Deadly Messengers by Susan May Page A

talking about it again. It had been years since anybody had wanted to listen again. The world had moved on. They had not.
    The thought her own grief might remain with her for decades was a sobering thought. She’d really believed one day she would wake up and it would have slipped into her past, that she could face the future without darkness in her heart.
    The Falling Down Murders—named for the scene in the eighties Michael Douglas film of that name, where Douglas’s character pulls out a semi-automatic in a fast food restaurant—had caused one divorce, one heart attack, and turned innocent people’s lives into nightmares. The widow, who had lost her daughter Jennifer, told Kendall how the light in her life was extinguished that day. Jennifer had the misfortune to be cleaning the table nearest the counter.
    “An engineer, that’s what she intended to be.” A solitary tear rolled down Jennifer’s mother’s cheek. “It was only a part-time job to help us with her tuition fees. Such a good girl.”
    John, who was there alone, simply eating his lunch—had just started a new job. He didn’t die instantly, but two days later, his wife turned off his life-support.
    Charlie McKinley was the employee who served Lyall Wright at the drive-thru window. He was the employee who’d forgotten he’d directed Wright to wait in the parking lot while his order was filled. An easy mistake that cost four lives. Five, if you counted the killer.
    Kendall had managed to locate a witness quoted in the old news article. She was no Beverley, possessing no joy at being the center of attention. Now in her sixties, the woman talked of taking her family to the restaurant as a treat. Her kids, now grown, loved the burgers. Two decades later, neither of them would eat in a Burger Boys’ restaurant. Kendall could identify with that . Avoiding reminders was normal.
    The woman openly wept as she talked of the sheer fear when Wright brandished a gun and began firing; her first thoughts, to put herself between him and her children. She talked of the vividness of the red of the blood, the feelings of knowing she would die, that her children would die, and that she had no way to prevent it.
    This time Kendall did remember to ask each person she interviewed the question she’d forgotten to ask Beverley: “How did you live with what happened that day? How did you come to terms with it?”
    The most impressive answer came from Charlie McKinley’s father, Doug. He shared that after the years it took for the shock and depression to wear away—he called it “the erosion of heartbreak”—he’d gone on to do his own research on the event. Doug told her he wanted to try to understand how it could happen. As part of the healing process, he felt a need to discover what had lived inside Wright’s brain to cause him to snap and inflict such violence. His hypothesis was fascinating.
    According to McKinley, Wright had been on medication, an early version of Prozac. This drug fell into a group labeled as SSRIs—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor—an umbrella term for drugs most commonly used as anti-depressants.
    He spoke animatedly about his research. “I saw a link between SSRIs and mass murderers. So I spent more than a decade after Charlie died trying to motivate the government to look more closely into the idea these drugs could be the cause of some of these random killings.”
    A statistical analyst before his retirement, his research sounded thorough and somewhat convincing to Kendall. Still, he’d taken quite a leap. She wasn’t surprised to learn he’d gotten little acceptance of his theory.
    “Take it.” The gray-haired, bear-of-a-man pushed the file across the table toward her. “Please, look through it. It’s important. Maybe there’s a story in there for you. I couldn’t get anyone to listen, but maybe now with these latest…”
    Doug McKinley’s voice trailed off; his mind had wandered away. A pained look came into his eyes,