The Suicide Effect Read Online Free PDF Page A

looked away so she wouldn’t see him staring. Disappointment made his legs heavy and he plopped down at the nearest table. Knowing how quickly he could slide into despair, he focused on his food: two slices of leftover pizza, a banana, and a twin pack of Twinkies. Not bad. It was better than Cup-O-Noodle, which he often ended up with because he’d hit the snooze button one too many times and had to run out the door.
    “Hey Robbie, need some company?” Matt, a thin young man about his age who worked the other end of the packaging line, sat down across the table. He laid his hands out flat, the small triangular tattoos showing. It was obvious he had no lunch.
    “What’s new?” Robbie tried to be friendly.
    “I had to get a new battery for my piece of shit car and now I’m broke.”
    “Cars are like black holes. You put your money in and it never comes back out.” Robbie put a slice of pizza on a napkin and pushed it across the table to Matt. “Here, I’m not that hungry.”
    “Thanks, man.”
    A little later he gave him one of the Twinkies too.
    On his way out, Robbie stopped by the bulletin board, hoping Julie would walk by on her way to the front office. A company flyer caught his eye. In large purple type it asked: Do you suffer from depression? If you have three or more of these symptoms, you may benefit from a new medicine. To find out more about a clinical trial for an experimental new drug, contact Adriana at Oregon Research Center .
    Robbie knew the list by heart. He was a poster child for most of the symptoms—a sense of hopelessness, inability to concentrate, insomnia. The trial intrigued him. He’d been taking Zoloft for a year and a half now, and it wasn’t working that well for him any more. Before the Zoloft, he’d been on Paxil for almost a year. That drug had made him feel emotionally numb and he’d hated that more than being depressed. Feeling bad was better than feeling nothing. Eventually, he’d asked his mother’s doctor to write him a script for something else.
    He’d never been in a clinical trial before. He visited online forums cheerily hosted by pharma companies like Prolabs that were keeping all the depressives medicated. Many of the people he chatted with had been in studies, and overall they reported good experiences. Often the research centers paid a nice compensation fee for time and travel expenses.
    As he stood thinking it over, the second lunch buzzer rang. Robbie took a moment to memorize the phone number. He had decided to give the trial center a call. He could help Prolabs test one of its products, pick up a little extra cash, and maybe start feeling better too.
    For now he had to get back to the packaging line. The fact that his father was CEO of the company didn’t mean he could get away with being late from lunch break. He used his mother’s family name, so most of the people he worked with didn’t know he was Karl Rudker’s son. He didn’t want people either sucking up to or avoiding him because of his supposed connections. Hah! He and his father hadn’t spoken for months.
    The supervisors knew who he was and he tried to be an excellent employee. Even though they hadn’t gotten along for years, his father’s expectations were buried deep in his DNA.
    Sula walked into Prolabs with a sense of apprehension. She hadn’t fallen asleep until after one o’clock, then she’d had a long unsettling dream in which Rudker had chased her through a warehouse and she kept running into stacks of boxes. She was still unnerved by the whole encounter yesterday. Rudker’s threat had been intense and personal and she suspected she hadn’t heard the last of it.
    Sula handed her brown leather backpack to the security man and passed through the metal detector. “Good morning, Cliff.”
    “Morning, Sula. Looks like it will be a gorgeous spring day.”
    “Sure does. Have a good one.”
    She picked up her bag and clicked across the tile foyer. Sunlight through the narrow