“A poorly educated electorate, I’ve always assumed.”
“You,” Blankenship said. “You’re it, Ridley. You’ll step the wrong way someday, I believe in that because I believe in God, and when you do? I’ll be here.”
“Have a fine afternoon, Sheriff. Next time you need my help, and you always seem to, you’ll know where to find me.”
Ridley closed the door and stood on the other side of it, his palm pressed to the wood — his hand was trembling faintly, and he hated that — until Blankenship had returned to his car and driven away. When he was out of sight, Ridley went for his own keys and hurried to his truck. He wasn’t supposed to visit her unannounced, but he needed her now, and she understood emergencies.
Novak had returned, and Ridley needed to get his mind right before he saw him. He’d long ago given up the hope that he could achieve that alone, unguided in the dark.
28
Mark hesitated before deciding on the next person to call because all his hopes for a possible explanation of things rested on the conversation. Eventually he chose a medical examiner in Gainesville who had testified for Innocence Incorporated on a few cases, Arthur Stewart, and told him he had a simple question — he wanted to know about ketamine.
“Ever-evolving applications for the drug. Developed as a human anesthetic years ago,” Dr. Stewart said. “Then it became a popular animal tranquilizer. Now some psychiatrists are using it to treat depression. Real-world guys are using it for date rape.”
“Right. What are the effects?”
“There are plenty of them. Ketamine is a highly dissociative medication. Memory goes, and suggestibility of the victim is high, but physical performance isn’t compromised as dramatically as with other tranquilizers. There are reasons it’s a popular date-rape drug.”
Memory goes. Mark let out a long breath. He might have something more than a desperate plea for Jeff London.
“When you say suggestibility of the victim is high, do you mean that someone who has been given it could be convinced to believe a version of events that wasn’t true?”
“Possibly, although you’d have to see on a case-by-case basis; it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. The imagination runs wild too. Hallucinations are common, which makes victim accounts extremely unreliable and makes the investigator’s job harder.”
“Hallucinations,” Mark echoed, thinking of how clearly he’d seen Sarah Martin watching him from the rocks.
“Absolutely. It’s called conscious sedation. Even if you know what is happening, you’re unable to do anything about it. You’re along for the ride.”
“Suppose rape wasn’t the goal,” Mark said. “Suppose misinformation was the goal; would it be as effective?”
“I’m not sure that I follow. You mean, would it aid someone in lying to a victim?”
“Yes.”
“Absolutely.”
“And it’s a pill or a liquid?”
“Both. You can inject it or snort it or, as is most common for criminal use, add it to a drink.”
He spoke the words crisply but the images they conveyed were foggy and soft around the edges. Diane Martin’s face, open and honest and imploring even as she told lies. Her eyes, so compelling, so haunting. Mark had looked into her eyes and he had known her pain. The greater violation was that he had believed she’d also known his. He tried to recall whether he’d left the table at some point, gone to the restroom or taken a call, given her any opportunity to be alone with his drink. He didn’t think so. Then again, what he thought had happened no longer carried much weight. Memory and reality had taken different paths away from that meeting, and Mark had traveled along the wrong one.
“All right, Dr. Stewart,” he said. “Thanks for the help. One last question, though, and this is important: How long would traces linger? How quickly do you need to test for its presence?”
“It can linger for up to two weeks, depending on the dose, but I’d want the test done within a few days, if at all possible.”
Mark was four days removed from his meeting with Diane Martin now, and three days removed from the cave. He thanked Dr. Stewart again, hung up, and followed the GPS directions in search of Brett and Jeremy Leonard.
He’d been on the road for more than a mile before it felt familiar. He was in a tunnel of leafless trees, hemmed in, and up ahead, snow-covered fields stretched out, and a four-way stop loomed.
He pulled off the road and onto the shoulder and left the car running with the hazard lights flashing. Opened the door and stepped out into the snow and nodded when the wind rose to meet him. That was right. That was how it had been. No snow blowing in with it today, but the same arctic chill.
He walked down the middle of the road, looking at the pavement even though there would be nothing to see. The crime that had occurred here had been a clean one. No shots had been fired, no glass had broken, no evidence left behind to mark the road. He walked the pavement anyhow, just in case there was something. The intersection where the truck had turned sideways to block the road loomed ahead, and he thought then of an intersection in Cody, Wyoming, that he’d once thought of as the worst road in the world.
When Mark was thirteen, his uncles had retrieved a stray dog of indeterminate breed and presented it to him as a gift, against his mother’s wishes. His uncles had named the dog Amigo, for reasons that probably had more to do with tequila than logic. Amigo was a goof, but he had fine energy and was well muscled, and when he laid out to run, he was fast, a true burner, and thus a wandering boy’s best friend.
The only problem with Amigo — at least, the only one Mark saw — was that he pulled at his leash. The concept of being tethered was foreign to him, and what resulted was a war of wills.
It was on one of the more beautiful afternoons of spring that Amigo began to kick at the collar with his hind leg as they made the walk home. Mark responded by giving the leash a few gentle tugs, thinking that he needed to distract the dog from his itch, and then the third tug met no resistance and there was the tinkle of metal on asphalt. The collar had come free. For one long second, Amigo held his place, looking at Mark as if to see what the problem was. The choice Mark made then was the worst one possible: he lunged at the dog in the hope of recapturing him.
When Amigo hit full speed, he looked like a greyhound, his hind paws nearly catching his front as he exploded ahead. Mark compounded the mistake of the lunge by doing the only thing that he knew to do when a dog bolted — he ran after him. Amigo, absolutely delighted, raced ahead, the game of chase now fully approved.
There was a stop sign up ahead, and the road on the other side had a speed limit of thirty-five but nobody paid that number any mind and the average had to be fifty miles an hour. Mark ran after the dog as hard as he could, heart thundering and legs throbbing, but Amigo outpaced him effortlessly, gaining distance with each second and then pouring on speed as he approached the stop sign that meant absolutely nothing in his world. A Dodge pickup with oversize off-road tires and a lift kit roared downhill. Just before Amigo reached the intersection, he turned and looked at Mark with his tongue lolling and ears pinned back and an expression of utter, oblivious delight. Then he faced forward again, dipped lower, and ran on, through the stop sign and out in front of the truck.
Mark could see the rest as if it were written before him. The lift kit on the Dodge afforded extra height that exposed its undercarriage plain as day, including the axles that would corkscrew Amigo and thrash his body and throw it, mangled, out onto the other side.