Near Death (28 page)

“You do?” Phyllis remarked again.

“I do. I’m not a religious man—at least I wasn’t one—but I had quite a session.” He dabbed at his eyes with his handkerchief. “Maybe I’ll be comfortable enough to share it with you one day. I only hope it happens to me again.”

“That’s good, Fred,” Meg said, easing toward the door. “We’re glad you’re feeling good.”

“Phyllis …” Fred called out. “I want to say something to you …” he dropped his chin to his chest. “I want to apologize for being a jerk. It’ll never happen again. Will you accept my apology?”

“Sure, Fred. Sure I will.”

The two women walked themselves to the ladies’ room, shut the door, and when they made sure they were alone, burst into hysterical laughter.

“That’s the best shit in the world, Meg!” Phyllis roared, propping herself on a sink.

“Honey, my Ronnie is getting a dose in his Bud Light tonight, I can promise you that.”

Ted’s Automotive in Worcester, Massachusetts, was a three-bay shop with a gas pump and a tiny convenience store. Ted Sperling, a gruff, unshaven man, finished filling a customer’s tank with regular and returned to the warm garage. He employed three mechanics, Ramon and Hector Manzilla, brothers from Panama who’d worked for him for a decade, and a newer fellow, Bobby Lemaitre, a long-haired kid, something of a free spirit. Ted had his doubts about Bobby’s personality but the kid was such a slick mechanic he overlooked the intangibles.

The guys were sitting on stools, drinking coffee in between a couple of cars on lifts.

“I ain’t touching that shit.” Ramon was adamant. “Put it away.”

Hector chimed in, “Me neither. You’re a young guy. You’re making a mistake.”

Bobby held his ground. “No, no, it’s totally cool, man. When I was a kid, my cousin Greg, a crazy little dude, got wiped out by a car on his skateboard. I swear to God,
I’ve seen him twice. He looks like the happiest son of a bitch on the planet, except he ain’t on the planet, if you know what I’m saying. I love this shit. I’d take it every fuckin’ day if Ted paid us better.”

Ted limped through the bays and sidled up to them. “What the hell you talkin’ about?”

Hector and Ramon clammed up but Bobby said, “I ain’t ashamed about it. It ain’t illegal.”

“What ain’t illegal?”

Bobby held up three sticks of Bliss.

“I know what that is,” Ted said bitterly. “Keep that out of my shop.”

“It ain’t illegal,” Bobby insisted, “and I don’t take it at work, for fuck’s sake. It puts you out like a light. Makes it hard to turn a wrench.”

“I still don’t like it,” Ted repeated. “Put it away.”

Bobby shrugged, went to the rear bays and put the paper sticks in the socket drawer of his toolbox, with Ted watching him every step of the way.

At quitting time, Bobby was fuming. He came storming over to the brothers and demanded, “What the fuck, man! Who took it? One’s missing. I had three.”

Ramon and Hector looked at each other. Hector said, “I swear it wasn’t us, man. I saw Ted go in there when you
were in the john. He took one out.”

“You’re shitting me! That asshole!” Bobby shouted.

Ramon took out his wallet. “How much was it?”

“Forty bucks.”

“Here.” He gave Bobby a couple of twenties.

“Why’re you covering for him, other than he’s the boss?” Bobby asked.

“Give him a break, man,” Hector said. “You know what happened to him. You know, the crash and all.”

Two weeks later, Ramon and Hector pulled into the service station with a couple of empty pickup trucks. The garage was dark, the pumps were off. A FOR SALE sign was hammered into the hard flowerbed.

Ramon honked and Ted came out of the bare store.

“We’re here to pick up our boxes,” Ramon said.

Ted opened the bay doors and let the brothers back their trucks in.

He watched silently as they wheeled the heavy toolboxes up ramps onto the beds of their trucks and tied them down.

Finally, he said, “I’m sorry. You’ve been with me a long time.”

“We understand,” Ramon said. “Hopefully, we’ll find something else.”

Ted seemed inclined to say more. “It’s just that I don’t see the point of it anymore. Since I took Bliss. You know what happened. I killed my Denise. I killed my girls.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Hector told him. “Black ice’s a bitch. What could you do?”

“No, I was going too fast …” He shook his head. “Here’s the deal. I thought Denise’d be mad at me for what I did. But for the past two weeks, I’ve been taking Bliss two, three times a day, and every time she’s so damn happy to see me and I’m so damn happy to see her. I’m not into the shop anymore. I don’t see the point. I’m sorry for pulling the plug and I hope you land on your feet, but I don’t see the point anymore.”

He waited for them to drive off and closed the doors behind them.

Rachel Mahoney reported to work at the Tall Pines nursing home in Austin, Texas, to start her regular eight-hour evening shift as a nurse’s aide. She and a second aide and their supervisor, a registered nurse, covered two wards: twenty men and twenty women. It was an established facility with relatively well-off patients and a solid reputation.

At nine in the evening she made rounds, pushing a
juice cart from room to room, checking on her patients, tucking them in and offering a bedtime drink. She had a spring to her step, different from her usual plod. At each stop she said cheerfully, “Orange, grape, cranberry, or apple?” Every time she poured a juice she dissolved a dose of Bliss in each Dixie cup.

Half an hour later, she snuck out of Tall Pines without telling her supervisor, got in her car and drove off, whistling and humming.

She never came back.

The next day, all the Austin TV stations led off the morning news with the Tall Pines story. In the middle of the night, the nurse and the remaining aide on duty became alarmed by their elderly patients awakening with manifestations of hysteria. Some were laughing, some crying, some were shouting uncontrollably. The nurses rushed from room to room but quickly became overwhelmed. Fearing some kind of environmental contamination, they put out the call to emergency services. As the patients were being wheeled out on gurneys to waiting ambulances, they chattered excitedly and called out to long-lost husbands, wives, brothers, or sisters. There was talk of God.

Investigators had their early suspicions. Rachel Mahoney was missing. The intoxications had the hallmarks of
Bliss ingestion. But before the lab results were back a posting appeared on the voluminous message board on the Inner Peace Crusade website.

I gave these dear old people in Austin doses of Bliss. I can’t think of any greater gift. Now they know that God is within each and every one of them. They know he’s within their reach, waiting for them. They know they’ll be met by people who loved them. I hope they’ll be able to face their last days with dignity and hope, maybe joy. I know not everyone will agree with what I did but it makes me feel wonderful. It’s the best thing I ever did. Love, Rachel
.

Thirty-seven

25 DAYS

“The director personally wants
you
.” Stanley Minot was doing his best to balance pride for the office and concern for his man.

“Look, Stanley …” Cyrus started to say.

“Cy, don’t even think about telling me no. This is too big and it’s too specific a request.”

Before Tara’s illness, he’d been as ambitious as the next agent. Now, he felt numb on the subject of striving.

“Why me?”

“The task force is a big deal. Top priority. You know Weller better than anyone in law enforcement. You know the drug. The North End raid put you on the radar screen in Washington. I’ll reassign most of your other work and Pete’ll have to pick up some slack. Bob Cuccio, the assistant director for criminal investigation, is the other FBI member on the task force.”

“There’s a lot of space on the org chart between me and Bob Cuccio.”

Minot smiled. “That’s why this is good for you. Next Thursday. The White House.”

Cyrus looked puzzled.

“You know, big building on Pennsylvania Ave with pillars?”

“Funny. Why there?”

“Neutral territory. When you’ve got Homeland Security, NSA, FBI, DEA, FDA, NDIC, NIH all in one room you better go for neutral turf. And by the time you have your first meeting, hopefully FDA and DEA will hand you a big stick.”

On a cool morning, a steady stream of men and women filed into the largest meeting room at FDA’s Parklawn Building in Rockville. At 9 A.M. sharp, Marvin Wolff, the chairman of the Drug Abuse Advisory Committee, called the proceedings to order. The DAAC had been convened in record time, at the insistence of the Drug Enforcement Administration, to take up the narcotic scheduling of Bliss.

Over the next several hours the committee heard testimony from FDA, DEA, and National Institute on Drug Abuse staffers on the abuse potential of the drug, geographic data on usage patterns, suicide and morbidity statistics. Vincent Desjardines, who still had more Bliss
patients than anyone else in the country, was brought in to testify and he nervously walked through a PowerPoint presentation. In the open public hearing, the mother of Jennifer Sheridan and other relatives who’d lost loved ones to suicide gave tearful testimony. To be sure, there were Bliss proponents there too. They were given a half dozen slots to speak about how the drug was a tool for enlightenment and self-discovery and that restricting its use would be a blow to spiritual freedom, an anathema. While they talked, surly DEA agents sitting in the audience scowled and whispered among one another conspiratorially.

Shortly before noon, the chairman called for open debate among the committee members. There was little dissention. All members strongly supported imposing severe restrictions on Bliss. When they were done, Wolff called for a vote. It was unanimous. Bliss would be immediately classified as a Schedule I drug, placing it in the same category as heroin, cocaine, and LSD. It was now illegal to make, use, sell, or possess the drug.

Law enforcement had its big stick.

The morning after the first Bliss task force meeting, Cyrus was at Reagan National Airport waiting to board the shuttle back to Boston. He called Marian to check on Tara.
The girl came on the line sounding cheerful, which improved his mood no end. Then he called Emily Frost to confirm they were still on for coffee later that afternoon. She sounded cheerful too and with that he stepped lightly onto the jetway.

Back at the office, Cyrus briefed Minot, did some paperwork then dashed off to the Longwood medical area. Emily was already at the coffee shop, smiling at him when he pushed through the door.

“How was Washington?” she asked.

“I’ve never seen so many puffed-up pompous pricks in one room.”

She laughed. “Sounds like a faculty meeting.”

Cyrus told her what he could. She was becoming his sounding board on matters related to Bliss and they’d been speaking on the phone almost daily. He wished he could go all in and tell her details about the investigation but he was careful about confidentiality. She was a good listener, a “professional listener,” he joked, but she also was smart and insightful and helped him connect dots.

The task force had the formal name JTF-B, for Joint Task Force–Bliss. It was the brainchild of the attorney general to bring coordination to what was becoming a national issue now that the drug had appeared in all fifty
states. Other countries already were reaching out to the United States for information and assistance, as the drug was showing up in clusters in Central America, South America, and Europe. It appeared that most of the Bliss was coming into the States through the porous Mexican border but beyond that the sources were unknown.

Cyrus confessed to Emily that he had far less interest in interdiction and enforcement strategies, which had dominated the proceedings, than in Alex Weller. In fact, his role at the White House meeting had been limited to delivering a brief profile on Weller, heavy on facts, with a dollop of his suspicions about the murders.

“I know you don’t like him,” Emily said, “but is there anything he’s done that’s criminal? From what I’ve seen, he’s evangelical about Bliss the way Timothy Leary was about LSD. I know it may be distasteful to some, but why is it a crime, even with the drug being scheduled?”

Cyrus sighed. “I wish I could tell you everything, but you’re right. He’s not officially a criminal—yet. Have you seen the message board on his website?”

“It’s as addictive as the drug,” she joked.

“There’s another layer to the website, a link to an encrypted area. Believe it or not, we’ve got guys at the NSA and Defense Department who can’t break it. Weller’s got
someone working for him who knows his beans. He’s got the ability to send and receive encrypted messages.”

“To what end?”

“I wish we knew. I wish we knew what his countdown clock was all about. I wish I could tell you more about why I want to nail him.”

“Me too,” she said.

He looked up from his coffee. “I talk in my sleep.”

“Hey, Cyrus,” she said gently but emphatically. “I’m still Tara’s doctor.”

He smiled a you-can’t-blame-a-guy-for-trying kind of a smile. “Let me walk you back to the hospital.”

The cadence of their steps made their shoulders touch from time to time. Neither made an attempt to separate the few inches it would have taken to prevent contact.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” she said.

“You told me you had a rough childhood. You know more about me than I know about you.”

“Why do you want to know about me?”

“You’re my daughter’s doctor,” he said, laughing. “I’m being diligent.”

“Now you’re mocking me.”

“I’m not. I want to know because I’m interested in
Emily Frost, the person.”

She sighed. “I was eleven. We lived in a small town in Virginia. My mom got divorced when I was one. I don’t remember my daddy, never saw him again, don’t know what happened to him. I do remember my momma’s boyfriend, though. He moved in when I was six. They fought a lot and they drank a lot. He was rough with her but she was rough with him. She split his lip, broke his hand with a pot.”