Scott Mariani - The Cassandra Sanction - The most controversial action adventure thriller you’ll read this year!

A walk-in wardrobe led off the ensuite, a whole other room in itself. Ben stepped into it, gazing around him for clues the police might have missed, like a pair of bathroom scissors lying in a red pool on the floor, or a cryptic message daubed in blood by the kidnapper.

What he found instead, he stared at for ten long seconds and then hurried back through the apartment with to show Raul.

Raul hadn’t moved from his position on the armchair, and barely glanced up as Ben walked into the room.

‘What’s this?’ Ben said, striding up to him.

‘What’s what?’

‘This.’ Ben tossed it in Raul’s lap. Raul picked it up and gazed at it.

‘It’s fluoxetine,’ Ben said. ‘Any ideas why I might have found a whole stash of it sitting on a shelf in your sister’s walk-in wardrobe?’ He was trying to keep the anger out of his voice, but it wasn’t easy. His discovery had left him feeling betrayed and made a fool of.

Raul slowly examined the small amber bottle of pills, then turned a blank expression on Ben and shrugged. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘They’re antidepressants,’ Ben said. ‘And they’ve got your sister’s name on the label. And I want to know why.’

‘Anyone can take medicine.’ A flare of defensiveness lit up in Raul’s eyes as he said it.

‘Fine. If her doctor put her on pills for migraine headaches or a dust allergy, that would be one thing, wouldn’t it? But this is something else.’

Raul said nothing. He stared at the bottle in his hand as if he could will it to change into something else.

‘You told me she was a happy person,’ Ben said. ‘You said she loved her life and filled every room she walked into with laughter and smiles.’

‘She did,’ Raul said quietly.

‘As long as the drugs were doing what they were supposed to do?’ Ben said, pointing at the bottle. ‘And what about the rest of the time?’

Raul fell silent. He closed his eyes. Maybe he thought that by shutting out the light, all his problems would vanish in the darkness. Ben glared at him, wanting to grab him by the neck and shake him.

‘Answer me, Raul. Did you know about the pills?’

‘Yes!’ Raul burst out. ‘I knew, all right? She went through a phase of feeling anxious and low when she was in her teens, and was on medication for it then. She was mostly fine, then every now and then she’d have a relapse when there was too much stress in her life. It happened again when that whoreson Austin Keller broke her heart. It hit her hard and she needed medical help to get over it.’

Ben didn’t bother to ask who Austin Keller was. He shook his head in disbelief at what he was hearing. ‘She was prone to depression and you knew about it all along, but you didn’t see fit to mention it?’

‘But it doesn’t mean anything,’ Raul insisted. ‘That was all in the past. She got over it. She always has.’

‘Read the label, you idiot. Look at the date. What does it say?’

Raul read it and sighed. ‘It says July eleventh.’

‘This year. Not last year, or the year before. It says she was prescribed this latest treatment five days before her car went over the cliff. And more than a third of them are gone. In less than a week? She must have been popping them like sweets.’ Ben could hear his voice getting tighter with anger. His stomach felt knotted and there was a beating in his temples that was growing into a dull ache. He took a deep breath to try to settle his pulse.

Raul waved his arms in frustration. ‘Fine. All right. But if she was taking them, then she wasn’t depressed, was she? Isn’t that the whole idea of 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 father and 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 thumping in 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 why you 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 the police 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 been so 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 part of 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.’