IT WAS THE LAST FEW DAYS OF MARCH, AND VERNON ERIKSEN HAD FOR
the eighth time in just under three months driven the distance between his home in Marcusville and Doctors Hospital in Columbus, with Ruben Frey sitting beside him in the passenger seat. Ruben seemed to have shrunk a little with each trip; the heavy man was still rotund but it was as if he had deflated, as you do when your expectations fade.
It was close now. He was sure of it.
There were plenty of parking spaces today, and even the elevator that went to the ninth floor was empty. The door to the prayer room was open, Father Jennings standing there waiting as he usually did, Drs. Lawrence Greenwood and Bridget Burk beside him. And farther back in the room, two new faces, lawyers; Anna Mosley and Marie Morehouse were young women with whom Vernon and Ruben shook hands and thanked for coming.
When Wilford Berry had been executed for the murder of a fifty-three-year-old baker one month earlier, it looked like their work together over the past few years had been in vain. It had been a long time since an execution had been carried out in Ohio, as if finally there had been room for other ideas, as if finally the argument against the death penalty had gotten the upper hand.
A four-page statement from the governor had put a stop to all that.
Lawyers’ legal objections were thrown out. People’s civil objections were rejected. Doctors’ medical objections and the church’s ethical objections—with references to Jesus blessing the murderers who hung on the crosses beside him—were discarded.
Ohio’s governor had rejected all of it with his four-page statement. He had run an election campaign on the promise of reinstating the death penalty and now he was delivering it. The poison that had been injected into Berry’s body was his virgin shot and it declared his power. Afterward he wanted more, in the way that someone who injects always wants more. It was no great secret that now the state of Ohio had reinstated executions, it would continue—there would be more. Vernon realized this. Ruben Frey realized this. From now on, those who had been sentenced to death would be taken one by one from Death Row to the Death House, to injections that kept power happy.
The people now present looked at each other and then sat down around the table in front of the prayer room altar: Jennings and the doctors and the lawyers and Vernon and Ruben, a small number of the group that called itself the Ohio Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
They knew that there wasn’t much time.
Wilford Berry had waited ten years for his death sentence to be carried out.
John Meyer Frey, who was still waiting in a cell on the same corridor that Wilford Berry had just left, had received his sentence the same year, a couple of months later.
IT WAS IN MID-APRIL THAT THE EXECUTION OF WILFORD BERRY STARTED
to have a serious impact in Ohio. When activity in the murderer’s heart had been stopped by 100 milliequivalents of potassium chloride two months earlier, it had been a symbolic act that once again opened the gulf between supporters of the death penalty and those who opposed it; the argument
against
the state’s right to terminate a person’s life was obliterated by the argument
for
the right to retribution for the victim’s family. The value of implementing crime prevention measures was given less attention than the value of execution as a deterrent.
After years without anyone in the two cells of the Death House, the majority of Ohio’s inhabitants now wanted to see death again.
And the line was long.
At night, the screams of the inmates on Death Row in Marcusville got louder—they were counting the days again.
John Meyer Frey was in Cell 8.
He knew that when the governor had declared the state’s right to kill again, the end was nigh.
And when the wind was strong and blowing in the right direction, he could hear the clamor.
The noise that found its way in through the narrow windows up close to the ceiling, shouts that intensified and jostled at the gate on the other side of the wall, from the pro-campaigners outside whose ranks had swelled day by day.
He recognized the voice.
He knew that Edward Finnigan was at the forefront and that he was the one shouting loudest.
Burn, John, burn.
IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY, SPRING AND GREEN AND FULL OF HOPE, THE
first week in May. And everything was about to go into free fall.
Vernon Eriksen had gotten up early, having decided late last night that he would go to Columbus again, to the hospital where Greenwood and Burk were both working that day. They couldn’t wait any longer. Time was running out as they watched, they should be chasing the minutes. John Meyer Frey had become a matter of policy and prestige in the governor of Ohio’s office. He was going to die. That was what the authorities wanted. His death would be another symbolic victory for the supporters of the death penalty and the start of Edward Finnigan’s retribution, and the state was therefore prepared to take the life of someone who Vernon knew was innocent.
Ruben Frey had knocked on his door just before midnight and stood waiting on the veranda; Vernon had opened the door and pulled him in, quickly covering his mouth with both hands. He had been forced to explain to John’s dad for a second time that he could not, under any circumstances, openly show that he had anything to do with the inmates’ families; that his house was presumably tapped and regularly checked like those of his colleagues; that in order to work as senior corrections officer at Marcusville he had of course to appear to be wholeheartedly in favor of the death penalty.
He hadn’t been able to get through to Ruben Frey and Vernon had slapped him hard in the face—he didn’t have any choice. Then he had pulled down the blinds and they had sat by the kitchen table, each with a glass of Canadian whiskey, maybe half an hour’s silence, before Frey could even talk again.
His voice, rusty and tense.
I believe in the death penalty, he had almost whispered. I always have. You do understand that, don’t you, Vernon?
No.
I believe that when you take a life you have to give a life.
It’s not that simple, Ruben.
That is why—look at me Vernon!—
if
John had been guilty,
if
he had killed Elizabeth Finnigan, then he could have burned in hell as far as I’m concerned.
Ruben Frey had emptied the small glass before Vernon had even lifted his. He had pointed to the empty glass, Vernon had nodded and filled it again.
But I know he didn’t do it!
He had tried to take hold of Vernon’s hand but couldn’t reach, or perhaps Vernon had pulled it back, he had maybe been too close.
They can’t damn well take him if he’s done nothing! Vernon! If he’s done nothing, you hear, if he’s . . .
The round man with the kind eyes had never finished the sentence, he had collapsed on one of Vernon Eriksen’s chairs, his head hitting the table hard.
Vernon had at first thought it was a heart attack.
That Frey had died in front of him.
He had lost consciousness for a while, sweated profusely. Vernon had helped him up and supported him as they had made their way slowly upstairs and to the bedroom. He had gently laid him down in his clothes on the only bed in the house, a blanket over his trembling body. He had sat beside him until he fell asleep and then gone down into the kitchen again, to the whiskey that was waiting, to a long night.
That was when he made up his mind.
Alone in the dark and with Ruben’s muffled snores vibrating through the whole house.
John Meyer Frey would not die strapped to a gurney with needles in his arms.
He had left Marcusville while it was still dark, as he normally did, and despite the slight mist had sped through a considerable part of Ohio. He had stopped at a gas station after he had driven some distance, borrowed a phone that was presumably not tapped, and let the two doctors know he was on his way. They were both working in the ER and had a lot to do that morning: two accidents involving buses on the roads outside Columbus a few hours earlier in the dark. But they agreed that he should come to the hospital all the same. There was always an empty room somewhere, always some time to spare between preliminary diagnosis and emergency treatment.
He had made one more phone call.
A confused Ruben Frey had answered, still sleepy and in Vernon Eriksen’s bed. Vernon had asked him to contact a branch of Ohio Savings Bank in Columbus, the one on West Henderson Road, in order to arrange a mortgage on Frey’s house. Just as they had agreed earlier; bank staff outside Marcusville would ask fewer questions and the money was prerequisite for them to take the next step.
As usual, Vernon walked briskly through the entrance to the Doctors Hospital, but this time turned immediately to the right, down a long corridor. A couple of hundred yards straight and far too bright, then some thick red metal doors.
He had opened the last door and continued on. The ER reception looked like a war zone. Conscious and unconscious people on beds spilling out into the corridor. Relatives who were crying or waiting or arguing loudly. Doctors and nurses and ambulance men in white and green and orange uniforms. First he spotted Greenwood, then a few minutes later Burk. They didn’t see him, they were running between patients and examination rooms and he sat himself down on a hard, pine bench. He would have to wait a while, until the corridor was less full, until the people who were bleeding had been tended to.
An hour and a half later they sat down in the only empty receiving room in the ER, Lawrence Greenwood’s young face sweaty, Bridget Burk with large damp patches under her arms. Vernon asked them to wait and then went out into the coincidently almost deserted waiting hall and over to the drinks machine that stood in the corner by a shelf of children’s books and well-thumbed gossip mags. A dollar fifty later he carried back a cup of coffee for each of them with both hands, but they were hotter than he’d expected, burning against his palms.
They each sat on a chair with the coffee on the empty bed between them. They took a sip, the heat slowly making its way through their bodies.
The decision they were about to make would change the course of their lives forever.
It was not a matter of
what
they were going to do. They already knew that. They had met together on several previous occasions and worked out step-by-step what they deemed to be the last resort.
It was more a question of
whether
they would do it.
Vernon finished the last of his coffee and then looked at them. He was the one to summarize all the appeals that had failed; the lawyers’, doctors’, and church’s joint appeals for humanity—that a state should not take life—had all been assigned to the trash can, again. The governor of Ohio had decided. There would be no more mercy, no more delays. It was May now, the date had already been set, John Meyer Frey was to be executed by lethal injection on the sixth of October at 2100 hours.
They had five months.
“Mr. Eriksen?”
“Yes?”
“This is important for you.”
“Yes.”
“How important?”
Vernon wasn’t sure that the doctors with their spouses and children would be able to understand.
“Well, it’s like this . . . this is what I think. I don’t want to watch when a friend ceases to exist. Not another one. That’s just the way it is. They’re kind of my family . . . I don’t really have anyone else. It might be difficult to understand. For you, I mean. But that’s how it is.”
Lawrence Greenwood moved his head slowly up and down in something that resembled a nod.
“That’s heartbreaking.”
Vernon Eriksen was breathing heavily.
“
I’m
the one who’s there, watching over them. The people that society demands retribution from. That society wants to take revenge on. Murder. Every day I watch over them. And I somehow become . . . physically involved. I’m there when it’s carried out. The murder. Do you understand?”
He opened out his hands.
“But it’s not
my
revenge. I don’t believe in damn retribution anymore, in revenge, in a society that takes life. And John . . . I am sure of it, John is innocent.”
Vernon looked at both the silent doctors, asked them to think about it for a few minutes while he went out into the waiting hall again and got three more cups.
When he came back they had decided.
He could tell by looking at them. They never actually said anything to confirm it, just leaned in toward each other and repeated what they had already gone through.
Lawrence Greenwood and Bridget Burk would that very afternoon apply for the vacant position at the prison in Marcusville, one of the jobs that had been advertised in the spring without anyone taking it. They would both apply for a part-time position, motivated by the fact that they both wanted to keep a part-time position at the hospital in Columbus as well, and they would offer to start as early as the first of June.
Vernon would continue to crush haloperidol and ipecacuanha in his office, then sprinkle it over John’s food, as he had been doing since the beginning of the year.
Once they started in their new job, Greenwood and Burk would immediately examine the inmate in Cell 8 on Death Row, who, after several months of haloperidol and ipecac, and without himself knowing why, had complained about feeling poorly and sick. They would give a speculative diagnosis of cardiomyopathy, soon to be backed up by X-rays already stored in a bank safety deposit box, and explain that John’s heart muscle was not functioning as it should, that his heart was slowly growing bigger and bigger.
They would then wait until late summer, until sometime in the middle of August. That was when they would do it. What they had gone through together a long time ago, every step, every tiny detail, second by second, minute by minute.
John Meyer Frey would do what no one else had done before.
He would escape from Death Row.
He would die so that he didn’t need to die.