“Maybe,” he said. “Then again, Mate was a legit doc and he was no master craftsman. Last year he removed a liver from one of his travelers, dropped it off at County Hospital. Packed with ice, in a picnic cooler. Not that
anyone would’ve accepted it, given the source, but the liver was garbage. Mate took it out all wrong, hacked-up blood vessels, made a mess.”
“Doctors who don’t do surgery often forget the little they learned in med school,” I said. “Mate spent most of his professional life as a bureaucrat, bouncing from public health department to public health department. When did this liver thing happen? Never heard about it.”
“Last December. You never heard about it because it was never made public. ‘Cause who’d want it to get out? Not Mate, because he looked like a clown, but not the D.A.’s office, either. They’d given up on prosecuting Mate, were sick of giving him free publicity. I found out because the coroner doing the post on Mate had seen the paperwork on the disposal of the liver, had heard people talking about it at the morgue.”
“Maybe I wasn’t giving the killer enough credit,” I said. “Given the tight space, darkness, the time pressure, it couldn’t have been easy. Perhaps those error wounds weren’t the only time he slipped. If he nicked himself he could’ve left behind some of his own biochemistry.”
“From your mouth to God’s ears. The lab rats have been going over every square inch of that van, but so far the only blood they’ve been able to pull up is Mate’s. O positive.”
“The only common thing about him.” I was thinking of the one time I’d seen Eldon Mate on TV. Because I had followed his career, had watched a press conference after a “voyage.” The death doctor had left the stiffening corpse of a woman—almost all of them were women—in a motel near downtown, then showed up at the D.A.’s office to “inform the authorities.” My take: to brag. The man had looked jubilant. That’s when a reporter had brought up the use of budget lodgings. Mate had turned livid and spat back the line about Jesus.
Despite the public taunt, the D.A. had done nothing about the death, because five acquittals had shown that bringing Mate up on charges was a certain loser. Mate’s triumphalism had grated. He’d gloated like a spoiled child.
A small, round, bald man in his sixties with the constipated face and the high, strident voice of a petty functionary, mocking the justice system that couldn’t touch him, lashing out against those “enslaved to the hypo-critic oath.” Proclaiming his victory with rambling sentences armored with obscure words (“My partnership with my travelers has been an exemplar of mutual fructification”). Pausing only to purse slit lips that, when they weren’t moving, seemed on the verge of spitting. Microphones shoved in his face made him smile. He had hot eyes, a tendency to screech. A hit-and-run patter had made me think vaudeville.
“Yeah, he was a piece of work, wasn’t he?” said Milo. “I always thought when you peeled away all the medico-legal crap, he was just a homicidal nut with a medical degree. Now he’s the victim of a psycho.”
“And that made you think of me,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “who else? Also, there’s the fact that one week later I’m no closer to anything. Any profound, behavioral-science insights would be welcome, Doctor.”
“Just the mockery angle, so far,” I said. “A killer going for glory, an ego out of control.”
“Sounds like Mate himself.”
“All the more reason to get rid of Mate. Think about it: If you were a frustrated loser who saw yourself as a genius, wanted to play God publicly, what better than dispatching the Angel of Death? You’re very likely right about it being a travel gone wrong. If the killer did make a date with Mate, maybe Mate logged it.”
“No log in his apartment,” Milo said. “No work records of any kind. I’m figuring Mate kept the paperwork with that lawyer of his, Roy Haiselden. Mouthy fellow, you’d think he’d be blabbing nonstop, but nada. He’s gone, too.”
Haiselden had been at the conference with Mate. Big man in his fifties, florid complexion, too-bushy auburn toupee. “Amsterdam, also?” I said. “Another humanist?”