If Cyril Fernandez had been much aware of or concerned about toxicology his theory would’ve been immediately disqualified by Daniel Rios’s autopsy. As it was, he wasn’t. He operated in his own world, his own circles. Cyril was a drug dealer.
He was convinced Kate Meadows was an addict. He’d never personally sold anything to Kate. He didn’t live in Berlin; he worked out of Portland. But he knew people. He heard things. He thought, like a lot of people, that he could put two and two together. He’d certainly heard the Boston mafia rumors, the supposed true history of Tom Malkovich. In Cyril’s version it was Malkovich who was Kate’s dealer.
Obviously something had gone wrong. Either Kate had fallen behind or gotten in too deep. She must’ve spiraled. That was pretty common, in these circles. He imagined her strung out. He pictured Malkovich actually trying to help her. Hey, the saying goes everyone’s a hero in their own stories, right? People in Cyril’s business don’t exactly think they’re ruining lives. They think they’re helping. That’s the whole point, right?
To Cyril, the facts fit the argument. Everyone said she’d been kidnapped, but all that could really be determined was that she’d gone missing. She’d had to lay low. Again, not so unusual in these circumstances. And she just hadn’t been able to get out from under. These things happened.
He felt bad about it. He pitied her. He wasn’t heartless. Saying that he also knew there were plenty more where she came from, that was just stating the obvious. There were always others. There was always more. The real problem with an expanded population was that it made jobs like his an increasingly established, invisible level of society. Easy to ignore, normalize. The fear vanishes.
And someone like Kate, whom the media portrayed in such wholesome terms (of course), would always turn out to be the victim. That’s why Cyril lamented her. As far as he could tell, if things had been just a little different for her, if she’d felt just a little less desperate, this would’ve never happened to her. She might’ve simply been another homeless bum. Instead of an addict. The two hadn’t always gone so hand-in-hand.
Well. Sometimes you just throw in the towel. That’s what happened, here. All the way around.
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