Over the Edge (42 page)

'Here's where it get a little theoretical.'

'Okay.'

'What if he was set up? It would handle several conceptual problems at once. The question was how. And once I got on that track, it led me to the third alternative, the one I think provides the best fit because it eliminates all the inconsistencies. He's neither a murderer nor truly schizophrenic. Both the crime scene and his mental deterioration are the products of a psychobiological manipulation.'

'Meaning?'

'Chemical mind control, Alex. Psychological poisoning. Someone used hallucinogens to drive him crazy. And planted him at the murder while he was stoned.'

'That's a quantum leap,' I said.

She reached across the table and grabbed my hand.

'I know it sounds far-fetched, but just hear me out.'

Before I could reply, she was off.

'The concept isn't really that weird after all. Didn't the field of psychedelic research develop precisely because psychiatrists were looking for drugs that could simulate schizophrenia? In fact, before the term psychedelic was coined,
  
LSD,
  
psilocybin,
  
and
  
mescaline
  
were
  
called

psychotomimetics; they mimic psychosis. And until the hippies gave it a bad name, LSD was considered a research wonder drug because it had the power to create an externally induced model psychosis. Psychotherapists started taking it to find out what their patients were going through, and pharmacologists studied the molecular structure in order to discern the neurobiologic - ' She stopped, looked at our hands, and pulled away, embarrassed, then tried to hide it by rearranging her books.

'What I am going on about?' she said. 'You know all this.'

'Jennifer, I don't think your theory's far-fetched at all -as a theory. In fact, drugs have been in the back of my mind since I first got involved in the case. Because I've been searching for a way to absolve Jamey. So nothing would make me happier than to find out he's a victim and not a victimiser.'

'Unfortunately,' I continued, 'once you get past theory, there are some serious problems. The night he was committed to Canyon Oaks, he was tested for LSD, PCP, and other street drugs and found negative.' If Mainwaring could be trusted. 'And even though there are similarities between drug intoxication and schizophrenia, you know as well as I that they're far from equivalent states. Drug trips are more stereotypic and visually disruptive. Schizophrenia's primarily auditory - '

'But Jamey had visual hallucinations.'

'He may have - some schizophrenics do - but the majority of his disturbances have been auditory. He heard voices. That's much more consistent with psychosis. And his deterioration's been chronic. Drug trips are generally short-lived. Someone would have to be virtually force-feeding him LSD to keep him that crazy. You'd just about need an IV drip.'

'Which you could do in a hospital.'

'But not in a jail.'

She was silent but undaunted. After tearing a sheet of paper off the legal pad, she began writing.

'I'm making a list of all your objections. What else?'

'Okay. Even if we could prove he was doped up the night of Chancellor's murder, there's physical evidence connecting him to six other slashings. Was he doped up and planted at all those murders? Then there's the matter of his escape. How did he get to Chancellor's house from Canyon Oaks? Even if he were stoned, you'd expect him to have some memory of that night.'

She scanned her notes, then looked up.

'What do you mean by physical evidence?'

'I don't know the details,' I said, omitting to mention Heather Cadmus's lavender dress.

'If it's fingerprints, they can be lifted and transferred. Anything else is even less reliable. I've been reading up on forensic biology, and it's not nearly as scientific as most people think. Two experts can examine the same physical evidence and come up with diametrically opposite findings. Just like psych.'

I smiled.

'As far as the escape," she said, "what if it wasn't an escape at all? Suppose someone set it up as an escape and then snatched him out of the hospital and dumped him at Chancellor's?'

I thought of Andrea Vann's new Mustang and wondered about that. But if the escape had been a kidnapping, why had he been allowed to call me?

'Now,' she said, returning to her notes, 'the issue of nonequivalency between drug trips and psychosis. What you say is true as far as LSD and most of the common hallucinogens are concerned. But it doesn't exclude some other drug, one that causes long-term disturbance and distorts auditory perception.'

'And is easy to adminster covertly,' I added. 'Orally or by injection. And unlikely to be tested for routinely. You're talking about the ultimate psychotomimetic'

She bobbed her head enthusiastically.

'Exactly!'

'Any suggestions?'

'No. I thought you might know.

'Nothing comes to mind,' I said. 'But I'm no expert in psychopharmacology.'

'It's a researchable issue,' she said, staring into my eyes. 'I've got time. How about you?'

I thought for a moment.

'Sure,' I said.

'Great!'

We walked south across the science squad, toward the medical centre. It was seven-thirty, and the campus was beginning to fill: huffing joggers; preoccupied grad students; premeds and predents, burdened by book bags and self-doubt. It was one of those mornings that draw people back to L.A. despite the craziness, the air ocean-washed and astringently cool under a deep blue sky. Jennifer drew her serape around her and talked animatedly.

'At first I approached the issue from a purely cognitive perspective Could you scramble someone's mind using purely psychological techniques?'

' Brainwashing?'

'Yes, but relentlessly - to the point of severe psychosis. Like what Charles Boyer tried to do to Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight. But that's movie stuff. In real life it wouldn't work; stress by itself isn't enough. I mean, think about the greatest stress a person could go through - the Nazi concentration camps, right?" Her lids lowered and closed for a moment. 'My dad spent his adolescence in Auschwitz, and lots of his friends are survivors. I've talked to them about it. The trauma affected them for life - anxieties, depression, physical problems - but none of them actually went crazy. Daddy verifies that. The only people he remembers exhibiting psychotic symptoms were those who were psychotic when they entered the camp. Does that square with the data?'

'Yes. And with clinical experience. Over the years I've seen thousands of children and families under incredible stress, and I can't recall a single instance of stress-induced psychosis. Human beings are remarkably resilient.'

She considered that, then said:

'And yet it's pretty easy to elicit psychotic-like behaviour in rats and monkeys with stress. Dr. Gaylord's shown that. Electrify the floors of their cages, prevent escape, shock them at random intervals, and they just curl up, defecate, and withdraw. Do it long enough, and they never recover.' She stopped and thought for a moment. 'Human beings are a lot more complex, aren't they? As organisms.'

'Yes.' I smiled. 'As organisms.'

We walked the rest of the way in silence, arrived at the Biomedical Library five minutes before opening and filled the time by drinking coffee from a vending machine in an open courtyard. The walk had heightened the colour in Jennifer's face, bringing a dusty rose flush to the surface of her tanned skin. Young skin, free of the tributaries etched by experience. Her hair had dried, and it shimmered in the sun. Her eyes mimicked the sky.

She put her books down, held her cup with both hands, and chattered animatedly between swallows. With each exclamation she edged closer to me, grazing my arm with tentative, darting touches, as if testing the surface of a hot iron. Several male students noticed her, then the interaction between us. I thought I saw a couple smirk.

'Let's go,' I said, looking at my watch and tossing my coffee cup into a trash bin.

We entered the library just behind two dental students carrying bone boxes and found an empty oak table near the periodicals rack.

'How do you want to go about this?' she asked.

'Let's sit down and make a list of relevant topics, divide them between us, run each one down in the card catalogue, then go into the stacks and track down the most promising ones. We can do a general scan first and bring back anything definitive.'

'Sounds good. How about using the computer for the more recent stuff?'

'Medline?'

'And Psych Abstracts. I think they've got Chemical Abstracts online as well '

'Sure. Take it wherever the references lead you.'

'Great - uh, do you have a faculty account? They won't run searches without guarantee of payment.'

'No, my faculty appointment's across town. But they've done courtesy billing before through the paediatrics department. Use my name, and if you have any problems, I'll talk to them.'

We made the list, divided it, agreed to meet at eleven-thirty, then parted ways - age-congruently: She made a beeline for the computers, and I spent an hour thumbing through the card index and jotting down call numbers before entering the twelve-storey data silo known as the Bio-Med Stacks.

My search began in the psychiatry section and progressed through neurology and psychobiology. As I zeroed in on topics, the references grew progressively esoteric and wide-ranging. At the end of two hours I'd sifted through scores of documents and learned little.

As Jennifer had noted, psychedelic research had begun as an attempt to replicate psychosis, and the articles from the thirties through the fifties were, for the most part, dry treatises, preoccupied with molecular structure and laced with cautious optimism about future benefits to schizophrenia research. I came across Hoffman's description of the synthesis of LSD and other landmark references, but none of them dealt with the issue of premeditated psychological poisoning.

In the sixties the scientific climate changed. I'd been a college student then, too intent on studying to get sidetracked to biochemical recreation. But I remembered how Leary, Alpert, and others had begun to imbue drugs with philosophic, religious, and political properties - and the flood of bandwagon-jumping drug abuse that had ensued when the wrong people listened.

The sixties articles brought back those memories -chronicles of tragedy delivered in the matter-of-fact prose of clinical case histories: bum trippers leaping out of ten-storey windows in spread-eagled flights of Icarian omnipotence, running naked down the freeway, cooking their

arms in vats of boiling water, an orgy of self-destruction.

As psychiatrists and psychologists busied themselves developing treatments for drug poisoning, notions of scientific value vanished. Although the spectre of permanent psychosis in psychologically healthy users was raised, researched, and eventually discarded, hallucinogens were deemed especially dangerous for borderline personalities and others with 'weak ego boundaries'. LSD was the most frequently cited culprit, but there were others as well: amphetamines, barbiturates, and a psychedelic named DMT and labelled the businessman's lunchtime high because it provided a sudden, intense trip of forty-five minutes to two hours.

Two things about DMT caught my eye: Sometimes lunchtime lasted longer than expected - aberrant bad trips had been known to last four or five days - and unlike LSD, its effects were potentiated - intensified - by the administration of Thorazine and other phenothiazine tranquillisers. I remembered Jamey's uneven response to medication, the up-and-down pattern that had puzzled and frustrated Mainwaring, and wondered if potentiation could have caused it. If he'd been poisoned with something like DMT, Thorazine would have made him crazier instead of more lucid. But DMT was too unpredictable for the type of calculated mind control Jennifer had suggested.

I read on and found articles on hashish, psilocybin, mescaline, and a quaint concoction combining both of them with LSD and DMT, known as STP. One piece that intrigued me was a collection of case histories by a research group at the UC San Francisco Medical School, which described STP as 'biochemical Russian roulette' and noted that it had been the party drug of choice for outlaw motorcycle gangs. But that infatuation had been brief, for the cocktail had proved too volatile even for the beasts in leather. Bikers again. I tossed that around for a while, came up with nothing.

A footnote in a 1968 review made note of a drug called Sernyl, a short-term anaesthetic developed by Parke, Davis for field use by the military but abandoned because, when overadministered, it had produced psychiatric symptoms.

Sernyl intoxication could resemble acute schizophrenia, to the point of causing auditory hallucinations. But according to the author of the review, its effects were so frightening - often creating the illusion of death by drowning and other horrors - that he didn't believe it had much potential for abuse. Ten years later Sernyl would be known primarily by its street names - hog, crystal, DOA, angel dust, PCP - and emerge as the main recreational drug of the inner-city ghettos. So much for prophecy.

PCP had been one of the first things I'd thought of after hearing Jamey's garbled speech on the phone and learning about his symptoms, which included some classic PCP reactions: sudden agitation and confusion to the point of violence, paranoia, auditory hallucinations, and a wind-down period of deep depression. PCP could be administered orally, and its effects lasted from hours to weeks. But as with DMT, that range was unpredictable. On top of that, PCP reactions were heavily dose-dependent: Small amounts could cause numbness or euphoria; moderate amounts, analgesia. The psychosis elicited by overdose could progress quickly to coma and death, and the difference between toxic and lethal blood levels was infinitesimal. Which means that a constant diet of PCP could just as easily kill someone as make him crazy. Too volatile to count on in a programme of calculated psychological poisoning.

And there was another problem with PCP, the one I'd raised with Jennifer: Mainwaring had found none of it in Jamey's blood.