Perfect killer

CHAPTER 23

Jasmine's head rested on my right shoulder. We leaned against each other in adjoining plastic chairs in an unoccupied office at the LAPD's Pacific Division Headquarters. She slept lightly, wrapped in a borrowed blanket.

The open door gave on to a fluorescent-lit deskscape of paper, phones, and tired people winding down their watch. At the far corner, two uniformed officers and a plainclothes detective escorted a handcuffed man tagged with prison tattoos out of an interview room, the same one I had occupied for almost two hours. Events before then had been predictable: first there was one black-and-white, then a Smokey-and-the-bandits parade populated by backup uniforms, plainclothes detectives, scene supervisors, crime scene van, forensic techs, then finally the coroner and a meat wagon.

Jasmine and I had made things as easy for them as possible. We bagged my gun and our assailant's in separate Ziplocs, labeled them properly, and set them on the kitchen counter before going outside to wait.

Then they brought us here to the architecturally undistinguished building on Culver Boulevard just off Centinela in a nondescript neighborhood filled with two- and three-story stucco apartment buildings, strip malls, gas stations, and dueling gang graffiti.

Across the big squad room, Darius Jones, the detective sergeant who had driven us here, emerged from the watch commander's office shaking his head. I heard nothing, but someone in the office must have spoken because the detective stopped in the doorframe and turned around. He stood a couple of inches taller than me, nearly as broad in the shoulders, a lot sloppier at the waist, and nearly filled up the doorframe. He'd played defensive tackle for USC until he'd blown out his right knee at the end of his senior year.

Darius Jones shrugged and continued to shake his head as he headed toward the main reception area. My stomach growled; I rubbed at the stubble on my jaw with my free hand and checked my watch. Again.

Hours had dragged by after detectives had interviewed Jasmine and me and then quickly agreed it was self-defense. But because there had been a homicide, Jones needed his supervisor's okay to let us go. Approval took a lot longer than expected thanks to a platoon of Oakwood boys who showed up in rival gang turf a couple of blocks away with Molotov cocktails and large-caliber weapons.

I tried now to enjoy the feeling of Jasmine's head against my shoulder, but the intractable fatigue and adrenaline hangover of the past twelve hours had left me drained, distracted, and dwelling on death. In a previous life, I had seen a lot more than the average person and had frequently been on the dealing end of it in service to my government.

During that time I had casually ridden a ballistic path of workaday death and risk that I accepted as an inevitable part of my personal trajectory. My acceptance didn't change until the day I realized death wasn't only for the other guy. My finger grew more reluctant on the trigger then I started to wonder where people went when they turned into one more seeping sack of organic soup waiting for the cell walls to burst and feed the waiting bacteria. I struggled with the durability of consciousness and realized it was the only thing that mattered. If you're unaware of being alive, then dying's not all that different. Did death represent the irrevocable loss of that individual or could a disembodied mind prevail? If it prevailed, was it our soul? Questions led to more questions. Was consciousness our soul peeking dimly through the meat-ware of the human body? Did bad people have good souls sabotaged by bad meatware?

No memorable epiphany stands out; no discrete single event redirected me from killing to healing. The process ran more like dust accreting on one side of a balance scale until one day it tipped, propelling me out of one life into another. Medical school turned me into a better than competent but less than brilliant neurosurgeon. Nevertheless, I reveled when I opened a cranium and moved my fingers and instruments among the living stuff that made someone who he was. Making him well felt even better, especially when I had cut away a tumor or relieved a pressure and had returned a profane, vile patient back to the congenial, likable person he had once been.

The most poignant cases came from the families of patients accused of the most hideous crimes, criminals whose malevolent creativity produced horror that seemed to verify the existence of evil.

"Please tell us it's a brain tumor," the families would plead. "Or an artery blockage or same sort of lightning storm in the brain cells." Something, anything that could be seen, touched, treated, removed, that would confirm that this loved person was not evil, only suffering from a merely physical lesion, which would absolve them of crime and guilt.

On occasion, surgery located such a physical epicenter, but even more often, I suspected a physical cause I could not prove. Locating a physical cause often allowed the sort of treatment that frequently led to normal lives. The lack of an identifiable, biological lesion was a shortcut to jail terms or execution. This bothered me because in many of the successful cases I located physical causes that would have gone undetected fifty years ago. Will people we jail and execute today be saved fifty years from now by more advanced diagnostic technology that will find the physical evidence?

Of course, taken to its logical absurdity, this led to the speculation that no one was ever guilty of anything since every act had a purely biological origin that precluded free will. Despite the lack of answers, the questions fed my notion of good souls trapped in bad meatware.

As I built an astoundingly lucrative surgery practice alongside my teaching and research at UCLA, I began to consider the tissue beneath my hands as a philosophical duality-spirit and flesh-which threw me into conflict with the scientific mainstream, which believed-with faith as absolute as that of the most ardent Bible-thumping Baptist-that consciousness came solely from the brain's electrical activity, all matter, nothing transcendent, which they couldn't prove any better than the average Baptist could prove the virgin birth.

What did it mean? Even more significantly, did it mean anything at all? I had worried this issue around and around for years, confusing myself half the time and often coming back to things I had written about it and realizing I did not quite understand my own words.

Instead, I tried to make sense of the attacks on my boat and at my house and finally fell asleep concluding that it all pointed straight back to Mississippi, to Vanessa and Darryl Talmadge. A convicted white racist murderer sentenced to die in the gas chamber. I certainly hoped Jasmine knew why in hell her mother would want to save a man like that.