For one shocking moment, I wondered if Richard Doss had a postmortem shot. But no, the eyes were open… something in them… despair? No, worse. A living death.

"Eric took it," said Doss. "My son. He wanted a record."

"Of his mom?" I said. Hoarse, I cleared my throat.

"Of what had happened to his mom. Frankly put, it pissed him off."

"He was angry at her?"

"No," he said, as if I were an idiot. "At the situation. That's how my son deals with his anger."

"By documenting?"

"By organizing. Putting things in their place. Personally, I think it's a great way to handle stress. Lets you wade through the emotional garbage, analyze the factual content of events, get in touch with how you feel, then move on. Because what choice is there? Wallow in other people's misery? Allow yourself to be destroyed?"

He pointed a finger at me, as if I'd accused him of something.

"If that sounds callous," he said, "so be it, Doctor. You haven't lived in my house, never went through what I did. Joanne took over a year to leave us. We had time to figure things out. Eric's a brilliant boy-the smartest person I've ever met. Even so, it affected him. He was in his second semester at Stanford, came home to be with Joanne. He devoted himself to her, so if taking that picture seems callous, bear that in mind. And it's not as if his mother minded. She just lay there-that picture captures exactly what she was like at the end. How she ever mobilized the energy to contact the sonofabitch who killed her I'll never know."

"Dr. Mate."

He ignored me, fingered the silver phone. Finally our eyes met. I smiled, trying to let him know I wasn't judging. His lids were slightly lowered. Beneath them, dark eyes shone like nuggets of coal.

"I'll take those back." He leaned forward, holding out his hand for the pictures. Again, I had to stand to return them.

"How did Stacy cope?" I said.

He took his time zipping open the purse and placing the snapshots within. Crossing his legs yet again. Massaging the phone, as if hoping a call would rescue him from having to answer.

"Stacy," he said, "is another story."

I BOOTED UP the computer. Eldon Mate's name pulled up over a hundred sites.

Most of the references were reprints of newspaper columns covering Mate's career as a one-way travel agent. Pros, cons, no shortage of strong opinions from experts on both sides. Everyone responding on an intellectual level. Nothing psychopathic, none of the cold cruelty that had flavored the murder.

A "Dr. Death Home Page" featured a flattering photo of Mate, recaps of his acquittals and a brief biography. Mate had been born in San Diego sixty-three years ago, received a degree in chemistry from San Diego State and worked as a chemist for an oil company before entering medical school in Guadalajara, Mexico, at the age of forty. He'd served an internship at a hospital in Oakland, gotten licensed as a general practitioner at forty-six.

No specialty training. The only jobs the news pieces had mentioned were civil'service positions at health departments all over the Southwest, where Mate had overseen immunization programs and pushed paper. No indication he'd ever treated a patient.

Beginning a new career as a doctor in middle age but avoiding contact with the living. Had he been drawn to medicine in order to get closer to death?

The name and phone number at the bottom of the page was Attorney Roy Haiselden's. He'd listed no e-mail address.

Next came several euthanasia stories:

The first few covered the case of Roger Damon Shar-veneau, a respiratory therapist at a hospital in Rochester, New York, who'd confessed eighteen months earlier to snuffing out three dozen intensive-care patients by injecting potassium chloride into their I.V. lines-wanting to "ease their journey." Sharveneau's lawyer claimed his client was insane, had him examined by a psychiatrist who diagnosed borderline personality and prescribed the antidepressant imipramine. A few days later, Sharveneau recanted. Without his confession, the only evidence against him was proximity to the ICU every night a questionable death had occurred. The same applied to three other techs, so the police released Sharveneau, terming the case "still under investigation." Sharveneau filed for disability benefits, granted an interview to a local newspaper and claimed he'd been under the influence of a shadowy figure named Dr. Burke, whom no one had ever seen. Soon after, he overdosed fatally on imipramine.

The case prompted an investigation of other respiratory techs living in the Rochester area. Several with criminal backgrounds were found working at hospitals and convalescent homes around the state. The health commissioner vowed to institute tighter controls.

I plugged Sharveneau's name into the system, found only one follow-up article that cited lack of progress on the original investigation and doubts as to whether the thirty-six deaths had been unnatural.

The next link was a decade-old case: four nurses in Vienna had killed as many as three hundred people using overdoses of morphine and insulin. Arrest, conviction, sentences ranging from fifteen years to life. Eldon Mate was quoted as suggesting the killers might have been acting out of compassion.

A similar case from Chicago: two years later, a pair of nurses' aides who'd smothered elderly terminal patients to death as part of a lesbian romance. Plea bargain for the one who talked, life without parole for the other. Once again, Mate had offered a contrarian opinion.

Onward. A Cleveland piece dated only two months earlier. Kevin Arthur Haupt, an emergency medical tech working the night shift on a city ambulance, had decided to shortcut the treatment of twelve drunks he'd picked up on heart-attack calls by clamping his hand over their noses and mouths during transport to the hospital. Discovery came when one of the intended victims turned out to be healthier than expected, awoke to find himself being smothered and fought back. Arrest, multiple murder charge, guilty plea, thirty-year sentence. Mate wondered in print if spending money to resuscitate habitual alcoholics was a wise use of tax dollars.

An old wire-service piece about the Netherlands, where assisted suicide was no longer prosecuted, claimed that doctor-initiated killings had grown to 2 percent of all recorded Dutch deaths, with 25 percent of physicians admitting they'd euthanized patients deemed unfit to live, without the patients' consent.

Years ago, while working Western Pediatrics Medical Center, I'd served on something called the Ad Hoc Life Support Committee-six physicians and myself, drafted by the hospital board to come up with guidelines for ending the treatment of children in final-stage illness. We'd been a fractious group, producing debate and very little else. But each of us knew that scarcely a month went by when a slightly-larger-than-usual dose of morphine didn't find its way into the mesh of tubes attached to a tiny arm. Kids suffering from bone or brain cancer, atrophied livers, ravaged lungs, who just happened to "stop breathing," once their parents had said good-bye.

Some caring soul ending the pain of a child who would've died anyway, sparing the family the agony of a protracted deathwatch.

The same motivation claimed by Eldon H. Mate.

Why did it feel different to me from Mate's gloating use of the Humanitron?

Because I believed the doctors and nurses on cancer wards had been acting out of compassion, but I suspected Mate's motivations?

Because Mate came across obnoxious and publicity-seeking?

Was that the worst type of hypocrisy on my part, accepting covert god-play from those I greeted in the hall while allowing myself to be repelled by Mate's in-your-face approach to death? So what if the screeching little man with the homemade killing machine wouldn't have won any charm contests. Did the psyche of the travel agent matter when the final destination was always the same?