THE NEXT TIME THE DOCTOR ENTERS the room, he’s carrying a second file folder, thick with evidence.
“Checking up on my story?” she guesses, as he deals the folder’s contents into three neat piles on the table.
He nods. “I don’t like to confront patients, but in prison psychiatry I find that taking an aggressive tack early on can be very useful.”
“For separating the con artists from the genuine head cases?” She looks amused. “So what’s the verdict on me?”
He offers her the first of his evidence piles. “This is a report filed by the Madera County sheriff’s office in October 1979. A man named Martin Whitmer was found dead in his van in a roadside ditch outside Fresno. Whitmer had worked as a janitor at a rural high school, but quit his job after an unidentified student accused him of being the Route 99 Killer.”
“Well there you go. It’s just like I said.”
“Not quite.” He flips to a page near the bottom of the pile. “There’s no mention of a bullet wound in the autopsy. Mr. Whitmer died of a coronary.”
“Yeah, I know. I told you, I shot him with an NC gun.”
The doctor thinks a moment. “NC stands for Natural Causes?”
“Right. Sorry, I thought that was obvious.”
“The gun shoots heart attacks.”
“Myocardial infarctions,” she says, tapping a finger on the cause-of-death line in the autopsy report. “MIs. And the CI setting, that’s for cerebral infarctions. Heart attack and stroke, the two leading killers of bad monkeys…” She smiles. “So what else have you got?”
He pushes forward the second pile, which consists of just two sheets, printouts from a newspaper microfilm reader. It’s a story from the San Francisco Examiner, with the questioning headline ANGEL OF DEATH HANGS UP WINGS?
“‘Sixteen months after the Route 99 serial killer claimed his last victim,’” she reads aloud, “‘state police are beginning to hope that the so-called Angel of Death—whose identity remains a mystery—may have gone into retirement…’ Yeah, see, I told you the cops didn’t believe me about the janitor. So even after he turned up dead, they thought the Angel was still out there.”
The doctor points to a circled paragraph farther down the page. “Keep reading.”
“‘Thirteen-year-old David Konovic, the boy believed to have been the Angel of Death’s eighth and final victim, disappeared from a Bakersfield gas station on December 12th, 1979…’”
“December,” the doctor says. “Two months after Whitmer was found dead.”
“Are you sure the newspaper didn’t screw up the date?”
He slides the last evidence pile across the table. “The sheriff’s report on David Konovic’s abduction. The date matches. And when the boy’s body was recovered, he was found to have been tortured and strangled in the same manner as all the other Angel of Death victims. So what does that tell us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Jane.”
“You want me to say that Whitmer couldn’t have been the Angel of Death, is that it?”
“Doesn’t that seem like a reasonable conclusion?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he was the Angel of Death.”
“Well if that’s the case, how do you explain this last victim?”
“I don’t.”
“You mean you can’t.”
“It’s a Nod problem,” she says.
“An odd problem?”
“A Nod problem. You know, the land of Nod, east of Eden? In the Bible?”
“I know the reference, but…”