Ecstasy

by Beth Saulnier

  “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.”

  IT 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.”

  “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.”

  CHAPTER13

  It 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.