Ecstasy (17 page)

“You don’t say.”

“Not that I’ve experienced this personally”—he winked at me, which is something that only he can get away with without a black
eye—“but I think it’s been known to occur.”

“So if Stilwell’s willing to play with the other kids, how come you’re on the sidelines?”

“Because the deaths happened in Jaspersburg. That means the Jaspersburg cops have jurisdiction; the county sheriff has jurisdiction;
the staties have jurisdiction; the D.E.A. has jurisdiction; the F.B.I. has jurisdiction….”

“Everybody but you.” He gave a single nod. “Poor baby. Well, maybe Stilwell’ll ask for help.”

“Nobody’s going to ask the Gabriel P.D. for help when the D.E.A. is sniffing around. We’re kind of small potatoes. All we
get to do is try and figure out how somebody vandalized the Deep Lake Cooling plant. Very damn exciting.”

“It’s enough to drive an Irish cop from Boston to drink.”

He raised his glass with a grin. “Yeah, well, that doesn’t take much.”

“Poor baby.”

“How’d you find out about all this, anyway?”

“Source of Ochoa’s tipped him off. Any idea how the investigation’s going to go?”

He shrugged. “Depends.”

“Well, what would you do if you were in charge?” He shrugged again. “Come on, don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.
My guess is you’ve been obsessing about it for the past two weeks.”

He concentrated on his half of the papadum, which indicated I’d nailed him but good. “Well…maybe I’ve been giving it a little
thought.”

“Maybe doing a little more than just thinking?”

“Okay…I did have a couple of conversations with a couple of individuals.”

“Which translates from the Cop-to-English dictionary as ‘I shook down every drug dealer in town and told them if they know
who sold this crap, they better tell me.’ ”

“Something like that.”

“And?”

“And nothing.”

“Bummer.”

“Yeah. But to answer your question, if I were in charge of this… Well, first I’d call Stilwell and his men on the carpet for
the botch job they did during the festival, letting everybody take off without getting any names. Then I’d acknowledge the
fact that there probably isn’t a lot of acid getting made in Jaspersburg, New York, and concentrate on where it most likely
came from.”

“Which is?”

“A metro area. That’s where this junk usually gets made, but there’s an exception to that rule, which is big college towns.”

“And Gabriel isn’t a big town, but it’s got a big college.”

“Right.”

“But I thought you already—”

“I did what I could do to try and keep this garbage out of Gabriel, but it hasn’t been much. There’s only so far I can go
when we’re not even officially in on the investigation.”

“So you think this stuff was really made in Gabriel?”

“It’s a possibility, but I’d say it’s even more likely that it was made somewhere else and sold through somebody here. Gabriel’s
a pretty big market for your softer drugs—mostly LSD, ecstasy, and pot. Practically nothing in the way of coke or heroin.
But then again, there were people from all over the place at that festival—your story said some of them had even driven cross-country
to get there, right? So the truth is, it could’ve come from anywhere.”

“What do you make of what the coroner’s office found—the fact that there was so much ergotamine tartrate in there?”

“I never officially worked narcotics, so I don’t have a lot of firsthand experience, but I made some phone calls. Apparently,
this is just off the charts.”

The appetizers came then, and we each grabbed a samosa. I doused mine in tamarind sauce and ate it with my fingers.

“So what you’re saying,” I said when I’d come up for air, “is that as far as drug enforcement goes, this is pretty much unprecedented.”

“Yeah.”

“And there’s really no way it could’ve been an accident? Like maybe some kind of production screwup?”

“Hard to see how. According to the M.E., it’s kind of an order-of-magnitude thing.”

“I heard that too. So you really think there’s any hope they’ll catch who did it?”

He shrugged and reached for a pakora. “If an investigation gets screwed up at the beginning, a lot of times it can be pretty
hard to salvage it later. If it were up to me, I’d have those kids’ friends in the interview room for as long as it takes.”

“I think their parents might object. Their lawyers too.”

“Yeah, and then what are they going to say if another kid dies?”

“Besides, I heard they’d already talked to the cops more than once—that their parents were making them cooperate.”

“That’s all well and good, but it’s got its limitations. You ask a kid questions in front of his parents, there’s only so
much you’re going to get.”

“You think they know more than they’re telling?”

“Of course they do,” Cody said. “They’re teenagers.”

I
t just so happened that the adolescents in question were supposed to be the focus of my Friday. While Ochoa dealt with the
cop stuff and Mad wrote about the freaky details of LSD, I was told to come up with something about youth culture—or, to put
it more baldly,
drug
culture.

Now, I know that sounds like a dangerously general assignment, and it was. Frankly, I had no idea where to start, or whether
anybody would possibly talk to me on the record.

So…I called Lauren Potter and asked if I could take her to lunch. She made noises about wanting to meet me in the news-room—three
guesses what the attraction was—but I made some excuse about why I needed to meet her at the sandwich shop instead.

She showed up at Schultz’s at eleven-thirty, wearing yet another hippie sundress; this one was lemon yellow with moons and
stars batiked onto it. Her hair was up in a bun again, and it struck me that I couldn’t remember any teenage girls affecting
that sort of granny hairdo when I was her age. Then again, since I entered adolescence in the era of leg warmers and cut-neck
sweatshirts, I probably shouldn’t talk.

Lauren may have been right on time, but she wasn’t alone; Trish was with her, the ugly duckling to offset Lauren’s swan.

“Trish was dying to get out of J-burg, so I asked her along,” Lauren said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “How’re you two doing?”

They both shrugged and sat down.

“Okay, I guess,” Lauren said. “School starts pretty soon, though.”

“You’re not that excited about going back?”

“It’s just, you know…it’s gonna feel weird to go back without Tom and Billy and Shaun.”

“Right, of course. Sorry.”

“We’re gonna…I talked to some other kids from our class, and we’re gonna try and do some big memorial thing. We don’t know
what yet. We’re gonna form a committee.”

“That sounds like a good idea.”

“I guess.”

“Are you hungry?”

Lauren nodded, and Trish copied her without much enthusiasm.

“What’s this place all about, anyway?” Lauren looked around the room, festooned with plastic salamis and cheeses. “I’ve never
been here before.”

“Schultz’s? Best sandwiches in Gabriel. Really good homemade pickles too. And I totally dig the rice pudding, as long as Frau
Schultz doesn’t throw raisins into it.”

“
Nein
raisins,” a Teutonic voice bellowed from behind the counter.

“Danke schön,”
I yelled back, then turned to the girls. “I’m kind of a regular.”

I ordered my usual Swiss cheese monstrosity on rye with extra honey mustard, while Lauren went for a Reuben and Trish a turkey
on white, no mayo. Lauren and I went for the rice pudding. As always, the food came with almost incomprehensible speed.

“Thanks for coming out here to meet me,” I said.

“No problem,” Lauren said through a mouthful of sauerkraut. “What did you want to talk to us about?”

“Why don’t we finish eating first? That okay with you?”

Trish shrugged and took a minuscule bite of her sandwich. “Whatever,” Lauren said, and scooped up a handful of potato chips.

“Hey, Alex,” she said a minute later. “I was kind of wondering… how’s your friend Jake doing?”

“Jake?” I was roused from the love affair I was having with one of Frau Schultz’s pickles. “Oh, you mean Mad. He’s okay, I
guess.”

“Does he, you know…have a girlfriend?”

“He dates.”

“Yeah, but is he, like, being monogamous with anybody or anything?”

The temptation to invent a jealous fiancée was mighty, but in the end, I couldn’t see the point. “Not as far as I know.”

“Oh.” She looked positively carnivorous, and not just because she was eating corned beef.

“Listen, Lauren, I’m not sure if you know this, but Mad is a lot older than you are. A whole lot older.”

Her lips formed a Mona Lisa smile. “That’s okay. I like older guys.”

“Yeah, but he’s something like twice your age. So if you’re thinking you’d like to, you know, go out with him or something,
it’s probably not a good idea. I mean, I don’t think your parents would approve.”

Trish snorted. Lauren just kept smiling. “I doubt they’d notice,” she said.

“Why do you think that?”

“They’re busy. As long as I get good grades, they pretty much leave me alone.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Are you nuts?”

For what felt like the hundredth time, I contemplated the chasm between seventeen and twenty-seven. I didn’t have a whole
lot of time to think about it, though, because Lauren kept peppering me with questions about Mad, and it took all my concentration
to dodge them.

Finally, when she’d finished her sandwich and it’d become apparent that Trish wasn’t going to ingest more than a quarter of
hers, I decided it was time to talk for real.

“Listen,” I said, “there’s something I have to tell you guys.”

Lauren looked up from the plastic spoon she’d been denuding of rice pudding. “Um…okay. What’s up?”

“It’s about Tom and Billy. And Shaun.”

Trish, who’d been zoning out during the Mad confab, finally seemed to focus. “What about them?”

“There’s going to be a press conference this afternoon, and then something’s going to break on the local news tonight. I wanted
to talk to you about some other stuff too for this story I have to do about youth culture. But…I thought you guys ought to
have a heads-up.”

Lauren looked like she was starting to get testy. “A heads-up about what?”

I took a deep breath. I’m not sure why this was getting to me so much, but suddenly the pudding I’d jammed down on top of
the half pound of Swiss cheese wasn’t sitting so well.

“It’s…They’re finally releasing the details of the autopsy results. And apparently… the feeling is that their deaths weren’t
an accident.”

I’m not sure what kind of reaction I was expecting, but I didn’t get it. If anything, they both just looked perplexed. I kept
talking.

“What I mean to say is…it looks like this happened on purpose. Somebody mixed up the batch of LSD in a particular way so that
whoever took it would die.”

Lauren laughed, which totally threw me.

“That’s completely nuts,” she said. “Somebody’s gotta be playing a joke on you.”

“I’m afraid not. The evidence sounds pretty solid.”

She just stared at me for a minute; then her face flip-flopped from comedy to tragedy so fast it was almost funny. Almost,
but not quite. “Oh, my… That’s…Oh, my God…”

Trish, who was plenty pale to begin with, appeared to have gone a shade whiter. “You mean …somebody killed them on purpose?”

“Based on the chemistry of what was found in their systems, there’s pretty much no way it wasn’t intentional.”

Lauren’s eyes widened. “You mean some sick freak
poisoned
them?”

“Um…I guess that’s what it looks like.”

“But who’d do something like that?”

“I don’t know. Do you think—”

“I mean, what kind of crazy maniac goes and kills a bunch of kids they don’t even know?” There was an undertone of fury in
her voice. “What kind of person would do that?”

“And you don’t have any idea who they might’ve gotten the LSD from?”

“I told you,” Lauren said. “Shaun always got that stuff. We’d tell him what we wanted and he’d know where to get it.”

“But you don’t know where
he
got it?”

Lauren shrugged. “I didn’t really want to know.”

“Trish?”

“I…I don’t know. I never…I haven’t done it in a long time. I kind of gave it up a while ago.”

“Really? How come?”

“Um…I had this eating problem for a while.”

“You mean… anorexia?”

“Yeah.”

Now there’s a shocker,
I thought, but I just nodded and tried to look sympathetic.

“So after I got, you know, diagnosed …I had to go to this hospital to get help for it. And while I was in there, I didn’t
take anything, and once I came out, I just never started again.”

“How come?”

“I didn’t really want to anymore, I guess.”

“That’s good, right?”

She shrugged, which seemed to be her all-around expression. “I guess.”

“And you guys really have no idea where Shaun would’ve gotten the drugs?”

“I told you,” Lauren said, “I never really asked.”

“Do you even have a guess?”

She picked up the plastic spoon again, and the business end went
whack-whack-whack
on the tabletop. “Only that… I guess he must’ve got it from somebody in Gabriel.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, nobody sells in J-burg, and he didn’t go anyplace else.”
Whack-whack-whack.
“He was working a lot of hours doing computer stuff at Benson, most weekends too, so he didn’t go down to the city or anything.”

“And you have no idea who his dealer was?”

“I already told you no,” Lauren said. “How many times do I have to say it?”

We spent the next hour ostensibly talking about my “youth culture” story, and they gave me some anecdotes I could use as long
as their names were withheld. But let’s face it: The deaths were the proverbial elephant in the room. No matter what we talked
about, the conversation kept returning to what happened to Tom, Billy, and Shaun.