Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross 1)

Checkmate.

EPILOGUE

FRONTIER JUSTICE (1994)

WHEN THE FATEFUL DAY finally arrived, I couldn’t sleep, not even a couple of hours. I couldn’t play the piano out on our porch. I didn’t want to see anyone to talk about what was going to happen in just a few hours. I slipped in and kissed Damon and Jannie while they slept. Then I left he house around two in the morning.

I arrived at Lorton Federal Prison at three. The marchers were back, carrying their homemade placards under a moonlit sky. Some were singing protest songs from the 1960s. Many prayed. There were several nuns, priests, ministers. A majority of the protesters were women, I noticed.

The execution chamber at Lorton was a small, ordinary room with three windows. One window was reserved for the press. One was for official observers from the state. The third window was reserved for friends and family of the prisoner.

There were dark blue curtains over each of the three windows. At three-thirty in the morning, a prison official opened them one by one. The prisoner was finally revealed, strapped down on a hospital gurney. The gurney had a makeshift extension panel for the left arm.

Jezzie had been staring up at the room’s ceiling, but she became alert and seemed to tense as two technicians walked to the gurney. One of them carried the needle on a stainless-steel hospital tray. The insertion of the catheter needle was the only physical pain involved if the execution by lethal injection was done correctly.

I had been coming out to Lorton to visit both Jezzie and Gary Murphy for several months. I was on leave from the D.C. police force, and although I was writing this book, I had plenty of time for visits.

Gary appeared to be coming apart. It was in all his workup reports. He spent most days lost in his complex fantasy world. It became harder and harder to coax him back to the real one.

Or so it appeared. And that saved him another trial, that saved him from the possibility of death row. I was certain that he was playing games, but nobody wanted to listen. I was sure he was making up another plan.

Jezzie had agreed to talk to me. We had always been able to talk. She wasn’t surprised the state had gotten the death penalty for her and Charles Chakely. She was responsible for the death of the son of the secretary of the treasury, after all. She and the Secret Service men had kidnapped Maggie Rose Dunne. They were responsible for Michael Goldberg’s death, and also Vivian Kim’s. Jezzie and Devine had murdered the Florida pilot, Joseph Denyeau.

Jezzie told me that she felt remorse, and had from the very beginning. “But not enough to stop me. Something must have broken inside me along the way. I’d probably do the same thing today. I’d take that kind of chance for ten million dollars. So would a lot of people, Alex. It’s the age of greed. But not for you.”

“How do you know that?” I asked her.

“Somehow, I do. You are the Black Knight.”

She told me that I shouldn’t feel bad after it was over. She said the marchers and other protesters angered her. “If their child had died, most of them would act a lot differently about this.”

I felt very bad. I didn’t know how much I believed Jezzie, but I felt bad. I didn’t want to be there at Lorton, but Jezzie had asked me to come.

There was no one else at the window for Jezzie. Not a single person in the world. Jezzie’s mother had died not long after her arrest. Six weeks earlier, the former Secret Service agent Charles Chakely had been executed in front of his family. That had sealed Jezzie’s fate.

Long plastic tubes connected the needle in Jezzie’s left arm to several intravenous drips. The first drip, which had already started, dispensed a harmless saline solution.

At a signal from the warden, sodium thiopental would be added to the intravenous. This was a barbiturate used as an anesthetic and to put patients gently to sleep. Then a heavy dose of Pavulon would be added. This would induce death in about ten minutes. To speed the process, an equal dose of potassium chloride was administered. This drug relaxes the heart and stops its pumping. It would cause death in about ten seconds.

Jezzie found my face in her “friends’’ window. She gave a little wave with her fingertips, and she even tried to smile. She had bothered to comb her hair, which was cut short now, but still beautiful. I thought of Maria, and how we hadn’t gotten to say good-bye before she died. I thought that this might be a little worse. I wanted to leave the prison so badly, but I stayed. I had promised Jezzie I would stay. I always kept my promises.

In reality, it was nothing very graphic. Jezzie finally closed her eyes. I wondered if any of the lethal drugs had been administered, but I had no way of knowing that.

She took a deep breath, and then I saw her tongue drop back in her mouth. That was all there was to the modern execution of a human being. That was the end of the life of Jezzie Flanagan.

I left the prison and hurried to my car. I was a psychologist and a detective, I told myself. I could take this. I could take anything. I was tougher than anybody. Always had been.

My hands were jammed deeply into the pockets of my overcoat. In my right hand, so tightly clutched that it hurt, was the silver hair comb Jezzie had given me, once upon a time.

When I got to my car, an ordinary white envelope was stuck under the driver-side wiper. I stuffed it in my coat pocket, and didn’t bother to open it until I was on my way back to Washington. I thought I knew what it was, and I was right. The Thing had sent me a message. Up close and personal. In my face.

Alex,

Did she sob, and whine, and beg for forgiveness before they pricked her? Did you shed a tear?

Remember me to the family. I want to be remembered.

Always, Son of L.