"Good."
Farragut's right hand tightened. "Okay, okay. But if you actually spoke to those people, did you at least get some idea of what they experienced, of what caused them to need treatment in the first place? Lots of people have recovered from bad trips without much more than a good night's sleep."
Katzmarek sighed, and started digging through the overstuffed folder.
"What's with all the paper, anyway? Wouldn't it have been easier to just keep all that on a laptop?"
The investigator pulled out a few sheets of paper and held them limply in his hand. "Of course it would have been easier. Why do you think they wouldn't let me bring one in? You're on private property here, outside the jurisdiction of the committee to force the issue. Anyway, here's what I found out, for whatever good it might do us."
As he read through the notes, and Farragut pressed him to draw inferences from some of the wording, a pattern emerged: by far, the majority of the bad trips were rife with religious references, most notably possession and variations on the idea of being godlike. In fact, the same word kept cropping up again and again as he read through the summaries of what the members of the 'meltdown mob' had experienced that day: blasphemy. And according to the psychiatrists' reports, it had been this attack on the central core of their beliefs that had made the experience so devastating to the more religious members of the group.
"Hold it, hold it," Farragut said when he'd finished the last report. "Every single one of those people was Christian. Weren't there any Jews there? Moslems? An atheist, maybe?"
"Of course there were. But the Jews either recovered or were kept off-limits by the ultra-orthodox rabbis that swept in to keep any taint of association out of the press. There was one group that attempted to capitalize on what happened, though. Mormons. They considered the ravings of the two latter-day saints in the group to be some sort of coded message from God, and set up a cloister in Utah to pick them apart. Well, you know how protective the LDS church is. They weren't even represented in the case."
The prisoner's expression had clouded over, so Katzmarek gave him some time to digest the reports. About a minute later, he leaned forward and spoke very quietly. "I think what you just told me... was that the people who snapped were all faced with the same quandary: either they'd had a religious experience that invalidated the core of their beliefs, or they'd been drugged."
"Essentially, yes."
"So to save their souls, they needed someone to pin the drugging on. Me."
"If, as you say, you are innocent, then yes."
"Which means that our only hope of reversing the verdict is to convince them that their blasphemies were legit?"
"Well," Katzmarek said lightly, "either that, or there was some other explanation for what happened to them."
* * *
On the cramped train ride home that night, Katzmarek opened his netbook and launched into an Internet search for people who had experienced something at the ill-fated debate but who were not among those who needed treatment afterwards.
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