True Believers(129)
When she got to the statue of St. Clare with the stone bench wrapped around it, she sat down. She had, she thought, known this was coming. Somewhere at the back of her mind, it had always been with her, waiting for her to stop long enough to notice it was there. The problem was, now that she had noticed it, she wasn’t too sure what to do with it, or even how to go about deciding what to do about it. Her head ached a little. Her hands were cold. St. Clare’s veil was as long as a waterfall.
All right, Mary thought. This is it. I’m going to be a nun.
EIGHT
1
Execution in Pennsylvania was by lethal injection. Gregor Demarkian had known that all the time, but for some reason he had been blanking it out, especially when Bennis had been the one asking him. He didn’t know why that should be so. Of all the possible forms of capital punishment, lethal injection was certainly the best—although the idea of calling one method of killing someone “the best possible” made his head ache. He could imagine other situations, and other people, with other answers: Homolka and Dreen, up in Canada, who only thought a killing was good if the victim screamed. Still, there really were worse methods. The gas chamber, which was a matter of being fully conscious while being asphyxiated in a booth with windows all around it, so that you could be seen by the largest possible audience. The electric chair, which was not only obviously painful—you would scream if your mouth wasn’t muzzled shut—but which kept malfunctioning, doing only half the job, causing buckets of blood to gush out of the mouths and eyes of its victims, causing burns. With lethal injection, they put you to sleep first. The element of righteous retribution was removed. The apocalyptic undertones were banished, once and for all, to the minds of the lunatic fringe who came to stand at the gates on execution evenings, cheerleading for death.
And that, Gregor thought, as Henry Lord pulled the car through three sets of electrified gates into the “official visitors” parking lot, is what I don’t like about lethal injection. It may be the most humane method we have, but it normalizes the whole process. It makes capital punishment appear as no more serious a policy decision than farm price supports.
The electrified gates were guarded by uniformed officers with rifles—with machine guns, Gregor noticed. Being used to federal prisons rather than state ones, he was a little surprised. Federal prisons were often minimum security. Stockbrokers who had traded on a little inside information and bankers who had scammed a few federal loans weren’t going to do much that was physical except notch their daily running time from thirty minutes to an hour. State prisons got the kind of prisoner whose idea of an interesting afternoon was to kill all five of the people in the convenience store they were robbing, and then to try to kill the cops who came to arrest him. Of course, federal prisons also got interstate kidnappers and Timothy McVeigh, but Gregor had no idea what they did about those people. McVeigh, if he remembered rightly, was on a federal death row. That one was probably not minimum security.
“What’s the reverie about?” Henry Lord asked, pulling into the parking space one of the guards was indicating with a waving machine gun.
“Timothy McVeigh,” Gregor said. “I hope that idiot has his safety on.”
“I hope he’s not an idiot. I never have liked this place. I used to have clients here, when I was younger, but I never have liked it.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to like it,” Gregor pointed out.
“I know that. That’s not what I mean. I’ve been to other prisons, though, and it doesn’t give me the feeling this one does. I really hate being in this place. Maybe it’s because of death row.”
Henry got the car settled in the space and turned off the engine. The guards suddenly surrounded the car, staying just far enough back to give the impression that they didn’t really think they’d have to shoot anybody, but close enough in so that they could if they decided they wanted to.
“Maybe it’s because they treat visitors here as if they were potential escapees,” Gregor said drily. He opened his car door and stepped out, unfolding a little from the car, because it was a compact and he was so tall.
Henry got out, too, unfolding less, because he was shorter. A thin, small man in a neat brown suit came through the guards, holding out his hand.
“Judge Lord,” the small man said, shaking vigorously. “Mr. Demarkian. I’m very pleased to meet you. I’ve read mountains of print on you. You lead a very interesting life.”
“This is the warden, Ed Nagelman,” Henry Lord said. “You’ve got to introduce yourself, Ed. Gregor was with the Bureau. He doesn’t know the first thing about wardens.”