Also by Dennis McDougal
Nonfiction
Angel of Darkness
Fatal Subtraction: How Hollywood Really Does Business
In the Best of Families: The Anatomy of a True Tragedy
Mother’s Day
The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood
Yosemite Murders
Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty
Blood Cold: Fame, Sex, and Murder in Hollywood
Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times
Dylan: The Biography
Fiction
The Candlestickmaker
Hemingway’s Suitcase
Copyright © 2020 by Dennis McDougal
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Brian Peterson
Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-4537-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-4538-4
Printed in the United States of America
For each and every gentle soul misplaced inside a jail.
Contents
Prologue
Part One
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Part Two
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Part Three
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Epilogue
Postscript
Bibliography
Plates
Prologue
Wamego, Kansas—Nov. 6, 2000
WILLIAM LEONARD PICKARD TENSED LIKE a gazelle, all senses alert. He sniffed the air, scanning his surroundings for movement, but remained stock still. Breathe in. Breathe out. Give the adrenaline time to dissipate.
Satisfied that the moment was false alarm, he relaxed, then returned to the task at hand.
On the eve of Election Day at the turn of the twenty-first century, the courtly, silver-haired chemist and his bearded sidekick, Clyde Apperson, loaded boxes containing aluminum canisters and an array of laboratory glassware into the rear of a Ryder truck outside a retired Atlas Missile silo on the edge of Wamego, Kansas. The pair worked with haste and care. The labware was delicate. The canisters looked as harmless as Pringles potato chip cans, but the powder inside could provoke convulsions, delusions—even death. There was no room for false moves.
When they finished loading the truck, Pickard silently directed Apperson to climb behind the wheel and then did the same with his rented Buick LeSabre. Like a wizard trailed by his inelegant apprentice, Pickard angled his silver sedan past the chain link surrounding the former missile base while Apperson followed close behind. They each had a walkie-talkie so they could keep in touch as they prepared to head west on US 24.
Apperson was new to paranoia, but pulling up stakes on a moment’s notice was routine to Pickard. For the better part of a decade, staying on the move had been as big a part of his complicated lifestyle as schmoozing with Afghan warlords, hobnob-bing with Russian diplomats, or investigating money laundering on the Caribbean resort island of St. Maarten. When he wasn’t globetrotting on behalf of the State Department or pushing paper as an academic at UCLA, Pickard synthesized psychedelic sacraments on the fly, lysergic acid diethylamide chief among them.
Leonard Pickard saw himself as heir to Dr. Timothy Leary, even while he slowly morphed into the Walter White of LSD—but with one crucial difference, Pickard would argue: whereas the protagonist of TV’s Breaking Bad made crystal meth, which ruins lives and kills thousands, Pickard maintained that LSD never killed anyone.
Possessing it is illegal, however, and carting around ingredients and lab equipment tends to raise questions. A veteran of many a previous bust, Pickard had grown wary to the point of neurosis: an ounce of prevention was worth a ton of police confrontation. Pickard preferred the serenity of anonymity.
As night fell over the fresh layer of snow that blanketed the Flint Hills, Wamego lit up like a beacon. The farm town that advertises itself as “home of L. Frank Baum’s fictional Land of Oz” afforded the only light for a hundred square miles. Once they’d driven beyond its halo, Pickard and Apperson were shrouded in darkness. They stayed well within the speed limit.
Pickard saw the flashing lights before he heard the sirens. He slowed, took a deep breath and waited for squad cars to blow past on their way to some accident on the Interstate.
Panic not. Obey all traffic laws. Draw no attention. Hide in plain sight.
Only this time, the cops didn’t fly by. Pickard began to perspire when a black-and-white crept up behind, its high-pitched yelp directing the LeSabre to pull over. Instead, Pickard switched instantly from calm to catastrophic. He whipped the walk-ie-talkie to his lips: “This is it,” he barked. “This is what we talked about.”
He gunned his engine. Apperson followed his lead. The chase was on.
It ended soon enough. Within a few hundred yards, the Kansas Highway Patrol overtook and forced both vehicles to the shoulder. Apperson made a half-hearted attempt to bolt before falling to his knees in surrender.
Pickard had different ideas. He left the Buick idling and lit out across an open field. Weapons drawn, the highway patrolmen hollered, “Halt!” They followed in hot pursuit that cooled to lukewarm then frostbitten in minutes.
A veteran marathon runner, Pickard could be seen in silhouette against the horizon. He ran a broken-field pattern well ahead of harriers half his age and did a fast fade into the night.
“I actually waded down streams to elude the bloodhound scents,” Pickard recalled months later. “It took a while for those Nikes to dry out. And a
