Read Murder Suicide for Free Online

Everything that was broken.  He’d made preparations — a living will of sorts.  He wanted to give his children their inheritances, settle up financially with his wife, move on cleanly."
    "The Ethics Committee didn’t have anything to say about this?" Clevenger asked.  "Doesn’t it amount to elective amnesia?"
    "They didn’t focus on it," Heller said, sitting back.
    "They didn’t focus on it, or you didn’t tell them?"
    "As I said, the data is very new," Heller deadpanned.  "They didn’t focus on it."
    Clevenger could only begin to imagine how Snow’s decision to hit the reset button on the software running his existence would have affected the people he planned to leave behind.  His son.  His daughter.  His wife.  His business partner.  His lover.  They would be strangers to him.  Would they feel abandoned?  Enraged?  "Did he consider the impact on his family?" Clevenger asked.  "Of him leaving them so suddenly.  So completely?"
    "It was his life, Heller said, a sharp edge to his voice.  "That’s what the Ethics Committee failed to understand — at first.  John wanted two things:  to be free of his seizures and free of his past.  I happened to be in a position to help him achieve both.  If a man owns anything, he owns his brain and his mind.  Don’t you agree?"
    Clevenger wasn’t prepared to answer that question.  There was something about Heller that made you want to agree with him.  He was extraordinarily charismatic.  His personality was like a strong, cool current that would carry you right along with it if you were content to go.  But Clevenger didn’t know what he really thought of Heller’s plan to use a scalpel to sever his patient’s emotional connections to others.  That felt like playing God.  "It doesn’t matter what I think," he said, finally.  "It matters what people around him would have thought, whether one of them would have felt threatened or angry enough to do him in.  Did any of his family members try to block the surgery?"
    "His wife Theresa pushed for an inpatient psychiatric evaluation to assess his competency to consent to the surgery.  She thought the risks were too high, that he was being irrational.  But so far as I know, she was only aware of the speech and vision issues, along with a question of mild short-term memory loss.  John indulged her request.  He spent five days her on Axelrod six."
    "Can you get me his records?" Clevenger asked.
    "Leave me an address.  I’ll get them off to you as soon as I can," Heller said.  "If he didn’t lose faith, if he was actually prepared to go to surgery with me, I’d like nothing better than to see the sonofabitch who stole John’s future spend the rest of his in a cage."
    "Do you think he ever told his wife — or anyone else — about the extent of the amnesia?"
    "So far as I know, he was confiding in two people:  me and his lawyer, Joe Balliro, Junior."
    "Balliro.  Snow wasn’t fooling around."
    "He was laying some very complicated legal groundwork," Heller said.  "The living will, and so on."
    "So with all the paperwork, someone could have found out.  A secretary in the office.  A photocopy clerk.  A friend of a friend of Snow’s mistress."
    Heller nodded to himself.  "His mistress.  There’s a wild card."
    "How so?"
    "John tried to end the relationship a few weeks before his surgery.  He thought it would be easier on her.  She considered the two of them soul mates.  She was pushing for a real life together."
    "And Snow?"
    "I think he had trouble loving people."
    "Why do you say that?"
    "I listened to him quite a bit.  He was a perfectionist.  He loved ideas and ideals.  Genius.  Beauty.  Perfect romance.  Not much in the world met his expectations — not even his own brain.  He was uncompromising."  He paused.  "He told me she didn’t respond well to the breakup."
    "Any idea what he meant by that?"
    "She threatened to hurt herself, again.  I guess she had a history of