Heart of a Killer (2 page)

“I want to die.”

“A lot of women have that initial reaction to me.” It was a stupid joke, meant to cover my panic and discomfort. What I really wanted to say was, “Guard! Get me out of here.”

She didn’t respond either way, not even to reprimand me for the misplaced humor. “I don’t have much time,” she said.

“Why don’t you tell me exactly what’s going on?” I asked, though I really didn’t want to know.

She opened the folder and took out a picture, which she slid across the table to me. It was of a young girl, pretty but thin, who clearly resembled Sheryl, especially in the eyes. “This is my daughter, Karen. The picture was taken last year, when she was thirteen.”

“She looks like you.”

“Thank you. She hasn’t been well for the last couple of years. Tires easily, poor appetite, not sleeping well. My mother, that’s who she lives with, finally took her to the doctor for tests. We got the diagnosis two months ago.”

This was not going to be good. “And?”

“She has a congenital heart defect. It’s a progressive condition, and it will kill her, unless she gets a transplant.”

“I’m sorry, but how does your dying help her?”

“She has a rare blood type, which will make finding a donor almost impossible. So I’m going to give her my heart,” she said, definitely, as if the issue was already decided, and only the details were still to be worked out.

“Excuse me?”

She slid another piece of paper across the desk. It was a report from a doctor, with lab results and a written summary. I didn’t read it at that point, because she was describing it.

“The prison doctor is a good guy; he took some of my blood and I had it tested on the outside. I have the same blood type, and I’m a perfect match.”

“So you want me to get the prison authorities to let you give your heart to your daughter?”

“That’s correct,” she said.

“You’d be committing suicide in the process.”

“You figured that out?”

It was as bizarre a conversation as I’d ever been involved in; this woman was actually asking me to arrange her death. But the situation itself and the surroundings felt even weirder, and that was mostly because of Sheryl Harrison.

People say that certain charismatic people, the Bill Clintons and Ronald Reagans of the world, are the center of whatever room they’re in. They control the room by the force of their personality.

Well, Sheryl Harrison controlled this room, and she didn’t do it with an entourage of assistants or Secret Service officers around her. She did it alone, wearing an orange jumpsuit, handcuffed to a table. It was surprising to me, and a little disconcerting. I would have thought, just going by our positions in life, that I would have had the upper hand.

I didn’t.

Having said that, I was there because of my alleged legal expertise, so I figured I should demonstrate some of it. “Look, this is not a situation I’m faced with every day, but I believe that suicide is illegal, and—”

She interrupted me. “Actually, it’s not. Assisting a suicide is illegal.”

“And in this case you need assistance.”

“Less than you think,” she said. “But as you can imagine, it has to be carefully orchestrated. I’ve done a lot of research on it.”

I had no doubt that she had done so; I could already tell that there was nothing impulsive about this decision. “Have you talked to the authorities about it yet?”

“No, I thought it best to have a lawyer do that, at least initially. They will take it more seriously.”

I hadn’t liked where this was going, and now that it had gotten there, I liked it even less. “Mrs. Harrison…”

“Sheryl.”

“Sheryl, I’m not sure I’m the right attorney to handle this.”

She laughed a short laugh. “You think I picked you?” she said, then softened it with, “You’re all I have. This is my daughter, and her life is more worth living than mine.”

I looked at the picture again, then at this woman chained to a table, who was probably right in her assessment. But fortunately I don’t get to make calls like that. “What does Karen think of all this?” I asked. “She would certainly have to consent.”

“She doesn’t know yet. I don’t want to tell her until it’s arranged. And at her age, consent isn’t necessary.”

“And your mother?”

“She knows. She’s opposed to it.” For the first time, I thought I detected a bit of frustration, or an impatience. “But none of that need concern you. That’s for me to deal with.”

I felt as if I was being dismissed and I wasn’t crazy about the feeling. “I’m going to need time to think about this, and research it.”

She nodded. “That’s fine. Just do me one favor, please.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Hurry.”

“So she’s a nut job?” The questioner was Julie Ammerman, the closest I had to a real friend in the entire firm. There are a limited number of partnerships at the end of the eight- or nine-year rainbow, so a natural competition exists among the associates vying to receive them.

Somehow Julie and I had always mostly gotten past that, and since it became obvious I was no real threat for one of the coveted spots, we’d gotten even closer. We’d slept together twice, which qualified as a semi-long relationship for me, but the last time was six months prior, and we’d since settled into a platonic friendship.

Julie had gone to a much lesser law school than me; actually, everybody by definition had gone to a lesser law school than me. But she certainly never resented it, and worked tirelessly and successfully to prove those Ivy admissions offices wrong.

We were in the firm’s cafeteria, moving through the line with our trays. The food was extraordinarily good and inexpensive; it was the one aspect of big-time lawyering that I was likely to miss.

“That’s what I thought while I was talking to her, but … yeah, she might be nuts.”

“Maybe you should report her,” she said.

“To who? About what?”

“Well, if she’s suicidal, shouldn’t you tell someone? I mean, if she hangs herself in her cell and they come to you, what are you going to say? ‘Oh, right, she mentioned cutting her heart out, but it slipped my mind’?”

“She’s not going to hang herself in her cell. She wants to do the whole thing under medical supervision. And I can’t tell anyone about it; it’s covered under attorney-client privilege. Did you cut class the year they taught that in law school?”

“Sorry, Mr. Harvard.” The fact that I went to Harvard Law somehow has always qualified me for ridicule among my colleagues, all of whom would have sacrificed their future firstborns to have gone there. “And if it’s all privileged, how come you’re telling me?”

“Because we work for the same firm; I consider you my cocounsel.”

“I suggest you reconsider that. Are you going to take her case?”

“No way. If I lose, which I would, I’m a loser. If I win, which I won’t, my client dies. Not exactly a fun way to pass the time.”

“And her daughter is really going to die?”

“That’s what she said; I have to assume she wouldn’t lie about it.”

We were quiet for a while; I was thinking about Sheryl’s situation and I imagined Julie was doing the same.

Finally, she said, “I’m trying to imagine my mother giving up her heart for me.” She laughed. “If she did, I’d never hear the end of it.”

I wasn’t quite into the humor of this; I could still picture Sheryl in that prison, trying to control her desperation, relying on me.

But Julie was on a roll. “Every day I don’t get married, she tells me I’m tearing her heart out.”

We finished lunch and headed back to our respective offices for another torture-filled afternoon. At 6:15, I got an instant message from her asking me if I was almost done for the day. I wrote back that I was planning to be out in fifteen minutes.

You want to grab a drink?
Julie asked.

More than one,
I responded.

We went to Hurlihey’s, on Columbus. It’s where I went when I was with someone, and therefore not interested in meeting anyone new. They have great burgers, crisp on the outside and rare on the inside, and a bunch of TVs always tuned to sports.

I started ordering dark and stormies, a combination of Gosling’s Rum and ginger beer that a friend in Boston had introduced me to the previous summer. Julie was drinking bloody marys, and like always was sucking them down to what must have been a hollow leg. No matter how much she drank it never seemed to affect her.

“You seem preoccupied,” she said. “Talk to Mama.”

“I’m fine. Just tired.”

“Bullshit. You’re thinking about your nut-job client in prison.”

“Actually, I was thinking about the shooting in Tucson. The one where the congresswoman got shot, and a bunch of other people died. You remember?”

She nodded. “Of course I remember. What about it?”

“There was a judge there with his wife. He was one of the people who were killed.”

“And?”

“The killer had pointed the gun at the judge’s wife and fired, but the judge jumped in front of her and took the bullet.”

Julie could be somewhat impatient when a story wasn’t being told fast enough for her taste. “Land the plane on this, Jamie.”

“So he was considered a hero for saving her life. Their friends went on the
Today
show, columns were written, it was a beautiful story. He gave up his life for the person he loved.”

Julie nodded slowly. “Which is what she wants to do.”

“Right. And he did it in the spur of the moment, with barely enough time to think about it. She’s had nothing but time to think, and to make a reasoned, careful decision.”

“Maybe she’s not such a nut job after all,” Julie said.

I was always considered an underachiever.

There were a number of reasons for that, the most obvious being that I pretty consistently underachieved. This I managed despite finishing near the top of my class in high school, then doing the same at the University of Pennsylvania, and graduating from Harvard Law.

The thing about underachieving is it is all based on expectations, and the ones for me were way up there. A lot of that was my own fault. I’m really smart, with an IQ off the charts, and perfect scores, or damn close, on every college board and achievement test I ever took.

So that raised the bar quite a bit, but it was starting from a ridiculously high level. My father is Dr. Thomas Wagner, the head of Respiratory Medicine at Columbia Presbyterian. You know how everybody always says that their doctor is “the best”? Well, if they’re talking about respiratory medicine, and they’re not talking about Thomas Wagner, then they have no idea what they’re talking about.

Mom is Theresa Lynne Wagner, and she is extraordinarily formidable in her own right. A graduate of the London School of Economics, an MBA from Harvard, she went on to become CFO for a Fortune 500 company.

She left that position, voluntarily, at the age of forty-seven, in order to become involved in every charitable foundation in the history of Earth. She is also on the board of directors of six different companies, and writes an occasional op-ed in
The Wall Street Journal
.

They’re just a pair of typical parents, except for maybe the part about driving the kids to soccer games. And except for their unnerving ability to make every night feel like parent-teacher night, with them playing both roles.

I saw a shrink the summer after my sophomore year in college. My parents suggested it, concerned that my academics was not up to their expected standards. Parents all over America were dealing with kids dropping out of school and/or strung out on drugs, and my parents were panicking that I had a 3.7 at Penn.

I didn’t pick the shrink from my father’s approved list, which for me qualified as a fairly rebellious act. The one I did pick didn’t help me very much, but I did come away with the understanding that I couldn’t stand my parents. I realized it during a session when I heard myself blurt out, “I can’t stand my parents.”

So on the Sunday before the Monday that I was to return to the prison to see Sheryl Harrison, I used her as an excuse to be late arriving at my parents’ house in Greenwich, Connecticut. It was a fund-raising cocktail party, which by 4:00
P.M.
would be filled with worthy people raising money for a worthy cause. When I did finally arrive, I would be the only person there who didn’t write a check.

But I had a job to do, and a client to maybe represent, so I opened Sheryl Harrison’s case folder to learn what she was about and how she came to find herself in prison.

The first thing I looked at was a color photograph of Charles Harrison lying facedown on the couch. Blood had spread from his neck, at least twelve inches out to both sides. It was as if the photographer had said, “Charlie, lie down over there, with your head on that bloody Rorschach test.”

It was among the most disgusting things I had ever seen, though it quickly took a spot near the back of the list when I saw some of the other photographs. Those had Charlie turned facing up, revealing the wound that caused his demise. It was literally ear to ear, and it made me glad that Sheryl Harrison was handcuffed to the table when we met.

The file wasn’t terribly thick, though the truth is I wouldn’t know a thick murder file from a thin one. But in this case it wasn’t exactly a whodunit; Sheryl said she “dunit” immediately, and the police, led by Detective John Novack, seemed to have competently crossed all the “t”s and dotted the “i”s. There was some written evidence that Novack initially doubted her confession, but no indication that ever went anywhere.

There was some background information on the victim, and it’s safe to say that Charlie’s life was not an exemplary one. He had been arrested four times and convicted twice of nonviolent crimes, though his nonviolence only seemed to extend to his felonies.

Police had been called to the home four times in the previous six months for domestic violence incidents, including twice when Charlie claimed he had hit her because she came at him with a knife.

Charlie had managed to avoid prison for the felony convictions, and was never arrested for domestic violence. In fact, Sheryl was arrested one of the times that Charlie claimed she went after him with a knife, something that in retrospect must have seemed more credible once Charlie had his throat slit. Sheryl also had a history of drug use, though that had been a number of years earlier.