Free Killer Look by Linda Fairstein

yoursubject—call him your victim—would be gone in less than one minute.”
    â€œBut how would you know that?” I asked. “Somebody actually watches?”
    â€œYes. Yes, they’ve been observed,” Emma said. “There have been studies out of places like Switzerland, where assisted suicides are legal if they’re not done for what the law there calls ‘selfish motives.’”
    â€œYeah,” Mike said, “like if one of your relatives had a fortune and was planning to cut you out of his will, then you wouldn’t be allowed to kill him.”
    â€œIn two of the reported cases of observed deaths using helium and a plastic bag over the head,” Emma said, “the time from inhalation of the gas to loss of consciousness was ten to twelve seconds. And no attempts at self-rescue, either. Not the half hour of thrashing around in a trash bag.”
    â€œBoth speedy and reliable,” I said.
    â€œSo much so that last year the governor of Oklahoma signed a bill allowing nitrogen asphyxiation—which works the same way as helium inhalation—as an alternative execution method in capital cases.”
    Mike did a thumbs-up. “Gotta love me a trendy way to knock out the bad guys. Kill them with kindness.”
    â€œThat’s part of the reason Mike’s so on top of this. Helium inhalation suicides have shown a striking increase in the last few years,” Emma said. “It’s a brilliant—almost foolproof—way to conceal a homicide.”
    I nodded in Mike’s direction.
    â€œThere’s an absence of specific findings at autopsy, though,” she said. “That’s why Mike has to do the heavy lifting here.”
    â€œHow so?” I asked.
    â€œThere are no visible signs on Wolf Savage’s body thatanything violent happened or any kind of struggle occurred,” Emma said. “I’ve done an external, head to toe, and there aren’t even the self-scratches of someone trying to get the bag off his head and neck. That’s completely consistent with this method of suicide, so it wouldn’t signal anything to me.”
    â€œBut normally you’d do an autopsy, wouldn’t you?”
    â€œRequired by law, Madame Prosecutor.”
    â€œWould one be useful?”
    â€œCould be,” Emma said in a noncommittal manner. “Oxycontin on the bedside table.”
    â€œThere!” I said. “Isn’t there a doctor’s name on the prescription?”
    â€œYou’re behind the times, Coop,” Mike said. “The good, old Oxy isn’t made in the States anymore. That bottle in the room was mail order from Canada. No way to trace it back.”
    â€œWhat’s the difference between Canadian Oxy and ours?”
    â€œThe reason that there was such an epidemic of abuse when Oxy was first introduced is that its active ingredient—oxycodone—was such a powerful painkiller that it was made for slow-acting release, to keep a patient sedated overnight,” Emma said. “But it was such a fine powder that addicts just crushed it and got all the effects, along with a swift high, in just minutes.”
    â€œSo the FDA changed the composition of the drug,” Mike said. “Now, it simply turns to a gummy mush if you try to crush it up to avoid the slow time-release. That’s why the addicts have dropped Oxy in favor of a return to heroin. The other case the doc and I had was traditional horse as the sedating drug. The vic was an addict, so it was easy to cover up the homicide after he got himself high. Then they bagged him.”
    â€œBut you’ll find Oxy in the tox study,” I said. “If Wolf ingested that first.”
    â€œWe will,” Emma said.
    â€œAnd disease. The autopsy will tell you what he thought was going to kill him, if someone didn’t help him find his own way to the grave.”
    â€œLook, Alex. If Savage had an internist who