Skinner’s crew bleached every surface and salvaged what remained, but not without problems. While packing up a box of beakers, Gunnar Guinan began hallucinating.
“It didn’t look good, but I didn’t perceive what it was,” he said. “It wasn’t Betty Crocker. It wasn’t some type of food preparation. It was some chemical endeavor.”
Skinner told him to drop a Valium or two. Gunnar slept for forty-eight hours.
Skinner’s father drove up from Tulsa to help. Todd cautioned him not to duplicate Guinan’s mistakes. Wear gloves, trousers, and long-sleeved shirts. Breathe through your nose.
In all, the emergency move took five days. On July 17, they caravanned everything from Carneiro to Wamego. Once again, Skinner counseled haste and care. He could ill afford hauling anyone to the same ER where he’d dumped Hulebak a year earlier.
While his makeshift crew hauled glassware into the grotto down below, Skinner hustled two twenty-canister cases of ergotamine tartrate into a metal barn on the grounds above. Each canister was worth $100,000. When he was sure that he was alone and no one was watching, Todd jammed both cases into a niche in the ceiling.
For the next couple of weeks, Skinner relaxed. He’d dodged the latest bullet in an ever-increasing volley. He rented a seaside place in Mendocino to get away from the maelstrom in Kansas. He even returned to Vegas with his usual squad of smurfs and partied hearty while cleansing cash.
His Waterloo didn’t arrive until early August, when Krystle called from Kansas City with disturbing news. The DEA had intercepted an MDMA shipment from Amsterdam. They were questioning Ryan Overton and connecting the dots.
The second blow landed on Aug. 25, when a Kansas magistrate ordered Skinner to pay a $10,000 fine for impersonating a government agent. Todd shut his eyes. Running low on money and second chances, he left the court despondent. He stewed a day or two, then began calling the DEA.
The first agent he reached in Tulsa listened impatiently to his improbable story, then told Skinner he was nuts. The second one in the San Francisco office did much the same. Skinner made his third call to Topeka attorney Tom Haney, who advised him to pack his bags and accompany him to Washington, where he retained a DC law firm, to connect them with the right people at the Department of Justice.
By the first week of October, Haney and Skinner had hammered out a deal: in return for blanket immunity, Skinner admitted to laundering LSD profits, distributing thousands of doses, and securing lab sites. Asked why he was coming forward, he explained with a straight face that acid was a sacrament. The fact that Leonard sold it as a commodity so offended him that he decided he must be stopped. Pickard, he said, was a bad shaman—the ruthless brains of the outfit.
Todd’s treachery carried a nice bonus. Haney negotiated witness protection and a $200,000 DEA stipend for Skinner’s cooperation. He also got a guarantee of up to a third of any drug money the DEA might recover.
It was a dramatic reversal of fortunes for Todd. Suddenly, things were looking up. He wed Emily Ragan on Sept. 9. He and Krystle might canoodle now and then, but it was his pregnant girlfriend he took to the altar. He’d been gaslighting her for over a year. Echoing Kelly Rothe’s experience,2 Emily would soon annul the marriage and fight to retain custody of their infant daughter, but not before Skinner had drawn her into a brief, unwitting role in Operation White Rabbit.
Before the wedding, Emily had briefly moved back in with her parents. They doted on their brilliant daughter. When she took up with Skinner, they objected, but didn’t disown her. Emily was always welcome home. Which gave Skinner a swell idea.
How about putting Emily’s old room to good use? The Ragans lived in Manhattan, just a fifteen-minute drive from Wamego. What a great place to store ET! Following their wedding, he transferred most of the canisters from the ceiling of the metal barn to a closet in Emily’s bedroom, far from the eyes of the DEA.
Operation White Rabbit was underway.
Pickard got hitched that summer too. Natasha was twenty-eight and he was turning fifty-five. Following his London trip, Pickard rendezvoused with his fiancée on St. Maarten, in the same Caribbean resort where he’d trysted just a few months earlier with Trais. Leonard and Natasha flew on to Honolulu from St. Maarten, married, then headed back to the mainland just in time for Leonard to slip away to New Mexico to visit Trais and his newborn son Duncan.
“I feel blessed to have my children, born under any conditions,” he said. “I don’t feel serial monogamy, which this was to a limited extent, was indiscriminate. Nothing was casual. There were no others. And love has many forms.”
His life might not have been quite as chaotic as Skinner’s, but it ran a close second. Following the Warren Buffett debacle, Leonard knew he couldn’t trust Skinner to keep the swimming pool project afloat. Moving to Kansas had been a mistake. He and Apperson put $5,000 down on a new Santa Fe rental and began looking for a different way to do their laundry.
Through Mike Bauer, Leonard recruited a young computer whiz who showed promise as an offshore money manager. While Mike majored in history, Bauer’s high school chum Kenichi Sakai studied investment banking. When Leonard asked if he knew how to hack, Kenichi perked up. He loved a challenge.
They began by breaking into the database of a south Florida tax dodge called Prosper International Limited League. Pickard was impressed. He was able to secure several PILL debit cards under his various aliases (Connor, Maxwell, Niemi) and deposit just under $10,000 in each account so that no misguided PILL employee might be tempted to file an SAR.
PILL3 looked like it might be as good, if not better, for disinfecting
