After closing the sports bar around 3:00 a.m., Ronnie had gone back to his apartment in Woodside. Still somewhat keyed up, he didn’t try to sleep. Over the years, he’d become totally adapted to working the night shift and normally didn’t go to sleep until around 9:00 or 10:00 a.m. Instead of sleeping, he used his laptop to google Jack Stapleton and learn as much as he could about the man, particularly where he lived and where he worked, and, most important, getting confirmation that he used his bike to get around New York City. Ronnie couldn’t believe his luck. Such a habit made it seem as if Stapleton was asking to be killed.
By 5:30 Ronnie had made himself some eggs and bacon, and by 6:15 he was back in his beloved Cherokee heading for Manhattan. To facilitate his plan, he had to be certain about Stapleton’s habits. Accordingly, well before 7:00 a.m., Ronnie had pulled over to the side of First Avenue just shy of 30th Street, where he could see the OCME building to his right as well as west up 30th Street to his left. Like a lot of buildings in the city, the OCME was surrounded by scaffolding without any evidence of any construction, making him wonder why it was there.
Not too long after sunrise at 7:07, Ronnie had been rewarded by seeing a bicyclist appear in the distance up 30th Street sporting a lime green helmet and dressed in a corduroy jacket with scarf and gloves. As he watched, the man had come streaking toward him, outpacing the vehicular traffic, and then came to a stop at the traffic light. At that point, Ronnie pulled a car-length forward such that the bicyclist would have to cross within feet of him, giving him a chance to make absolutely sure it was Jack Stapleton.
When the light had changed, the bicyclist pedaled across the avenue, and Ronnie had gotten a good look at him. There had been no doubt whatsoever: It had indeed been Stapleton. Satisfied with his accomplishment, Ronnie had driven back to his apartment in Woodside on 54th Street just off Northern Boulevard. The main reason Ronnie lived where he did was because the apartment came with a detached garage reached by a rear alleyway. Once the car was safely put to bed, Ronnie had gone inside and done the same for himself.
“Okay!” Ronnie said as he tossed off his covers and stood up in the chill of his bedroom. He was ready for his day to begin and had a lot to do before he called Stapleton. He didn’t want to call too early, as he wanted to control where the meeting happened and limit Stapleton’s options. It was Ronnie’s intention to insist on meeting again at the MMH back in the ED MD lounge, although the exact location didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the meeting would be not at the OCME but at the hospital. Ronnie’s plan was simple. He intended to make sure Stapleton did not to make it all the way to the MMH but instead would have a terrible, fatal accident on the way.
After making himself some breakfast, it was still too early to call Stapleton. Ronnie wanted it to be late enough to claim there wouldn’t be time for him to meet and get from the OCME to the MMH before the start of his shift at 7:00 p.m. To fill the time, Ronnie decided to reaffirm his avowed crusade of saving people from the clutches of the medical profession and pharmaceutical industry, both of which selfishly profited mightily from abusing and torturing mortally ill patients. To do that, he got a step stool out of his closet and a screwdriver from his tools and sundries drawer in the kitchen. After placing the stool under the HVAC vent in his apartment’s hallway, which connected his kitchen and bedroom from his living room, he climbed up and removed the sheet metal screws. Allowing the grille to rotate downward, he was able to reach up inside the duct and retrieve a dog-eared ledger. Leaving the grille open, he carried the ledger into the kitchen and sat at the built-in table. Along with the Cherokee and the SIG Sauer pistol, the ledger was a favorite possession, which he perused regularly to celebrate his accomplishments.
Over a period of almost six years, which included two years at a hospital in Queens, where he’d first worked after getting his nursing bachelor’s degree before moving to the MMH, he’d kept a careful record of all the mercy killings he’d been able to accomplish. It had started out slowly, as the opportunities had been few and far between, but then had sped up once he’d become a nursing supervisor. The pace had magnified dramatically once he’d become a solo supervisor. Over the last year, he was impressed with how many people he’d saved from an ongoing frightful existence. Each entry had the name, the diagnosis, the horrid treatments they’d endured, the date, and the agent he used, which was usually just an overdose of a medication the patient was prescribed.
As Ronnie’s eyes went down the list, he could recall just about all the patients quite clearly. He could even remember conversing with many of them, hearing their sad stories of the tortures they had endured and commiserating with them. All at once, he came to Frank Ferguson, whom he remembered distinctly since his case was a mirror image of Ronnie’s foster mother, Iris. She had been a nurse and a stimulus for Ronnie to become a nurse. She had also been a chain-smoker who had developed throat cancer. At the time, Ronnie had been an impressionable preteen and had been horrified when she was transformed from an attractive woman into a ghoulish caricature of herself, both physically and mentally, such that she could have starred in a gruesome anti-smoking campaign advertisement. It also marked the time that Ronnie and his younger foster brother started becoming chronically sick, requiring innumerable hospitalizations, which Ronnie was later to realize had been caused by Iris plying them with inordinate amounts of salt, which ultimately killed his brother. Ronnie had been able to escape by aging out of foster care and joining the navy.
The last two entries in the ledger were from four days earlier, when Ronnie had used insulin to put an end to the tortures of two men, one with colorectal cancer and another with prostate cancer. Both had had metastatic disease and multiple surgeries. They were numbers ninety-three and ninety-four. It was a comfort for Ronnie to know they were now in a better place.
For a few minutes, Ronnie toyed with the idea of adding the names of Sue Passero and Cherine Gardener to the ledger entries, as their deaths added to the crusade by making sure it continued. But ultimately he decided against it, for the same reason he had never added to the main section of the ledger any of the inadvertent deaths that had occurred when he’d failed to save a patient whom he’d put in jeopardy to get the credit. Instead, he added their names at the back of the journal, where he’d merely listed the inadvertent deaths.
Feeling totally rededicated to his cause, Ronnie closed the ledger and returned it to its hiding place in the HVAC duct. After repositioning the grille and replacing the sheet metal screws, he checked the time. There was still a half hour before he believed it would be appropriate to call Stapleton and adequate time for him to prepare the Cherokee for the afternoon’s activities. With that job in mind, Ronnie went out the back door, unlocked the garage, and entered. His first order of business was to remove his license plates, which he stored in the back of the Cherokee, and replace them with old, outdated New York plates that he’d found in the garage when he moved in. Once that was done, he opened a can of water-based black paint and painted over the orange flames radiating from behind each wheel well. He hated to do it because they added so much to the SUV’s allure, but he was confident it would wash off easily. He didn’t want his car to stand out that afternoon. He also had a lever inside the car, which, when switched, would redirect the entirety of the exhaust into the car’s mufflers, significantly reducing its growl. He intended to flip that lever well before making any contact with his target.
When he was finished with the Cherokee, Ronnie went back into the apartment and returned to the kitchen table with his phone and Stapleton’s business card. It was now quarter to four in the afternoon, around the time when he’d deemed it appropriate to make his call. For a few minutes, he just sat there and tried to imagine what kind of argument Stapleton might try to make to insist on having their conversation at the OCME. Ronnie could remember telling the man that he was off Wednesday and Thursday, so that information might resurface, but if it did, Ronnie meant to tell him that had changed. In order to get Sarah Berman to agree to come in last night on the spur of the moment, Ronnie had to offer working both Wednesday and Thursday for her. Of course, he was not going to say anything to Stapleton about having made a trade.