“These look pretty good. But what have we here?”
Furlong folds a paper towel and sets it in front of him. Then picks up the tongs, reaches into the mason jar, and pulls out a small plastic sheath dripping with red juice. He wipes it back and forth on the paper towel then lays it down.
“My first thought was, well, it’s some kind of spice pack that Laguna Sunshine Farms has told Julie Anthony or Crazy Carol to include in certain batches of the sliced tomatoes. Maybe recipes. So I read the jar label, but there’s nothing about a spice pack or recipes inside, or a toy, like in a box of cereal. So, what is it? Let’s see.”
Furlong unfolds the clear plastic sheath with his paws and uses two big fingers to extract a red rectangle from inside.
“Of course,” says Furlong. “Laguna Sunshine Farms includes a sheet of red paper wrapped in plastic in their canned, stewed tomatoes. Who wouldn’t? However, it looks a little unusual. For one thing, the sheet of what looks like paper is sectioned off into five rows of four roughly half-inch squares. Twenty, total. Each square is delineated by perforations, perfectly, symmetrically made. And look, each half-inch square of red paper has a small black outline of the sun on it, like a child’s drawing. Which looks very much like the childish sun in the upper left corner of the Summer of Eternal Love invitation you delivered to every business in Laguna. The invite that, ingested by twenty-five thousand low-IQ hippies and other drug fiends, led to dozens of overdoses and two deaths last Sunday. Not to mention hundreds of arrests and god knows how much brain damage.”
Furlong levels a look at Matt.
“It’s LSD, Matt,” says Chief Hein. “From a BEL-financed lab in Oakland.”
“It’s going out in shipments all around the country,” says Furlong. “Possibly the world. I hope to find some kind of sales data, or shipping logs when we raid Dodge City.”
Matt sees what’s shaping up here and he doesn’t like it one bit. Feels his anger spike at everything these cops are not doing.
“How many jars do they sell in a month?” asks McAdam.
“Matt?” asks Furlong, with raised eyebrows.
“How would I know?” he answers. “I do know that my sister was kidnapped almost three weeks ago and you haven’t come up with one solid lead.”
Silence, dead but brief.
“Your mother pretty much ran the operation until she fell on Sunday,” says Furlong.
“She just worked there,” says Matt. “It wasn’t an operation to her, it was just a job. It didn’t pay very well.”
Furlong lets that observation hang in the air.
Mike Saffalo, the district attorney, comes around the table for a better look at the perforated red paper. “They call it blotter acid, when it’s on paper like this,” he says. “It’s lighter and easier to transport than tablets. It’s also a federal offense if they’re using the United States Post Office to ship these drugs across state lines.”
“I can just about guarantee you they are,” says Furlong.
“‘Just about’ won’t cut much ice in court, Bill,” says Saffalo.
Furlong looks at Matt. “We’re working on that.”
“Sergeant,” asks Saffalo, “can you put a street value on this?”
“Sixty bucks — three dollars a trip. Times hundreds of mason jars. If not thousands over a year’s time. But the BEL isn’t doing this for money — they’re doing it to turn the world on.]In other, words, for fun.”
“Show him the high-dollar stuff,” says Chief Hein.
Furlong sets the tomatoes and baking dish aside, picks up the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and opens the lavish leather-and-stamped-gold cover.
He holds the elaborate title page up to Matt — a picture of a Tibetan holy man, meditating. He’s wearing a crimson robe, much like that of Mahajad Om.
“Nice title page,” says Furlong. “But after that, the plot fizzles out. There’s not another written word in the whole volume.”
Furlong, still holding the book up, turns the title page to reveal the book’s first page — a white sheet of paper, perforated similarly to the canned stewed tomatoes from Laguna Sunshine Farms. Matt, with 20/10 vision, can see hundreds of beaming little suns from where he sits. These Tibetan Book of the Dead pages are much larger than the mason jar inserts.
“Same blotter acid as in the tomatoes,” says Furlong. “Same half-inch squares, white instead of red. But each sheet in this book is seven by nine inches, which gives you two hundred and fifty-two doses of LSD per sheet. There are three hundred and eighty pages in the book, which means one hundred and ninety sheets. The grand total is forty-seven thousand eight hundred and eighty hits of acid. At three bucks a pop, this Tibetan Book of the Dead is worth one hundred forty-three thousand, six hundred and forty dollars. Johnny Grail has a storage room full of these things at Mystic Arts, according to Matt here.”
“Not full,” says Matt. “I never said it was full. I only ever saw a few copies of that book. I also saw two strong men drag my sister into a van a hundred feet from this police station, in case you’re interested. In case you’re interested in kidnapping instead of a Tibetan Book of the Dead my mother has nothing to do with.”
Hein sighs and Saffalo clears his throat.
Furlong shrugs, opens his hands. “Stay with me, Matt. Every book has almost forty-eight thousand doses of LSD in it. Do you know how many people could lose their minds forever on this shit? That’s what I’m talking about here. The human cost. In brain cells. In suicides and addictions and accidents. I’m talking about your mother, Julie Anthony.”
“Matt, is this the same book that you delivered to Marlon Sungaard?” asks Detective McAdam. “Two copies?”
Again, Furlong looks to Matt.
“I thought they were just books!”
He suddenly remembers that Jazz had done similar errands for Johnny Grail and the BEL. Had she been fooled too, or did she know? Had she done something to the BEL to get herself kidnapped? But how could Johnny Grail do something that evil, and what good could it possibly do him? How could Grail act like a friend if the BEL has Jazz?
Furlong loudly drops the book on the table. Pushes it aside and squares the box of Languedoc Toffees in front of him and lifts the lid. Tilting it up to Matt, he pulls away the dark brown bubbly wrap, revealing the big round candies inside. They’re wrapped in gold foil and look the size of Ping-Pong balls. They look pretty damned good after his hasty peanut butter and jelly burrito for breakfast.
“Don’t tell me,” Matt says. “The toffee in the middle is really LSD.”
Furlong shakes his head. “No. Inside, they’re plastic-wrapped dragon balls, double-dipped in chocolate. They’ve got very high opium-to-hash ratio. The foil, plastic, chocolate, and box wrapping throws off the drug dogs’ noses. These things are packaged in Afghanistan and smuggled into Laguna by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Each box is thirty dragon balls — worth about twenty-four hundred on the street. As you know, Laguna Beach is awash in Afghan dragon balls. We’ve got dragon ball addicts sleeping in the streets, on the beaches, in the parks. Look what these things did to your mom.”
“She beat the opium, I told you.”
“Matt,” says Furlong. “I’ve talked to Dr. Caroline Hoppe at South Coast Hospital. Getting off the poppies isn’t as easy as Julie makes it sound, especially on top of her spectacular acid overdose and near death. The pain she’s in? And living in Dodge City, where she can get whatever dope she wants from those stoned-out hippies and dealers? So, we’ll see about her kicking the dragon balls. But I certainly hope she can, because we’ll need her to testify at Johnny Grail’s trial. That’s after we’ve arrested him for narcotics distribution, felony mail fraud, furnishing narcotics and alcohol to children, and second-degree murder.”