Salem Falls Read online

  "Yes. And a maypole, and often there's handfasting, too--"

  "Handfasting?"

  "A trial marriage. You grab your intended's hand and jump the flames, and you're tied to each other for a year--a test period, if you will. And of course, after handfasting, there's always the Great Rite." She laughed at Jordan's blank expression. "Making love, Mr. McAfee, right out there in the fields of the earth."

  "Well," Jordan said, coloring. "That sounds festive."

  Starshine winked. "Don't knock it till you've tried it."

  "Is Beltane celebrated on a certain date?"

  "The same time every year," Starshine said. "At the stroke of midnight on April thirtieth, as the calendar rolls onto May first."

  *

  It spoke volumes that the first person McAfee had put on the stand did absolutely no harm to Matt's case. It didn't matter to him if Gillian Duncan was a Pagan, a Buddhist, or a tribal shaman. Despite the hocus pocus and the candles and the safe space, nothing could take away from the fact that Gillian Duncan had been raped that night.

  "Ms. Starshine," Matt said. "Do you have any way of knowing, other than by what she told you, that Gillian Duncan is a witch?"

  "I'm not in her coven, if that's what you mean."

  "Were you in the clearing behind the cemetery on Beltane?"

  "No. I was celebrating elsewhere."

  "In fact, you didn't see Gillian that night, did you?"

  "No."

  "And you didn't see Mr. St. Bride that night, either?"

  "I've never met the man," Starshine said.

  "So you have no way of knowing whether the defendant and Ms. Duncan were together on the night of April thirtieth?"

  "No."

  Matt started to walk back to his seat but then turned. "That safe-space spell you did when you got up here ... is that something other witches would know?"

  "In some form or another, a protection spell is fairly common, yes."

  "What does it protect you from?"

  "Negative energy," Starshine said.

  "But if the defendant were to step up there right now and grab you--"

  "Objection!" Jordan cried.

  "--if he were to throw you onto the ground and pin you--"

  "Sustained!"

  "--could a protection spell keep a witch from being raped?"

  "Mr. Houlihan!" The judge rapped the flat of her hand against the bench. "You will stop now!"

  "Withdrawn," Matt said. "Nothing further."

  Dr. Roman Chu was dressed like a skateboarder, with his hair on end and a black T-shirt that read SHREDDER. If Jordan hadn't known him personally, he would have assumed Roman was a kid plucked off the street and paid to play a part. But then the toxicologist was sworn in and began to speak, listing his credentials and his certification by three separate boards, as well as so many forensic testimonies under his belt that the prosecutor stipulated to his expertise. "My job involves demonstrating evidence of drug intake by means of isolating, identifying, and quantifying toxic substances in biological materials," Chu explained. "Basically, I'm a very expensive bloodhound."

  "Can a forensic toxicologist tell if a drug is taken in a therapeutic dosage, or as an accidental or intentional overdose?" Jordan asked.

  "Yes. We use modern analytical procedures like chromatography and spectometry to measure drugs, and then we identify the relationships between these drug levels and the clinical response to understand the pharmacological effect." He smiled at the jury. "We also go to graduate school and learn to use words that are never less than six syllables."

  He had them laughing, which was one of the reasons that Jordan loved to use Roman as an expert. "Dr. Chu, did you analyze a sample from Gillian Duncan?"

  "Yes, I did."

  "What were your results?"

  "The blood sample I tested showed signs of the substance atropine." At the prosecutor's table, Matt went very still. The jury leaned forward, riveted by the proof that Gillian had lied.

  "Atropine?" Jordan asked. "What's that?"

  "A drug used medicinally to relax the muscles of the intestine, to increase heart rate, to reduce secretions during anesthesia, and occasionally for treatment of asthma."

  "How long does the drug take to kick in?" Jordan asked.

  "It's a very rapid onset, with peak plasma concentration within an hour, and the effects last between two and six hours."

  "For you to find atropine in a blood sample, how long ago would the person have to ingest it?"

  "Within twenty-four hours of the specimen being drawn," the toxicologist said.

  "Was the level of atropine found in Ms. Duncan's blood consistent with a normal dosage?"

  "The usual therapeutic dose is zero point one to one point two milligrams. Her test showed a blood level of twenty-three nanograms per milliliter at about four hours after she drank it. With a drug half-life of three to four hours, that would correspond to a blood level of forty-six nanograms in the first hour. Working backward with the parameters of Ms. Duncan's weight, body fat, and approximate time of ingestion, that indicates a dose of ten milligrams of atropine ... roughly ten to one hundred times the norm."

  "What does that mean?"

  "Ms. Duncan had overdosed," Chu said.

  "Would that have impaired her functioning?"

  "Oh, yeah. At a dose of just two milligrams, a person would have a rapid heart rate, palpitations, dryness of the mouth, dilated pupils, blurred vision. Up the dose to five milligrams and the person would also be feeling restless, having trouble speaking and swallowing, headaches, hot skin, reduced intestinal peristalsis. If you take ten milligrams of atropine, like Ms. Duncan, you'd feel all that, plus have a rapid, weak pulse; blurred vision; flushed skin; restlessness and excitement; trouble walking and talking; hallucinations; delirium and coma."

  "Are the effects lasting?"

  "Nope. It's a short trip," Chu said, grinning.

  "But hallucinations are likely?"

  "Yeah. In fact, recently in Holland four brands of Ecstasy were found to contain atropine, for that reason exactly."

  "Other people, then, have used atropine as a recreational hallucinogenic drug?"

  Chu nodded. "That's what I hear. In fact, those hallucinations are what usually tip a doctor off to the possibility of atropine poisoning ... because atropine doesn't show up on a routine ER tox screen, and blows your short-term memory, which makes it very difficult to get an accurate sense of if or when the drug was taken."

  "Would you know if the things you hallucinated were real memories or not?"

  Cho shrugged. "You wouldn't be able to tell. Like all hallucinogens, from LSD to peyote, it creates altered perceptions."

  "Could someone in the throes of a hallucinogenic drug imagine a physical attack?"

  "Objection," Matt called out. "This isn't the witness's area of expertise."

  "I'm going to allow it," the judge said.

  Chu grinned. "Think of all those guys who scratched their skin off after tripping on angel dust, convinced they had bugs crawling all over. If you're using a psychedelic drug, what you believe to be true becomes true."

  "One final question," Jordan said. "Is atropine derived from any particular substance?"

  "It comes from the liquid extract of a plant, which has a long and varied history of being used as a poison, an anesthetic, and to induce a trancelike state. Remember that sleeping draft Juliet drinks in the Shakespeare play? Same stuff."

  "What's the name of this plant, Dr. Chu?"

  "Oh," he said. "That would be Atropa belladonna."

  Matt called for a fifteen-minute recess and left the courtroom fuming. He stalked upstairs, to the small conference room he'd secured to sequester the victim, on the chance that he needed to recall her after the defense finished its witness list. When he burst through the door, Gillian was bent over a table, doing a crossword puzzle.

  "Don't you ever lie to me again."

  She dropped her pencil. "W-what?"

  He braced an arm