Free The Cassandra Sanction by Scott Mariani

antidepressants?’
    ‘Happy pills don’t always work that way, Raul. Sometimes they take away sadness and replace it with rage and hatred and all kinds of other emotions instead. They can make a perfectly ordinary, gentle person with mild anxiety decide to take an axe to their family. Or take a jump off a high building, whichever way the brain chemistry happens to lead them. There have been thousands of proven cases.They call it the paradoxical effect. I call it mind-altering garbage that screws people’s heads up.’
    Raul frowned, a line appearing between his brows. ‘How come you know so much about it?’
    Ben pointed again at the bottle. ‘Because my mother was prescribed some kind of crap just like that the year after Ruth disappeared, to help her cope with the loss. Over the next few months my fatherand I saw her degenerate into a total stranger. One day when I was eighteen years old, she wandered like a zombie into her bedroom, locked the door, lay on the bed and swallowed a jar of sleeping pills and never woke up. That’s how I know so much about it, okay? Because I made it my business to find out what those things can do to a person.’
    The breathing control wasn’t working. The thumpingin his temples was amping up into a full-blown headache. He’d never told anyone that much about his mother’s suicide before, and he didn’t enjoy revisiting the feelings it raised up in him.
    Raul lowered his eyes and said nothing.
    ‘Look at me, Raul. Tell me the truth. You knew Catalina was still on these drugs, didn’t you? But you hid it from me, because of how I might react. That’s whyyou didn’t show me the full copy of the police report, because her antidepressant use would have been mentioned there as corroborative evidence to back up the coroner’s suicide verdict. You removed those pages so I wouldn’t see them.’
    Raul’s face twitched as he stared hotly at Ben, like a child caught with its fingers in the pie. ‘Okay, I admit it. I did know, and you’re right, it was in thepolice report. It came out at the inquest that she’d gone to her doctor not long before her disappearance, worried she was slipping back into depression, because of work-related stress and other private matters. The lawyers pulled strings to keep the details out of the media, but that’s what happened. There. I’ve said it. I should have known you’d find those pills in her things, but my head’s beenso fuzzy with all this nightmare that I didn’t think about it. I should have told you the truth. I screwed up. Are you satisfied now?’
    Ben glowered at him. ‘No, I’m not, Raul. Don’t you see how this changes things?’
    Raul paused, then pursed his lips as a new thought seemed to come to him. ‘It would … if it was for real.’
    ‘What? How can it not be for real?’
    ‘It could all be partof the set-up. Kind of makes sense, actually.’
    Ben couldn’t believe what kind of wildly twisted logic Raul was throwing at him. ‘Let’s think about that for a moment, shall we? The kidnapper made her go to her own doctor for antidepressants, so that they could then plant them here in her apartment as phony evidence that she killed herself.’
    Raul spread his hands. ‘Does that sound so crazy?’
    ‘Yes, Raul, it does. It makes it sound as if you’re doing everything you can to deny the truth about what happened to Catalina.’
    Raul’s face paled to an ashen grey, as if Ben had punched him. ‘What are you telling me, that now you believe all that bullshit story about her killing herself? I thought you were on my side.’
    ‘There’s no other way to see it, not now.’
    ‘Listen. Ben. Iknow how it looks, you finding the pills, me lying to you.’
    ‘Good. Then you understand why I’m thinking you brought me here on false pretences.’
    ‘Yes. And I know you’re thinking you want to walk away from all of it. I’m begging you, don’t. I need your help. Never give up hope, remember? That’s what you said,