Shattered to Death, page 25
But Garcia had told her to watch it, so there had to be something there that was relevant to Leander’s death investigation. Kenzie glanced at the date of the therapy session she was watching and saw that it was a few days before Isah’s death. She was not going to see him choke on his water and die on the screen in front of her.
Garcia had watched it. Kenzie could watch it, too. She could pause it whenever she needed to. Mute it. She had options. Unlike Leander, who was caught in the middle of it. Even when he resisted telling Dr. Miller something, Miller would continue to press and insist until Leander provided more detail about what he wanted. Kenzie watched the session, wondering whether Miller was even a licensed therapist. He seemed to be asking a lot of questions and pushing his patient a lot more than Dr. B ever would. But Kenzie didn’t have a lot of experience with other therapists. They would, of course, all have different techniques and different levels of comfort with various techniques.
Miller was, Kenzie assumed, certified to deal with trauma patients and had probably been through all kinds of training to do with the administration of MDMA under the auspices of the pharmaceutical company that was running the trials. They would have a strict protocol about what was expected so that all the clinics they dealt with would have similar, reproducible results.
As Leander talked about what he had been through, Kenzie noticed that Dr. Miller was rubbing first Leander’s arm and then his thigh, sitting closer to him on the couch, until their bodies were touching. She could barely breathe as she watched the therapist inflict more and more intimate positions and touches. Leander did not appear to object to the contact. There were a few times when he stopped the doctor or pushed him away briefly, but the man simply resumed, and Leander appeared to be responsive to the affections.
But that was due to the MDMA. As Garcia and Kenzie had discussed before, sexual arousal and sensitivity were commonly reported effects of MDMA. That didn’t mean it was what Leander wanted or that he would have been okay with what Dr. Miller was doing if he had not been high.
Leander started hallucinating, describing auditory and visual hallucinations he perceived rather than the torture Miller was asking him about. He began to get agitated and afraid of the hallucinations, clutching at Miller and begging for his help and protection. Miller answered with calm reassurances, stroking Leander and giving him more physical affection.
Then they moved off camera. There was still audio, but not a lot of what Leander was saying made sense anymore, and it was punctuated by grunts and thumps and other noises Kenzie didn’t care to identify.
It was clear that Miller had gone far past what was appropriate in the therapist-patient relationship. Kenzie was sickened by what she saw and heard. It was no wonder Leander had objected to the therapy and said that he wanted out. For someone who had been tortured while in prison in police custody, in various physical, psychological, and sexual ways, to then be re-traumatized in what was supposed to be a therapy session was unthinkable.
Even though she and Garcia had discussed Kenzie’s findings that Isah had probably been sexually assaulted, Kenzie had not expected this. Had not been expecting to see and hear it with her own eyes and ears. Kenzie was used to dealing with bodies, grieving family members, and people who didn’t know how to react to the death of a loved one. The violence her patients had been subjected to was over. They were past being hurt. She didn’t have to see and hear it herself.
She did not watch the other two videos Garcia had sent.
45
Kenzie sat on the bed for a few minutes, thinking about what she had seen and what to do next. She didn’t want to watch anything else. She didn’t want to think about what she had observed. But Garcia was expecting her to call back, and she had been right that she and Kenzie would have to talk once Kenzie had seen what the videos showed of the therapy session.
Kenzie needed to analyze it clinically. Not to think about the man or the betrayal of the patient’s trust. But to think about how it had impacted his health and may or may not have contributed to his death. Because that was all that was on her plate. She couldn’t do anything about the regulation of the doctors at Persons or about criminal charges being laid. That was outside her purview.
She took a deep breath and hit the button on her phone to call Garcia back.
Garcia answered with a sigh. Not angry, as she had been the last couple of times that she and Kenzie had spoken on the phone. But resigned. Subdued.
“Kenzie.”
“I wish you hadn’t sent that to me,” Kenzie told her.
“I can understand your feelings about them. Did you watch all three?”
Kenzie didn’t try to cover up the fact that she had not. “No. One was all I could stomach. I assume they are all relatively the same.”
“Yes. But with Isah’s agitation level increasing each time and more drugs needing to be administered. I don’t know if the doctor was giving him multiple doses of MDMA or if he was giving him something else to take the edge off. A sedative, benzos, something like that. I guess… we’ll either find out from the doctor, or by whatever other medical professionals review those tapes.”
“He had benzodiazepines in his blood. We were told that he had been sedated after the cafeteria incident and the visit from the police.”
“Right. I guess at least one person knew exactly why he was getting so worked up.”
Kenzie shook her head. “It’s sickening.”
“Yes. We were forewarned… but I still wasn’t prepared for what I saw,” Garcia admitted. She’d had longer to get used to it than Kenzie had. And she had probably watched them multiple times, talked to different people about them, and maybe passed them on to the special investigations unit, the medical board, and the management of Persons. It would be a lot of work.
“I don’t know what else to say about it,” Kenzie said. “It does not have a big impact on the death investigation. I could see that the MDMA was affecting him physically, not just psychologically. You saw him sweating?”
“Yes. Quite a bit, especially toward the end.”
“That is the best evidence of your cause of death. The bloodwork I got back today shows that he was on SSRIs as well. His serotonin levels were astronomical. The combination of MDMA and an SSRI can cause Serotonin Syndrome, which can be lethal. His body was overheating and, at some point, his heart stopped. When I arrived there, some time after his death, the body was still too warm.”
“What about the altercation before his death. Putting him prone and dogpiling on top of him. Did he smother?”
“He was still walking and breathing after that, though probably neither one very well. The surveillance pictures are too distant and low resolution to see if he was sweating or how dilated his eyes were. Using the session tapes you sent me as a reference point, he was probably still high after he came out of those sessions. MDMA can last for several hours. Janice said that sometimes his sessions were quite long. I guess Dr. Miller liked to take advantage of that nice long high.”
Garcia grunted.
“The combination of the drugs, the PTSD and agitation, the altercation with the staff, and possibly having his breathing cut off briefly at that point… he would have been in bad shape. They took him back to his room. I don’t know if he was in restraints when he died, but he had been restrained sometime before his death.”
“Straitjacket? Padded room?”
“Wrist restraints at least. Maybe the police had him in cuffs while they talked to him to try to scare him straight. But he got so upset that they had to give him a sedative to calm him down. He wanted to go back to his room and go to sleep, so maybe that’s what they let him do. I hope…” Kenzie’s voice caught in her throat. She didn’t know why she was getting so emotional about what Isah’s last few moments had looked like. Did a few minutes of peace in his room before he died make up for everything else they had done to him?
“I hope so too,” Garcia murmured. “I hope that for however long it was before he died, he had a little measure of peace. He didn’t deserve to be treated that way.”
Kenzie nodded and swallowed. She went on, holding herself as distant from it as she could and speaking around a lump in her throat.
“His heart gave out. I don’t know whether they found him on his bed or on the floor. Whoever found him or someone who joined them shortly after that tried to do CPR. Broke his sternum and a couple of ribs. They probably thought that he had just recently stopped breathing because of how warm he was. But he’d already been gone for a while when CPR was attempted. There was no bleeding, bruising, or swelling around the ribs and sternum.”
“And then they called the funeral home to pick him up,” Garcia offered.
“Yeah. And almost got away with it. Would have if the nurse hadn’t decided that the medical examiner needed to be involved.”
“Thank goodness for that nurse.”
There was a knock on the door, and Kenzie looked at it, reorienting herself to time and place. She had closed her eyes for a minute to try to set aside the disturbing images and information. It was stressful just knowing what had been happening to Isah, and she had found herself wanting to turn off the world and retreat into sleep. Apparently, that was exactly what she had done.
“Come on in,” Kenzie told Zachary. “I’m off the phone.”
He opened the door and poked his head in. “Everything okay? It’s been a while and I just wanted to make sure you didn’t need anything.”
“I guess I fell asleep.”
“Oh. I didn’t mean to wake you up. You can go back to sleep if you want to. Do you want me to close the blinds?”
“I’d better not go to bed this early, or I’ll wake up at two o’clock and won’t be able to go back to sleep.”
He grinned. “Then we can have a party together.”
Zachary was frequently up in the early morning hours, either unable to get to sleep or, having slept a couple of hours, unable to go back to sleep.
Kenzie yawned, deciding to cover her mouth halfway through. “Sorry. How are you sleeping these days? Are you getting enough?”
“According to the experts, no, but it’s enough for me to function during the day.”
“And it’s enough that it doesn’t affect your mental health?”
“It doesn’t make me more depressed. Just a little foggy sometimes if I’m really short on sleep.”
“I remember that day last year when you hadn’t slept for three days. That definitely affected you emotionally.”
“That, yeah.” Zachary waved it off with a motion of his hand. “I haven’t had anything like that this year. I’m okay.”
“You tell me and take a sleeping pill if that happens again.”
He shrugged and nodded. “So you’re getting up now?”
“Yeah. Let’s have a late supper. I think I need something other than ice cream.”
Zachary chuckled. “Heresy! You need some pizza to go with it?”
“Actually, I think I’ve got a frozen one. That might be a good idea.”
Kenzie got up from the bed, her head throbbing a little but, all things considered, it wasn’t too bad. The nap had probably done her good.
Putting a frozen pizza in the oven wasn’t exactly a two-person job, so she did it herself, then joined Zachary again in the living room.
46
After a few minutes, Kenzie became aware that Zachary was studying her and wondered whether he had said something she had missed. She turned to face him directly.
“Are you okay?” Zachary asked. “Is it just the concussion? You seem… far away.”
Zachary was usually the one dissociating, retreating from Kenzie when things got to be too much for him emotionally. Kenzie touched the bump on her head.
“No… I think…” She tried to think about what to tell him about what was on her mind. “I got some videos from Detective Garcia about what’s going on at Persons. And… it’s pretty disturbing stuff.”
Zachary nodded seriously. “You want to tell me about it?”
“I really can’t. It would be too inflammatory if it leaked out. Not that you would leak it. I’m just saying that I have to be really careful what I say. And honestly… you don’t want to hear it. It would be too triggering.”
“Okay.” He touched the back of her neck and stroked a few tendrils of hair. “So what can I do to help?”
“I’m worried about Rhys.” Kenzie swallowed. “He was supposed to have his first MDMA therapy today. I know that he’s probably fine after just one session… just because something bad happened to another patient, that doesn’t mean that the same thing would happen to Rhys. But… I just want to know he’s okay.”
“I can call Vera.”
“I don’t know if she’ll even answer. She was not happy with me trying to talk her out of Rhys doing the MDMA therapy. She sees it as the only option, the only thing that might help him. She doesn’t understand the risks and I couldn’t tell her everything. I think we’d better stay out of it, or she’ll say we can’t see him. It might be worth it for me to be banned, if it gets her to reconsider the therapy. But I wouldn’t want you to be blocked from seeing him too. I think he needs you.”
Zachary frowned as he considered this. Kenzie knew he was going to argue the point.
But he tried a different direction instead. “How about Stanley? I could call him and see if he’s heard anything.”
“Yeah. That might work. He’ll want to know how Rhys is doing too.”
Zachary nodded his agreement. He took a minute to look at the contacts on his phone and find Stanley’s number. It was late enough that Stanley would be off work, but not late enough for him to be in bed.
“Stanley, it’s Zachary. I was just calling to see—”
He had put the phone on speaker, and Stanley cut in before he could even finish the explanation.
“He’s not doing great,” Stanley said. “The doctors say it will pass and they don’t think it was enough to cause any damage. It was just a bad reaction, not an overdose.”
Kenzie stopped breathing.
“What happened?” Zachary asked. “I knew he was supposed to have therapy this afternoon, but I didn’t hear how things went. I was hoping you had heard.”
“Vera didn’t call you?” Stanley paused to consider this new information, then decided it was okay to give Zachary the information anyway. Rhys would have wanted his friend to know what was happening, so Kenzie thought it was the right choice.
“Well, like I said, he had a bad reaction to the drug. They’re not saying that he was allergic or that it was an overdose. It’s not life-threatening.”
“What kind of reaction?” Kenzie asked, leaning toward the phone and hoping he would be able to hear her and wouldn’t be put off by her involvement in the call.
“He’s hallucinating… a bad trip, I guess, like on LSD. Seeing and hearing things. Not… not quite in this world.”
Kenzie made a noise of understanding. “That can happen. Some people are quite sensitive to the hallucinogenic properties. Or it was a bad batch of MDMA, but that shouldn’t be the case when we’re talking about pharmaceutical grade.”
“The doctors are telling Vera that it will wear off and he’ll be fine and back to normal in a few hours.”
“Okay, good. Is he still at Persons? Are they going to go ahead with another session right away?”
“No. They called for an ambulance. He’s back in the city hospital. I don’t know if he is still in emergency or in psych. But it’s too late for visiting hours.”
“They probably wouldn’t let us see him anyway if he’s in a crisis,” Zachary said. “Unless he was asking for us and they thought it would help to calm him down.”
Kenzie rubbed her eyes, thinking about it. “Do you know anything else about the session? How long it was? Who was leading it? Which doctor?”
Zachary’s concerned gaze turned toward Kenzie, but she didn’t meet his eyes.
“I don’t know,” Stanley confessed. “And I don’t know whether Vera does either. Those kinds of things… aren’t necessarily things they would tell us. It never occurred to me to ask, and I doubt she thought of any of those things. Does it make any difference?”
Kenzie tried to think of how to explain.
“Kenzie has been involved in an investigation at Persons,” Zachary advised before she had a chance to get her thoughts in order. “So she knows some details about who is involved in what.”
Stanley cleared his throat. “Vera told me that you didn’t want him taking the therapy. I guess now we know why.”
A bad trip was the least of Kenzie’s concerns about Rhys. If it hadn’t been caused by an overdose, Stanley was probably right and wouldn’t cause any permanent or lasting damage. And might just be enough to convince Vera and Rhys not to continue with the drug therapy.
“You could try calling Persons to see if they would give you any details,” Zachary suggested to Kenzie. “They could at least tell you who was treating him. You’re a doctor, and you have the right to ask questions that are related to your investigation.”
“It would be a stretch to connect Rhys with my investigations,” Kenzie pointed out.
“I don’t know what was in the stuff that Garcia sent you today, but Isah’s death was related to the same kind of therapy as Rhys was being given, wasn’t it? Seems like there’s enough of a connection there.”
Stanley spoke up again, his voice uncertain. “You think this therapy Rhys is doing is connected with a death?”
“I can’t say anything about it,” Kenzie told him. “I haven’t released my findings to the public yet.”
“I had no idea it was that dangerous.”
“It shouldn’t be,” Kenzie said carefully. “Not in a controlled therapeutic setting.”
“I’ll tell Vera to give you a call,” Stanley said. “If you know about this drug and this therapy, then she should talk to you about it before she does anything else.”
