“That’s—that’s not true,” Rick stammered. “With all drugs that treat depression, of course there is a small but recognized risk that as the patient’s depression and inertia begin to lift, they may actually be at slightly greater risk for suicidal ideation. But that risk is no greater for patients taking Socom than for any other drug.”
Cassie soldiered on, making an effort to match his crisp tone and matter-of-fact delivery. “But we’re not talking about suicidal thoughts, are we, Dr. Wheeler? We are talking about kids who had become so delusional, they couldn’t tell what was real and what were their demons. Kids like Darren Cartwright. Ben Tranbarger. Carmen Hernandez.” As Cassie said each name, Thatcher reached under the tablecloth on the serving cart to hand her a blown-up photo scanned from the yearbook and mounted on foam core. She lined them up on top of the grand piano. There were murmurs now. “All patients of yours. All kids you prescribed Socom to. For them, Socom ultimately led to their suicides.”
“That’s conjecture!” Rick said quickly, his voice too loud in the now-hushed room. “You’ve got no proof.”
“But we do have proof, Dr. Wheeler,” Thatcher said, his voice giving the word
doctor
a sarcastic spin. “Look at the signatures on these permission forms. It’s clear all of them were signed by the same person. And that person was you. You forged the permissions from these teens’ parents. They never knew you were injecting their children with an experimental drug.” Three more pieces of foam core, all showing a Socom consent form, all showing spiky, illegible signatures that slanted to the left. After Cassie had been unable to get the files from the house, Thatcher had taken his computer to his part-time job and thrown himself on the mercy of his buddies in technical support. One of them had managed to resurrect the file.
“Where did you get those?” Rick demanded. “Those are private records. Besides, those three only represent a small, small percentage. Less than one in a thousand. For the other 99.9 percent, Socom is a wonder drug. Parents get back their teens the way they used to be. Obedient, polite, well-spoken.”
Cassie interrupted. “And sometimes suicidal! Three kids died! Is anything worth that risk?”
Rick shook his head in exaggerated sorrow, his eyes drilling into hers, and Cassie realized he had finally recognized her. “Cassie, Cassie, Cassie. So you’ve come home. First you act out, and then you use drugs, and then you start a fire at your boarding school that injures dozens of kids.” He looked at the crowd. “This is my stepdaughter, folks. She couldn’t handle that her mom got remarried, so now she’s making up outrageous lies.”
“She’s telling the truth.” People’s heads turned to the woman who stood in the hall. With each word, Jackie took a step toward Rick. She was dressed all in black, her face hollow. Her belly jutted so far forward, she had to lean back to counterbalance it. “You tried to tell me that it was a coincidence that Darren was taking Socom. You said Ben was never on it. And I never even knew about Carmen.” Jackie now stood directly in front of him, her hands fisted on her hips. “Now I know you lied.”
Michelle was the first in the crowd to move. Holding a silver tape recorder, she walked up to Rick and held out a tiny microphone toward him. “Michelle Haynes from the
Oregonian.
Would you care to comment on these very serious allegations, Doctor?”
For a moment no one spoke, then there was a sudden swell of voices. “Is this true?” one man called out. “My daughter knew that boy, Ben,” another man said, gesturing to Ben’s photo, his face drained of color. People turned to each other to ask questions, and many of them turned to Rick. The babble of voices swelled until it became a cacophony.
Rick looked at them all wildly, then suddenly he turned and ran for the front door. He threw it open and ran outside, not even bothering to close it.
Cassie ran after him. The garage door was already half up. Rick was pointing his key fob at his BMW. It chirped in answer. He ducked under the garage door. As he threw open the car door, Cassie reached under her blouse, pulled the taser from her waist pack, and pointed it at him.
Rick was half turned toward her. He managed a laugh, and she realized he thought she was holding a gun. “You would never use that.”
“It’s easy,” Cassie answered. “Just point and shoot.”
And she did.
thirty-five
June 27
From the
OREGONIAN
Doctor linked to teen deaths
A prominent Southwest Portland psychiatrist was arrested on June 25
th
, charged with manslaughter and fraud. Richard Wheeler, M.D., specialized in treating adolescents with behavioral issues.
As a psychiatrist, Wheeler was licensed to write prescriptions as well as to counsel troubled individuals. He was approached by Socom to enroll patients in a clinical trial of the drug. For every patient he enrolled, he would get $10,000. For many teenagers, Socom seems to have helped them concentrate in school, evened out their mood swings, and relieved the surliness and withdrawal that often go hand-in-hand with puberty. But for some, it also caused delusions. And at least three of those teens committed suicide—deaths that were never reported to the FDA, as mandated by law.
•
Ben Tranbarger, 17, drank silver cleaner. Unknown to Ben’s mother, Wheeler had enrolled Ben in the Socom study. But five weeks later, Ben began to obsess about being dirty, showering for hours and taking multiple doses of laxatives. After drinking silver cleaner, he slipped into a coma and was pronounced dead three days later.
•
Darren Cartwright, 15. Worried about his depression and shyness, his mother took him to see Wheeler. On Socom, Darren began to believe that he could fly. He died when he jumped off a seven-story building.
•
Carmen Hernandez, 16. A high school dropout, Carmen was interested when other kids said she could earn money by enrolling in the study. On Socom, she believed she was pregnant by Satan, and stabbed herself in the abdomen. In an interview, the coroner said that while Carmen’s injuries were definitely self-inflicted, he had never seen anything like them in his 30-year career.
Medical ethicist Renee Mestad said, “When you take the potential to make a whole lot of money, and add in the ethical dilemma of whether a person with mental health issues can even give informed consent, it can really go wrong.” Pending the outcome of the criminal investigation, Wheeler’s medical license has been suspended by Oregon’s board of medical directors.
Megan Fuller, a spokesman for Socom, said, “We have an extensive system of checks and balances. We are helping to set industry standards. Even with all that, we didn’t uncover the fraud.”
thirty-six
July 27
The wailing started as Cassie rooted through a cabinet filled with expensive appliances, trying to find the few things that didn’t belong to Rick.
“Mom! The baby’s crying,” Cassie shouted. No answer. The wailing got louder. As she went upstairs, Cassie heard the rush of the shower from the master suite. With four showerheads, it was a place you could lose yourself in blasts of water so loud that not even a one-month-old baby’s cries could penetrate.
On tiptoe, as if Noah were asleep instead of screaming his head off, Cassie went into the nursery. She leaned over the bassinet, wincing a little when she saw his face, so red it was nearly purple.
“It’s okay,” she said. In answer, the corners of the baby’s mouth turned down even farther and his mouth opened wider. He was wearing only a onesie, his bare legs kicking. Gingerly, Cassie picked him up, remembering to support his head. It was the first time she had held Noah without someone else watching her.
Jackie had gone into labor the night of the Socom party. Her water broke as Thatcher and Cassie tied Rick up with dishcloths and a half dozen guests called the police on their cell phones. Some had thought Rick was the bad guy, others Cassie. But by the time the cops showed up, Cassie was halfway to the hospital, with Lori at the wheel of the car and Jackie in the backseat, her feet pressed against the side window while Lori and Cassie yelled at her not to push. Twenty minutes after they’d arrived at the hospital, Noah had been born.
The police, the courts, and the FDA were still sorting everything out, as was Jackie. She was beginning the process of annulment, which Cassie hadn’t realized was possible when a marriage had already produced a baby. But an annulment would make it easier if Jackie needed to testify in one of the numerous criminal and civil lawsuits being filed against Rick and Socom. Although her testimony might not be needed. Late last week had come word that Rick had decided to cooperate with the authorities.
Cassie tucked Noah’s head under her chin and patted him on the back. The decibel level dropped, but the crying didn’t stop. She bounced up and down on her toes, and Noah’s cries began to slow. Jiggling even faster, she patted his back more vigorously and was rewarded with a giant burp that a fifty-year-old couch potato would have been proud of. It was so deep and loud that it made Cassie laugh.
The front doorbell rang, and Cassie went downstairs to answer it. It was Thatcher. Lori stood in the driveway, folding down the backseat of her car.
“Hey, little guy,” Thatcher said softly, stepping behind Cassie so he could look at the baby’s face. His voice changed. “Um, did you know you have spit-up all down your back?”
“Yuck! I’ll change when my mom gets done with her shower.”
“Mom and I are ready to take another load. How many more boxes do you have?”
“Not too many. We’re only taking what we brought, and we didn’t have that much to begin with.” Cassie smiled. It felt like she was casting off a husk that she didn’t need anymore—this house, the furniture, the twin BMWs in the garage. They had next to nothing, but she had never felt richer. One of the few good things Cassie had learned at Peaceful Cove was that she could live without a lot of things. If you had freedom and people you loved, well, that was more than most of the kids at Peaceful Cove had had.
The only other thing she had taken away from Peaceful Cove was her friendship with Hayley. Hayley had originally given the Mexican hospital a false name. She hadn’t admitted who she really was until she was sure that the school was going to stay closed. The second-degree burns on her feet and calves were slowly healing. Jackie had tracked her down after finding out from Cassie’s dad that Hayley had been her best friend at the school. She had hoped that Hayley might know where Cassie was. When she couldn’t locate Hayley’s mom right away, Jackie had paid for Hayley to be flown up to Portland for treatment. Actually, Rick had paid for it, even if he hadn’t known it. There had been many long discussions since with Hayley’s mom, and it looked like Hayley might end up staying in Portland.
Lori came over to them. “I picked up some more stuff for Noah yesterday. A Baby Bjorn that looked like it had never been used.” Lori had made it her mission to find the stuff at Goodwill that Jackie and Cassie needed to start their life over again in Portland. Minor held too many memories, and for Jackie, too much guilt.
“I should have asked more questions,” Jackie had told Cassie. “I wondered about some of the things that were going on in the office, but I figured I just didn’t understand the way things worked. It took me a long time to see that was exactly why Rick hired me—because I didn’t know enough to be suspicious. And when I finally did ask questions, he distracted me by showering me with attention. No one had acted like that toward me for a long time. You may find this hard to believe, but Rick can be very charming when he wants to.”
Cassie hadn’t been able to let it go so easily. Not after everything she had been through. “But you must have known something. All those kids who died in Minor.”
“I knew that Darren was on Socom,” Jackie had admitted. “I’d seen him in the office myself. When Darren died, I went to Rick and said I was concerned. He told me Darren had already had suicidal tendencies. A few weeks later I found out I was pregnant and Rick told me he wanted to get married and for me to quit working. Ben died right after that. I asked if he had been on Socom, and Rick told me he hadn’t. He seemed so broken up over Ben’s death, I thought he was telling the truth. And I never even knew that that girl, Carmen, had been one of Rick’s patients.” Jackie had sighed. “I guess I wanted someone who would tell me what to do. Do you think thirty-nine is too old to try to grow up?”
“What’s the alternative?” Cassie had said.
Now Jackie came up behind them, towel-drying her hair. “Sorry, I didn’t even hear him.” She reached out and took Noah. “Did you know that you have spit-up all down your back?” She walked back into the house.
Thatcher exchanged a smile with Cassie and then said, “I found something today at Goodwill to replace something you had to leave down in Mexico.”
“What is it?” Cassie asked. She couldn’t think of anything she missed about Peaceful Cove.
He went to the car and came back with his hands behind his back.
When Cassie saw what was in the mesh bag, she started to laugh. “I don’t think I’m going to need a snorkel set again. At least not for a long, long time.”
And then, while they were still both laughing, and before she could think twice about it, Cassie stood on tiptoe and gave Thatcher a kiss.