Chung Ri allowed them to use her office to talk to Casey privately. Ellie pasted on her best, most helpful, smile as Ms. Ri threw them one last disapproving scowl before closing the door.
“Sorry about that,” Casey said. “That woman kind of loves me.”
“I think you can hold the ‘kind of’ on that,” Rogan said. “I, however, think she’s kind of planning a voodoo spell for us.”
“Can we make this quick? I just got a message from Ramona about everything that happened last night in Long Island. Her parents are back in the city now, but she’s really freaking out.”
“Tell you what,” Ellie said. “Let us have a word with you, and we’ll give you a ride up there when we’re done. We need to know more about the drug-testing program you were doing with Dr. Bolt.”
“Okay.” She noticed he looked down at his hands as he spoke. He seemed nervous. “Like I said, Brandon was the one who knew about it. I guess he found out from Julia. We went once a week for counseling and stuff. We’d talk to the doctor and fill out these questionnaires. Mostly we got a hundred bucks.”
“Do you know how Julia knew about the study?”
He shook his head. “No. I mean, I didn’t even know she was the one who told Brandon until that asshole e- mailed me yesterday trying to apologize for setting me up like that. Julia was always trying to find ways of helping people out. She probably told him so he could get some easy cash. I don’t think she knew I was doing it, too, because she never mentioned it. Why are you asking me about this?”
“Sorry, but we can’t tell you. And you can’t tell anyone that we asked you about this. Not even Ramona. Do you understand? We’re taking a chance on you. We need to be able to trust you.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“You said Brandon faked the test to get into the experiment. Do you know how he did that?”
“He looked on some website about manic-depressives and then just tried to answer the questionnaire the way he thought a manic-depressive should. Some of the stuff he was talking about sounded more like OCD to me. I’m surprised it worked.”
So was Ellie. According to Bolt, the diagnostic tests were intended to weed out the fakers.
“And how about you? Did you fake the test, too?”
He stared at the table, lips pressed together nervously.
“It’s okay, Casey. We’re not interested in putting you through anything else. We need to know what’s going on with the study.”
“I told Brandon I was faking it, but at the last minute I decided not to. I’ve been told my whole life that I’m not normal. That the way I think of myself is unnatural and a sign that something is wrong with me. I figured here was a chance to get a real diagnosis from a legitimate doctor. I was pretty surprised when he said I fit the qualifications for the research.”
“Could you tell any difference in how you felt once you started the program?”
“Yeah, at first. But then, I don’t know. I started to feel kind of
… flat. Like, when all of that stuff went down with Gundley and the way those guys treated me- terrified me- it was like I didn’t really care what happened. Like I was outside of my own body or something. I mean, in some ways I’ve lived outside of my body my whole life, but this was different. I was just so… yeah, flat is the best word to describe it. Like I just didn’t feel anything.”
“And that was a recent change?” Rogan clarified. “You said the drugs were helpful at the beginning?”
“I didn’t really mean the drugs. It was more having a trained person to talk to. I got sent to quacks back in Iowa, and I could never really tell them what it was like-you know, to feel like I’m supposed to be different from the way I was born. Dr. Bolt didn’t seem to judge me. He was actually trying to help me deal with my own self-doubt and guilt. I think he has a lot of young patients. He’s all about separating yourself from your parents-being honest about who they are and how they treated you, but then letting go of it.”
It was all getting a little touchy-feely for Rogan. “But what you’re saying is that the drugs might have been causing you to feel depressed?”
“Yeah, I mean, I’ve wondered about that. I stopped taking them, even though they say you’re not supposed to go cold turkey. But I miss talking to Dr. Bolt. He’s pretty smart. Like, he had me do this exercise where I wrote a letter to my parents. Not that they talk to me anymore. They said I could come back once I was willing to be Cassandra again. But he had me pretend that I could open up to them. He had me write down all of the things I was never able to say to them. Even though you don’t mail the letter-no one even reads it-there’s something about the process of putting it on paper: the rage, the fury, the scribbling, the crossing out.”
Wasn’t that what Adrienne had said about her blog? That writing about the abuse she’d suffered was a way to purge herself of the past?
When Ellie had undergone department-mandated therapy after an officer-involved shooting, the counselor had asked her to do the same thing. In her case, the letter had been to a woman killed by the man Ellie eventually shot to death. If it was a common therapy tactic, writing must bring a form of enlightenment to some, but Ellie hadn’t seen the point. Sure, she had experienced the rage and the fury and the scribbling and the crossing out that Casey described, but she hadn’t let any of it go. She still woke up thinking about that dead girl. And she still had nightmares about her father.
And then Ellie pictured herself writing that fake letter. The pad of paper from the therapist’s office. The crossed-out words.
She knew why Julia Whitmire had written that suicide note to her parents.
“You ready for that ride uptown?” she asked. It was about time she and Rogan had a heart-to-heart with George Langston.
Chapter Fifty-Three
The storage room?” Rogan pushed the top of an encrusted mop away from his face. “This was the best we could do?”
They hadn’t been able to contact the photographer who leased the office next door, so this tiny janitorial storage closet was the only other space for them to camp out near Dr. David Bolt’s office. Given the circumstances, they needed to be close.
“Shh.” She pressed the headphones closer to her ears. It had taken George Langston only a day to strike an agreement with the district attorney’s office. He would come clean about his part in the Equivan drug-testing scheme. He would testify against Bolt. He would also set up a meeting and wear a wire. All he got in exchange was a promise of sentencing consideration. It was a lousy deal, but the man was seriously pissed. What had started as a favor to a friend had turned into an attack on his wife.
She heard George’s voice through her headphones. Rogan nodded to indicate his audio was also working.
“Sue’s gone?” George asked. Sue was the receptionist.
“You were the one who said you didn’t want anyone to see you here. I canceled three sessions for this. What’s with all the James Bond action?”
“My wife. Don’t tell me you didn’t get my messages yesterday. A man followed her out to East Hampton. He tried to kill her.”
“And it sounds like she did a good job defending herself. Shouldn’t you be with her?”
“This has gotten totally out of control.”
“What is your deal, George?”
“It was supposed to be comments on a website. A few words to scare her-to make everything right again. That’s all I agreed to.”
“And I swear, that’s all it’s been.”
It was only that morning when they’d watched George Langston sob in an interrogation room. You have to understand, he said through the tears, it didn’t seem so terrible at first.
It was only one lawsuit. One screwed-up kid, Jason Moffit, had killed himself during a drug trial. A fluke. A statistical anomaly. But Jason Moffit had been taking Equivan, and the parents were telling anyone who would listen that the experimental drug combination had caused their son to inject himself with enough heroin to kill four
