Authors: Alafair Burke
E
llie was nestled into the space between her couch and her trunk-doubling-as-coffee-table, pen in right hand, nan bread in left. She was prepping a huge scoop of saag paneer onto her flatbread when she heard keys in the door. Before she realized it, she had dropped her pen and was checking her breath in her hand. She and Max had exchanged house keys nearly three months ago, but she still got a little rush when he popped in unexpectedly.
“Oh God, I detect the distinct odor of dirty diaper and singed hair. How can you eat that stuff?”
Not Max. Jess. Just as well. She was still trying to settle back into a comfortable rhythm with Max, but she could stink up both her breath and the apartment with the stench of curry, and her brother couldn’t say boo about it.
She ignored Jess as he continued to feign holding his breath, then choking, then fainting on the sofa behind her.
“You mind?” he said, reaching for the remote.
“If I minded the sound of a television, I would most definitely
not
choose you as a roommate.”
To her annoyance, she recognized the two women arguing on her television screen. Even though she’d never actually watched the reality show, she somehow knew who these D-list celebrities were, what products they were shilling, and the details of their screwed-up love lives.
“I swear I’m going to get one of those parental control chips for the cable box.”
“It took you four weeks to call the super when your bathroom sink was clogged. If you can brush your teeth in the tub for a month, I don’t see you lining up at Time Warner Cable just to deprive me of my housewives.” She noticed that he kept the volume lower than usual. “How can you work and eat at the same time?”
“I’m just making some notes, is all.”
“Again: How can you work and eat at the same time? Take a break. You’ve been killing yourself lately.”
“Not anymore. We let Casey Heinz go today.”
“Didn’t you call that when it first went down last week? Why’d you even bother busting your ass?”
“Because when it comes to murder, we don’t usually let people go because we have
a feeling
. I really expected we’d have some answers by now.”
“You’ll get them.”
“Doesn’t always happen that way, Jess. I think we both know that.”
“I also know
you
. You’ll get there.”
She considered arguing with him, but chose instead just to thank him and continued brainstorming on her notepad.
She started drawing lines of connection between the principals. Julia Whitmire’s threats against Adrienne. Julia’s friend, Ramona. Ramona’s friend, Casey, research subject to Dr. David Bolt. The Adderall—without a prescription—in Julia’s handbag. The Casden School, alma mater to Bolt, where prescription drug abuse ran rampant. Missing witness Brandon Sykes, another subject to David Bolt.
That psychiatrist’s name was popping up a little too frequently.
She pushed her plate to the side to make room for her laptop. She entered “David Bolt” into Google and hit enter to search. As she scrolled through hits relating to a southern lawyer, a freelance graphic artist, and a hotshot middle school hockey player, she realized her job would be a lot easier if everyone in America had a name as unique as Rumpelstiltskin.
Fortunately, a fair share of the hits concerned the man she was interested in. There was his practice’s website. Various celebrations of his professional achievements. Announcements of the Phase I clinical trial of Equivan, one making special mention of Bolt’s earlier decision to forgo his academic appointments rather than disclose the income he made from the pharmaceutical companies that funded his research. Consumer-focused websites protesting the funding of the research by the drug companies that manufactured the two drugs that went into Equivan.
Her surfing came to a halt. On the screen was a photograph from a twenty-five-year class reunion at Yale, a group shot of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Second row, third man from the left was Dr. David Bolt. Next to him was Ramona Langston’s father, George.
She tried to slow her impulses. She’d been reacting on emotion, not facts, ever since they’d caught this case. She told herself there could be a rational explanation. To a certain segment of the population, there were only ten acceptable high schools, and three acceptable colleges. It wasn’t so coincidental that Bolt would go to college with George Langston, or have graduated from the same prep school as his kid. Casden and Yale probably went together like peanut butter and chocolate.
But these two men didn’t just go to the same college. They were in the same frat. And in this photograph, Bolt had his elbow crooked around George Langston’s neck, giving it a playful squeeze. These guys were tight.
She searched for their names together: “George Langston and David Bolt.”
She got one hit, a
New York Post
article with the headline “Suicide Leads to Lawsuit.” She clicked on the link. It was a short article from March.
The parents of a Manhattan high school student who died of a drug overdose last month have filed a civil lawsuit arising from the experimental combination of two leading psychiatric drugs. According to the complaint, filed yesterday in the district court for the Southern District of New York, Wallace and Janet Moffit claim that the drug Equivan—an experimental combination of the anti-depressant Flovan and the mood stabilizer Equilibrium—caused their son, Jason, to suffer severe depression and take his own life. The lawsuit seeks $20 million in damages.
Jason Moffit, 17, a student at the prestigious Casden School, was found dead in Central Park on February 14 from a heroin overdose. A representative for Dr. David Bolt, the acclaimed researcher overseeing the drug trial, declined comment, as did the Moffits’ attorney, George Langston.
M
om, what are you going to do?”
Her mother’s face was white.
“Mom. This isn’t just words anymore. He knows who you are. He found you. He’s stalking you. We have to
do
something.”
Ramona knew that the world her friends inhabited wasn’t real. It was real for them, but it wasn’t the world that normal people lived in. Regular people didn’t have chefs and drivers and private SAT-prep coaches. Regular mothers didn’t have lines of credit at Tiffany. Regular dads didn’t trade in their wives every decade or so for a newer model, like a car.
Ramona also knew that she wasn’t rich the same way her friends were rich, with parents who had been raised rich, as had the parents’ parents. Ramona wouldn’t even be at Casden if her family didn’t have a friend who’d pulled strings to get her in.
Still, Ramona had always been grateful for what they had. Ramona’s mother made sure of that. She hadn’t come from wealth, that was for sure. She’d been raised in Chico, California, by Ramona’s grandmother, a single mother who waited tables for a living and who died before Ramona could meet her. Ramona’s grandfather had never been in the picture. When her mother met her father, she was working as a nanny.
Maybe it was because Ramona was appreciative of what she had that she tried so hard to stay grounded in the actual “real” world. In retrospect, Ramona realized that a shared yearning to know another world was what bound her and Julia together.
Julia and Ramona had been different in a lot of ways. Julia was long and lean and lithe, with flowing blond hair and classic good looks. She was the kind of girl who attracted men. She also had a recklessness and darkness about her that Ramona liked to think she had managed to avoid.
But Julia was the only friend from Ramona’s world who was happy to join in her hobby of talking to strangers everywhere they went. They both believed they could learn at least one interesting thing about human nature from any person they encountered. That was how they had gotten to know Casey, Brandon, and Vonda. Brandon had been the one holding the panhandling sign claiming they needed money for a bus ticket to Missouri.
“Do you really want to go back to Missouri?” Julia had asked.
Brandon had assumed Julia was messing with him and started in with the spoiled rich girl comments. But then Julia sat down cross-legged on the sidewalk next to them and said she just really wanted to know. They’d spent the next four hours sitting in that same spot. Just talking.
But nothing Ramona had learned from the world outside of hers had prepared her for what was happening now, in her real life. That privileged little bubble from which she’d been so eager to peer out was now being deflated, one slow leak at a time. Julia was dead. Brandon and Vonda had lied about a person who had been nothing but kind to them. And now she was terrified that something was going to happen to her mother.
“
Mom!
” Ramona was shouting now. “We have to call the police.”
Her mother was staring at her, but her mind was clearly somewhere else. Her lips were parted, but no sound was coming out. And at her feet, on the freshly polished hardwood beams, lay the package Nelson had handed them as they’d entered the lobby, stuffed from dinner at Fishtail, one of their favorite mother-daughter spots when Dad worked late.
The top had spilled to the side when her mother had dropped the box to the floor.
Maggots. Hundreds of them, rushing to escape from their temporary housing.
Adrienne
T
he next morning, Ellie and Rogan stood on the stoop of a nondescript brick apartment building on Anderson Avenue in High Bridge.
“Some kid from Casden Prep lived
here
?” Rogan asked.
Whereas Julia and Ramona grew up in the poshest townhouses and penthouses of Manhattan, Jason Moffit had been raised by his parents in this rent-controlled apartment in the South Bronx, just blocks from Yankee Stadium.
“According to that article in
New York
, he was a scholarship student. Casden takes them to ensure both class and racial diversity.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Jason supposedly had test scores off the charts. A total genius at chess. Parents who were devoted to his education. A real success story.”
“And the kid winds up a heroin OD in Central Park?”
“According to the suicide note, it was all too much pressure, trying to keep up with these kids who had everything. He went from being the smartest kid at JHS 151—getting shit from his peers for carrying his books home—to being the poor kid at Casden, getting shit for not being able to afford the restaurants and stores where these kids hang.”
“Damn,” Rogan said as he rang the buzzer marked Moffit. “Life can suck.”
J
anet Moffit was waiting for them at the family’s open apartment door. They entered to find the space filled with moving boxes. Discolored rectangles marked the walls where pictures had once hung.
“Watch your step around these boxes. We still have the couch to sit on for now. You said this was about Jason? Should I call my husband? He’s working a shift down at Madison Square Garden—he’s a security guard there—but he can come home if there’s something important.”
“We just have a few questions,” Ellie said. “It’s our understanding you have a lawsuit against David Bolt?”
“Yes. Or, well, we
did.
I never thought we’d be the kind of people to sue someone, but, that’s correct, ma’am, we did indeed have a lawsuit.”
“ ‘Did,’ as in past tense?” Rogan asked. According to the newspaper article, the suit had only been filed in March.
“That’s right, but we reached a settlement. Wallace and I are still trying to figure out what to do with the money. We’re getting out of here obviously. Too many memories of our son.”
Rogan nodded sympathetically. “Where y’all heading?”
“A little further north, to Mount Vernon. It’ll be my first time having a yard. Wallace grew up down in Georgia, but Jason and I never knew anything but apartment living. It’ll be something to look forward to.”
Certainly not the most affluent New York suburb, Mount Vernon was nevertheless a big improvement over High Bridge. A security guard wouldn’t be able to swing a mortgage for a single-family house in that kind of town. The settlement must have been a good one.
“Had your son suffered from manic-depressive disorder for long?” Ellie asked.
“No, you see, that’s the thing. He never had anything like that, not as far as we knew. I mean, he had hard times, like kids do. But he wasn’t
crazy.
He didn’t have a
mental disease
.”
“So why was he in that study?”
She shook her head. Ellie assumed it was a question the woman might never be able to answer.
“And your lawyer was George Langston?”
“Yes, ma’am. He came to us right away. Said he’d worked defending drug companies his whole career and knew how they operated. He offered to represent us pro bono—without charge. His daughter, Ramona, goes to Casden. Jason always told us how nice she was to him. Even came up here once to see the park where he played chess on weekends.”
“Did Mr. Langston tell you that he personally knows the doctor you filed your lawsuit against?”
“We knew he worked for drug companies at his old law firm. Is that what you mean?”
“We think it’s more than a lawyer-client relationship with the drug industry generally, Mrs. Moffit. Your lawyer is very close friends with David Bolt, the doctor overseeing the research.”
“I don’t know anything about that. He said he knew the ins and outs of how these companies worked. That’s how he was able to negotiate a quick settlement for us.”
“Was that the basis of the lawsuit? That your son shouldn’t have even been taking this drug if he didn’t have a mental illness?”
“I’m not sure I should say anything else, Detective. Our lawsuit has a confidentiality agreement. They were very clear about that.”
“It must have been a good amount of money for you to be moving, and, like you said, so fast. Did your lawyer even have enough time to conduct discovery?”
“He thought we’d do best to settle early, and we didn’t want things to drag on. Like I said, ma’am, with all due respect, I think I’m done talking about what happened to my son.”
Ellie had been pulled into this case against her will, but it had finally worked its way beneath her skin and would not leave while there were still more questions than answers.
As they started down the stairs, Ellie could picture Janet Moffit making a phone call to her trusted lawyer, George Langston. They had just wasted nearly a week clearing Casey Heinz, and now it felt like they were on the clock all over again.