Ecstasy (16 page)

I took a liberal slug of the spiked ginger ale. “I can’t imagine.”

“Ergot is a fungus that grows on grain, mainly rye. During medieval times it killed a bunch of people—causes gangrene and
convulsions, really nasty. Over the years it’s had a few medicinal uses, and Hofmann starts working on it as…how did he put
it…a ‘respiratory and circulatory stimulant.’ You following?” We nodded, and Mad stacked the empty shot glass atop the previous
one. “So Hofmann synthesizes a bunch of ergot derivatives. One of them, code-named LSD-25, seems to have no use, so it gets
dropped.

“But then, five years later, Hofmann has this hunch that there’s more to it, so he whips up another batch. Somehow, he ingests
a little of it, and he gets to feeling all funky. He has to go home because he feels really dizzy, starts seeing weird shapes
and colors. He wonders just what the hell’s going on. And, being a scientist and an all-around nut job, he decides to do an
experiment on himself. He takes what he thinks is a minuscule dose of the stuff, a quarter of a milligram, and he just completely
freaks out. Has your quintessential bad trip, like—this is my favorite part—he thinks the neighbor lady is an evil witch who
wants to kill him.

“After a while, he calms down and starts to enjoy it. Starts seeing the sound of a car driving by, like Ochoa was saying.
Anyway, by the time he calms down the next morning, he feels great—says breakfast never tasted so good. And voilà, the birth
of LSD.”

Ochoa raised his beer mug. “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

“Now you gotta admit,” Mad said, “that’s some interesting shit.”

“Yeah, you win,” I said. “From rotting rye to freaking in the purple haze. Who’da thunk it?”

Mack, the bartender, appeared tableside then and told us Bill was on the phone for Ochoa. The phone number for the Citizen
Kane is, after all, noted prominently on the newsroom call list.

Ochoa went behind the bar and picked up the red handset, whose long cord allows it to reach even to the farthest stool. He
talked for all of two minutes before he came back to the table and drained his beer. He didn’t look happy.

“This is the most unbelievable goddamn day.”

I took my feet off the seat of his chair, but he made no move to sit down. “What’s up?”

“I gotta get back to the paper.”

Mad refilled his mug. “Come on, have one for the road.”

“Better not.”

“What the hell’s going on?”

“Source of mine called the newsroom looking for me.”

Mad leaned back in his chair. “So the hell what?”

“Somebody at the coroner’s office. Apparently, they’re finally gonna announce what was in the acid that killed those three
kids.”

“And?”

“I don’t know the whole story. I haven’t even talked to the source yet.”

“Come on,” I said. “He must’ve said something to get Bill’s knickers all twisty. What’s up?”

“What this person told him,” Ochoa said, “was that according to the evidence, it’s looking like those accidental deaths were
no damn accident.”

O
choa’s sentence sent all three of us scrambling back to the newsroom, with me simultaneously jogging and dialing Cody on my
cell phone. I told him I had to run back to work and I’d call him when I was done; he said he’d just as soon stay at the station
for a while longer. (One of the advantages of dating a cop, by the way, is that they’re in no position to complain about you
working crazy hours, since theirs are inevitably even crazier.)

As soon as we got up the stairs, Ochoa sprinted for his Rolodex. Mad and I went into Bill’s office, where we found the occupant
reading a story and nibbling on a dumpling he’d impaled on a chopstick.

“Gang’s all here, eh?”

I eyed his take-out carton. “Those things vegetarian?”

He shook his head and smirked. “Pork and shrimp shumai.” He finished off the dumpling and impaled another. “Where’s Ochoa?”

“Went straight to the phone. Who’s this source, anyway?”

“Damned if I know. Lady wouldn’t give me her name.”

“What did she say?”

“To tell Ochoa the coroner’s office finally figured out what killed the kids, and no way was it an accident. Gave him a heads-up
on the press conference tomorrow afternoon.”

“Which blows our deadline but works just fine for TV.”

“What else is new?”

Mad reached for one of the dumplings, and Bill warned him off with a threatening chopstick. Mad then announced he was starving,
whereupon Bill told him to go over to Schultz’s and get himself a turkey sandwich.

Mad allowed that this wasn’t a bad idea; he got back just as Ochoa was getting off the phone. The four of us convened in Bill’s
office, where Mad made a show of offering around a bag of fat-free potato chips.

“Some people,” he said, “like to share.”

“Kiss my ass,” said Bill, and grabbed up a handful of chips.

Ochoa took some too, balancing them against his chest as he flipped pages in his reporter’s notebook.

“Okay, it’s like this,” he said. “We’re screwed.”

Bill scowled and chomped a potato chip. “Screwed how?”

“She spilled her guts, but off the record.”

“So we confirm it with another source and run it unattrib—”

Ochoa shook his head. “I mean
off
-off.
Way off.
As in not for publication.”

“So why the fuck did she even bother telling you?”

“She wanted to give me a heads-up.”

“Can’t you get her to—”

“Said if she leaked it on the record and it got traced back to her, she’d get canned for sure. I had to swear up and down
we wouldn’t run anything tomorrow.”

“Terrific.”

“But I figured if we got the lowdown ahead of time, we could at least flesh out the story a whole lot more. I mean, sure,
the TV guys’ll have the bare bones on the air tomorrow night, but we’ll have the jump on them. We can put together a kick-ass
package for Saturday—our first-day story’d come off like a second-day story. You know, not just reporting the coroner’s finding
but really getting into the—”

“Thanks, man, but I know what a goddamn second-day story is, okay?”

“Hey, don’t get pissed at me,” Ochoa said. “If it weren’t for my source, we wouldn’t even know what we were in for tomorrow.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bill said, rubbing at his temples with his chip-free hand. “So come on, let’s hear it. What did she tell you?”

Ochoa finished chewing and took a deep breath. “All right,” he said, “apparently LSD is made from this stuff called ergo…”
He squinted at his notebook. “Ergo…”

Mad offered him the chip bag for a refill. “Ergotamine tartrate.”

“That’s it.” Ochoa shook his head at the chips. “Anyway, I guess it doesn’t take a whole lot of it to make the drug. Like—”

“Like a half pound of the stuff is enough for a million doses.”

I tossed a chip in Mad’s direction. “Show-off.”

“Just doing my homework, baby.”

“Like I was saying,” Ochoa said, “each dose of LSD only contains a very small amount of ergotamine. And that stuff itself
is a pretty potent poison. Madison was telling us earlier about how it killed a lot of people whose grain got infected with
it or something….”

“Jesus,” Bill said, “when was this?”

“Middle Ages.”

Bill slumped back in his chair. “Like I care.”

“Anyway,” Ochoa went on, “nowadays a derivative of it is used to treat migraines. But if you take a whole lot of it, it can
cause all sorts of shit—messes with your blood pressure, gives you clots, seizures, coma, you name it.”

Bill’s eyebrows went up. “And it can kill you?”

“If you ingest enough of it, yeah.”

“But you just said each dose of LSD only has a tiny amount of it.”

“It’s supposed to. But this stuff didn’t.”

“So why does that mean that it didn’t happen by accident? Like, couldn’t somebody have just put too much of—”

“According to my source, not too goddamn likely.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Neither did I,” Ochoa said, “but she explained it to me like this: If you’re baking a cake and you put in an extra cup of
sugar, it just means you’re a little careless. If you put in two extra cups, you’re
really
careless. If you put in an extra garbage can full, you did it on purpose.”

“We’re talking that kind of ratio?”

“Yeah. Plus, she said that nobody who makes LSD throws around their…” He looked back down at his notebook.

“Ergotamine tartrate,” Mad said with a grin.

“… their ergotamine tartrate lightly. It’s their main ingredient, and they definitely can’t waltz in and buy it at the drugstore.
It mostly gets smuggled in from overseas.”

Bill leaned back and put his feet up on the desk. “So why did it take so goddamn long for the coroner to come up with this?”

“Apparently, the guy just couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He thought his equipment was out of whack or something. I mean,
that kind of ergotamine level is totally unheard of.”

“So why the hell did they release anything?”

“Well, they knew for sure they were dealing with LSD, so they could announce that much and everybody could concentrate on
stopping people from taking it. But when it came to the contaminant, the doc wanted to send it out to a couple of independent
labs for confirmation.”

“And now it’s confirmed.”

“That’s what they’re gonna say at the press conference tomorrow.”

“Wonderful. Where’s it gonna be?”

“At the G.P.D. station.”

That got my attention. “Not out in Jaspersburg? I thought Chief Stilwell was being all protective about the case.”

“Probably doesn’t have much choice,” Ochoa said. “Jaspersburg Town Hall’s a little small. Plus, the county coroner’s based
in Gabriel, so there you go.”

“Not to mention,” said Mad, “that this guy’s gonna need all the help he can get.”

Bill took a swig of his iced chai and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “So let me get this straight. We’re saying
that these three kids were killed on purpose.”

Ochoa looked at him like he was suffering from the mental equivalent of narcolepsy. “Um… That’s the general idea.”

“Then…
why?
”

The question hung there for a while. Finally, I decided to take a bite. “What if it’s like the Tylenol poisonings back in
the eighties? You know, some kind of random thing by a sicko.”

Mad’s eyebrow went back up. “A sicko who knows enough chemistry to mess with the levels of ergotamine tartrate in their LSD?”

“I guess that would be the job description, yeah. Some kind of mad scientist maybe.”

“Benson’s got plenty of those.” The three of us stared at him. “Hey, I’m
kidding.
”

“Seriously,” Ochoa said, “how much know-how would it take?”

Mad shrugged. “Probably not a whole hell of a lot. Most LSD is made in small batches in people’s houses, for chrissake. Doesn’t
seem like a huge leap from there to upping the ergotamine levels—not like you’d need a Ph.D. or anything.”

“Talk about sick,” Bill said. “Some son of a bitch whips up a batch of this stuff and puts it on the market and just sits
back and waits for people to die so he can get his ya-yas off on it. Unbelievable.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But not unprecedented.”

“So like Ochoa said before, we’re screwed on the deadline. Only thing we can do is try to come out with all guns blazing on
Saturday.” He turned to Mad. “You’ve been doing research for this package of Marilyn’s, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Great. Now it’s running on Saturday. And don’t expect Alex to help you. She’s going to be busy.”

“I am?”

“Those kids’ parents want more coverage, fine,” Bill said. “They’re gonna get it. But I’m pretty damn sure they’re not gonna
like it.”

I
T WAS AFTER NINE
by the time I finally met Cody for dinner at our usual Indian place, which is fifty steps from the newspaper and maybe forty
from the cop shop. The restaurant has a line of booths along the front window, but we never sit there. Although our little
romance has been out of the bag for a while now, we figure we might as well not advertise it to everybody who fills up at
the Gas ’n’ Snack across the street.

“Hungry?” he said, once I’d inhaled half of a giant papadum dipped in mint chutney.

“A gentleman wouldn’t notice.”

“Ah. My mistake.”

“So how was your day, dear?”

He stared down at the menu. “So… what do you feel like having?”

“Sly way of changing the subject.”

“I’m like a cat.”

“Yeah, well, don’t bother playing all cool,” I said. “I already know.”

“Know what?”

“Know the thing you’re not supposed to talk about, but you were gonna wind up telling me anyway because we promised each other
from day one we weren’t gonna play that game.”

“Oh, right.” He finally looked up, and I could swear there was an actual twinkle in those ridiculously green eyes of his.
“That.”

“That.”

“You want to order first?”

“Cody, I swear I’m gonna—”

“The waitress is hovering.”

I stopped glaring at him and looked over. “Oh.”

We ordered the vegetable korma for me, chicken curry for him, and assorted vegetarian appetizers to split, plus a double order
of nan.

“So,” I said, once I’d slurped up the better part of a mango lassi, “how was your day, dear?”

“Stunk.”

“Sorry to hear it. And why would that be?”

“That would be because some nut decided to whip up a batch of killer LSD and push it just over the line from my jurisdiction.”

“Which means …?”

“That this stuff is out there and there’s not a lot I can do about it.”

“Chief Stilwell’s still being all territorial? You gotta be kidding me.”

He shook his head and took a drink of his Kingfisher. From what I could tell, he was probably going to need several more before
the night was over. “Not anymore, no. I think he knows that was a major screwup, but…truth is, I can understand the instinct.
Cops have been known to be macho.”