Ecstasy (27 page)

“Are you serious?”

“Now, as far as we know, four tabs of the killer acid were sold at Melting Rock. The fourth one went to Norma Jean Kramer.
But what if it was supposed to go to somebody else?”

“And who would that be?”

“I was thinking about that when I was walking over here. And my first thought was, who’s the most obvious person? I mean,
there were four guys in that little Jaspersburg High enclave, and only one of them is still breathing.”

“The jock, right? What’s his name …?”

“Alan Bauer. And if I’m right, we’ve got to warn him. I mean, if somebody tried to kill him once, who’s to say they aren’t
going to do it again?”

“Wait a minute. Why do you think he didn’t take the acid along with the others?”

“I’m not sure. I know he was indulging in various, you know,
substances,
but he was also counting on getting a soccer scholarship. Maybe he didn’t want to take the chance.”

“Or maybe he knew.”

“What?”

“It’s just a thought. Maybe he didn’t take it because he didn’t want to get dead.”

“So you mean maybe he was in on it? Jesus, I guess it’s possible, but…I really doubt it. As far as I knew, they were all friends.”

“You got any other ideas?”

“Yeah, maybe this is totally out of left field, but… what if that fourth tab really wasn’t meant for Bauer, after all?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Think about it,” I said. “Bauer’s alive and well right now, but somebody else isn’t.”

“And who would that be?”

“Whoever I found in the goddamn Deep Lake Cooling pool.”

“Couldn’t that be Alan Bauer?”

“What? God, that never even occurred to me, either. But, come on…I saw that hideous thing four days ago. If Bauer’s been missing
since then, don’t you think somebody would’ve said something?”

“Yeah, I guess. So, if it’s not him, who do you think was supposed to get tab number four?”

“Well, who do we know is missing right now?”

“The bail jumper with the earring fetish.”

“Robert Sturdivant. You got it. Not to mention his buddy Axel Robinette.”

“But wait a second,” Mad said. “Sturdivant is the guy who sold the drugs to those kids in the first place. How could he be
a target?”

“I was thinking about that on the walk over here too, and—”

“It’s only a block and a half, you know.”

“Yeah, well, I think fast. So, like I was saying, I was thinking… what if he wasn’t just supposed to sell the drugs, he was
supposed to
take
them too? What if whoever set this whole thing up gave him four tabs and said, ‘I want you to sell three of them to Tom and
Shaun and Billy, and, by the way, here’s a freebie for your trouble’?”

“So the killer, whoever he is, gets rid of those three guys and the delivery boy all in one fell swoop. Convenient.”

“Yeah, but maybe Sturdivant gets greedy. Maybe he’d rather have the money than the high, so he sells it to that girl from
Baltimore. He obviously hasn’t been told that the acid is bad, or he’d never take it himself, right? Which means that Sturdivant
is just a patsy.”

“Like Lee Harvey Oswald.”

I stared at him over my Sprite can. “Where did that come from?”

“Hey, the government knows what really went down. It’s all in files in the basement of the Pentagon, believe me.”

“Whatever. So the question is, how does Axel Robinette figure into all of this? Was
he
really supposed to get the fourth tab? I mean, the guy was definitely jittery when I talked to him the day before he disappeared.
He clearly needed money so he could blow town. Maybe he knew he was in danger or something. What do you think?”

“I think,” he said, “that in all this cogitation you’re skipping over the most important part.”

“Which is?”

“Jesus, Bernier, how many times have you had to talk to the journalism club at Benson High?”

“Too damn many. What’s your point?”

“What do you always tell them about the five
W’s?
”

“I’m not following you.”

“You’ve got your
who,
your
what,
your
where,
and your
when,
” he said. “But nine times out of ten, the most interesting part of the story is the
why.
”

Y
ou’re wondering about the motive,” I said.

“Damn right I am,” Mad shot back. “Aren’t you?”

“Yeah. I just… God, I just don’t know. I mean, let’s set aside the possibility that maybe these three guys
weren’t
the intended victims—that the whole thing was random or the acid was meant for somebody else. If we assume for the moment
that those four tabs were meant for Tom, Shaun, Billy, and whoever else, then …why?”

“I think I just asked you that a second ago.”

“Why would somebody want to kill them? How could somebody hate three clueless teenage boys enough to want to pull this off?”

“Maybe somebody just wanted to shut down Melting Rock.”

“What?”

“I mean, that’s what happened, right? Maybe that was the point all along.”

“Why would someone want to do that?”

“Because the place is a goddamn smelly mess.”

“Come on, be serious.”

Mad shrugged, then coated a tortilla chip with an obscene amount of salsa. “Who knows why? Maybe it’s a political thing. I
mean, if there’s no Melting Rock, the village of J-burg is pretty much in the crapper, financially speaking.”

“You’ve got a point there.”

“And, hey, think about it. What did those three kids have in common?”

“They were all male; they all went to the same school.…”

“… and they were all hometown boys.”

“So you’re saying… what? That the killer was hoping that if a bunch of local kids died of bad drugs, people’d want to shut
down the festival for good? Do you really think that makes any sense?”

“Hey, you wanted me to play ball with you, I’m playing ball. That’s all I’ve got.”

“So shutting down the festival—maybe just for a day, maybe for good—either it was the whole point of the killings, or it was
just a fringe benefit.”

“I guess.”

“And if it
wasn’t
the point—if killing them was an end in itself, then …why?”

“Here we go again.”

“I mean, come on,” I said. “How does a bunch of high-school kids piss somebody off enough to want them dead? Is it just… jealousy?
Some nerd deciding to get one over on the cool kids?”

“Nah. I think they usually just cut to the chase and shoot up the lunchroom.”

“Okay, so what else could it be? I mean, most murders are about money, aren’t—holy shit.”

“What?”

“There’s, um, this story I’ve been working on….”

I filled him in about the Melting Rock budget snafu and Mrs. Hamill’s pricey Victorian hellhole.

“And you think… what? That the boys were killed because they knew about it?”

“I don’t know. I was just saying how most murders are about money, and it occurred to me that there’s actually a lot of money
at stake.”

“But how could they know about it? They were just a bunch of teenage kids.”

“Right, but they were a bunch of kids who went to Melting Rock their whole lives. And, in fact, when I first met them, Lauren
said they were involved in organizing it too. She said”—I hunted for the details—“that Shaun Kirtz had worked on the festival’s
Web site and Tom Giamotti had volunteered in the office. Plus, she and Billy had manned some promo table on the Green. Maybe
one of the guys stumbled onto the financial racket, and either they threatened to go to the cops or they—”

“Wanted a piece of the action?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s definitely worth looking into.”

“You know, Cody said the embezzlement could potentially be connected to the murders. I just don’t think he meant this directly.”

“You told Cody?”

“Pillow talk.”

“So what’s he gonna do about it?”

“Look into it. Subtly.”

“And goddamn Band’s gonna—”

“Cody promised we’d get to break the story one way or the other.”

“Jesus,” he said, “you really think the money’s the motive?”

“It’s the best one I’ve heard so far.”

“Yeah, but if you ask me, somehow it just doesn’t jibe.”

“Why not?”

“I guess…I don’t know, it’s just the way they were killed. The whole thing seems so…”

“Sneaky and psychotic?”

“Not the words I was looking for,” he said, “but I guess they’ll do.”

“And you’re thinking that if somebody was really doing this over money, they would’ve done something more…straightforward?”

“More or less.”

“It could be they wanted it to look like an accident all along. Maybe they thought nobody would figure out it wasn’t just
an OD.”

“Yeah, but…I don’t know, maybe it was really just your regular, old-fashioned crime of passion. Teenagers definitely have
plenty of
that.
”

I thought about the tin of Relax-Me-Talc, and decided not to go there.

“Fine,” I said. “So if that’s really the story here, then what prompted it? What kind of, you know,
passions
did these kids stir up that made somebody want to kill them?”

He repeated his shrug-and-dip-the-chip maneuver. “Maybe somebody got sick of looking at a bunch of scruffy little creeps.”

“Would you be serious?”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “So what are you asking exactly?”

“What I’m wondering,” I said, “is just what the hell these guys did. And more to the point, who did they do it to?”

T
HEY WERE LOVELY QUESTIONS
; unfortunately, it didn’t look like I was going to find answers anytime soon—if indeed there were answers to be had.

With Labor Day weekend just days away, much of the population of Walden County appeared to have blown town in search of a
few final days of summer vacation. My attempts to talk to Alan Bauer, therefore, were foiled by the fact that his entire family
had decamped to Hershey, Pennsylvania, for some sort of amusement-park-related healing. I tried to picture purple-haired Cindy
riding a Ferris wheel shaped like a chocolate kiss, and couldn’t.

Although I would’ve been more than happy to flee the 607 area code myself—particularly if it involved a homicide detective
and a hot tub—it was sadly not an option. At the beginning of the year, we reporters divide up the holidays, and to make sure
I’d get to go home for Christmas, I’d volunteered to work on New Year’s, Thanksgiving—and Labor Day weekend.

So there I was, covering the cops beat for three days straight and writing the usual fluff about back-to-school plans and
the Gabriel Workers’ Alliance Solidarity Barbecue. I was also feeling fairly sorry for myself, though I was somewhat mollified
by the fact that I’d at least get to make an appearance at the newsroom picnic—which, by the way, was happening in my own
backyard.

Unfortunately, the chance to have a veggie burger and pet my dog for an hour was just about all the consolation I was going
to get; with the search for Sturdivant at a standstill, Cody had taken the three-day weekend to drive his mom back to Boston
to visit his sisters and their frighteningly well-behaved kids.

That left me to make my own fun on Friday and Saturday night. I saw a delightfully stupid action movie for my column, split
some veggie sushi with the still-heartbroken Melissa, and spent a good hour reading
Dog Fancy
in the bathtub. Labor Day itself turned out to be gorgeous—the kind of blue-sky-perfect weather that we rarely see here in
the cloud capital of upstate New York. This, as you can imagine, inspired me to thoroughly research my piece on the Solidarity
Barbecue. And I mean
thoroughly.

The yearly event, which pretty much takes over the big park at the edge of Mohawk Lake, is a major fund-raiser for the Workers’
Alliance—a nonprofit group that promotes union membership, lobbies for living wages and fair working conditions, and generally
tries to keep the little guy from getting screwed by the Man. There’s always a bunch of speeches by politicos and union agitators,
plus games of horseshoes, softball, volleyball, and the like, with many a beer bet riding on the outcome.

And speaking of beer, the local Budweiser distributor traditionally parks a truck on the grass and sticks a tap in the side
of it; suffice it to say, everybody has a damn good time.

But for a lot of the people, the real draw is the barbecue itself, which is an orgy sufficient to bring about the fall of
Rome. In addition to the various creatures dipped in sauce and grilled over a spit, there’s also a ton of distinctly unhealthy
vegetarian food: butter-laden corn on the cob, delectably mayonnaisey potato salad, that sort of thing. Yours truly got a
complimentary media ticket, which garnered me a blue plastic
OVER
-21 bracelet and the freedom to eat and drink till I keeled over.

Between the weather and the comestibles, I spent a good three hours at the barbecue. I was just about to bow to the inevitable
and go back to the paper for another round of cop calls when I figured I should have more to show for myself than a couple
of measly quotes, so I made another loop around the park.

I was interviewing a Benson janitor when the screaming started.

It came from the water, which is where a bunch of future union-dues payers were playing, and at first everybody seemed to
take it for the usual kiddie screeching. But it didn’t take long for people to realize that there was something wrong. The
natural assumption, of course, was that some poor kid was drowning. What seemed like the city’s entire union membership ran
en masse to the water’s edge, and I had to dodge my way through a crowd of very solid men to get a look.

By the time I got through the clutch of people, it was too late—for the victim, anyway. The body was floating facedown, gliding
back and forth with the motion of the water. The way it was moving implied a weird sort of purpose—it came close to shore,
then slid back toward the open water, hovered at one particular spot, and slid back in again. It was an illusion, of course;
the person lying facedown in Mohawk Lake no longer had any free will, nor would he ever.