I'd seen him try to kill himself over leaving the Church. I'd watched him go through agonies of guilt over ignoring answering-machine messages from Father Healey. Hell, I'd watched him shake and cry because at ten years old we'd stolen three apples from a market on Columbus Avenue. Yet there he sat, disturbed but coherent. For Bucky, even serene. Believing he'd contributed to murder.
I said, "What neuropharms do you take, Bucky?"
"I told you. None."
"None at all."
"No." His brown eyes were completely honest. "Gene, I want you to find out how these clinical subjects really died. You have access to NYPD records--"
"Not any more."
"But you know people. And cases get buried there all the time, you used to tell me that yourself, with enough money you can buy yourself an investigation unless somebody high up in the city is really out to get you. Kelvin Pharmaceuticals doesn't have those kinds of enemies. They're not the Mob. They're just..."
"Committing murder to cover up an illegal drug trial? I don't buy it, Bucky."
"Then find out what really happened."
I shot back, "What do you think happened?"
"I don't know! But I do know this drug is a good thing! Don't you understand, it holds out the possibility of a perfect, totally open connection with the person you love most in the world... Find out what happened, Gene. It wasn't suicide. J-24 doesn't cause depression. I know it. And for this drug to be denied people would be ... it would be a sin."
He said it so simply, so naturally, that I was thrown all over again. This wasn't Bucky, as I had known him. Or maybe it was. He was still driven by sin and love.
I stood and put money on the table. "I don't want to get involved in this, Bucky. I really don't. But--one thing more--"
"Yeah?"
"Camineur. Can it ... does it account for..." Jesus, I sounded like him. "I get these flashes of intuition about things I haven't been thinking about. Sometimes it's stuff I didn't know."
He nodded. "You knew the stuff before. You just didn't know you knew. Camineur strengthens intuitive right-brain pathways. As an effect of releasing the stranglehold of violent thoughts. You're more distanced from compulsive thoughts of destruction, but also more likely to make connections among various non-violent perceptions. You're just more intuitive, Gene, now that you're less driven."
And I'm less Gene, my unwelcome intuition said. I gazed down at Bucky, sitting there with his skinny fingers splayed on the table, an unBucky-like serenity weirdly mixed with his manic manner and his belief that he worked for a corporation that had murdered eight people. Who the hell was he?
"I don't want to get involved in this," I repeated.
"But you will," Bucky said, and in his words I heard utter, unshakable faith.
)
When a bullet smashed through his knee and sent him into early retirement, Police Detective Gene Shaunessy became Mr. Shaughnessy, junior high school math teacher. But Gene is coerced back into crime-solving by an old friend disturbed by the unregulated testing being secretly performed by his pharmaceutical company--and the resulting "suicides" of six nursing home patients.
