Page 66 of The Broken Places

“Maybe he’s just planting pleasant memories in your minds. How do you even know what he did to you was real?”

Ambrose let out a soft breath. “Because I know. It’s been seventeen years, and I’ve watched the process hundreds of times now. The goal is not to distort or erase memories. He uses what he can gather from a patient’s past to help them remember and process their own stories. Then he lets them guide the journey. What I revisited was far from pleasant. Under any other circumstances, reliving it, mentally or otherwise, would have broken me. But I’ll tell you this: even if he had ‘implanted’ pleasant memories into my head, I’d be grateful. My mind was a war zone. And Dr. Sweeton walked through the battlefield and dragged me out.”

She met his eyes then, and again, he saw the empathy there. But he also saw her struggle. And in her expression, he knew that she wouldn’t expose them—at least not yet. But she also wasn’t ready to allow it tocontinue. “Dr. Sweeton isn’t young. He won’t live forever. What happens when he dies?”

“We have plans for that eventuality. He’s training others who are now in the medical field. They’ll step into his place one day.” Dr. Clayton Contiss, who’d gone through the treatment himself only a year before Ambrose, was already in charge of some of the sessions, with Doc only there as backup.

“Well,” she said. “Maybe you can go international too. An underground therapy, changing the world one drug addict at a time.” When he said nothing, she stared at him for a moment, then murmured, “Oh my God.” She set her mouth, but then sighed and used two fingers to squeeze the bridge of her nose. “Tell me why you infiltrated the department. Who are you really, Ambrose?” she asked after a moment.

He lowered his shoulders. “I work as a bounty hunter. I track down fugitives, but I also locate missing people and bring them home or bring them to justice. I work with the government sometimes, but I prefer to work for myself.”

“Let me guess. You’ve done enough shady business for the feds that you banked on them not pursuing legal action against you for infiltrating our department.”

She looked away. She obviously didn’t need him to confirm her assessment. But he did anyway. “In a nutshell, yes. But any so-calledshady businessI did was for what I considered a noble purpose.”

“You seem to like to make your own rules.”

“Sometimes I deem it necessary, and justified, yes.”

“What if everyone deemed rule breaking necessary and justified? What if everyone thought their purpose wasnoble?”

“Then society would break down.”

“Exactly.” She massaged her temples again. “How did you hear about the crime I was investigating?”

“Like I said, there are over five hundred people who’ve successfully gone through Project Bluebird, dating back over twenty years.”

Her mouth formed a small O. “You have a mole in the department.”

“I wouldn’t call the person a mole. They didn’t join the department for any nefarious reason, nor did it have to do with the project. They joined because they wanted to work in law enforcement. But when this case became known to them, they saw the links to the project and called Dr. Sweeton, who then contacted me. I learned what I could but needed to get closer. Specifically, I wanted to see those pills.”

“And?”

“And originally they were the same, with the addition of the LSD coating. Since then, they’ve been reformulated into an altered combination of the original, for what reason, I don’t know.”

“My God,” Lennon said. “So someone got hold of this drug that Dr. Sweeton illegally manufactures—”

“There are very strict controls in place. He doesn’t manufacture more than needed, and none have ever disappeared or been unaccounted for. Dr. Sweeton has gone through every part of the process and can’t come up with how even one pill could have been taken. Plus he trusts the people who work for him.”

“Then how? How did our killer come up with the recipe for these drugs, and what’s the point? Why is he using it to kill people?”

“That’s what we’re all trying to figure out.”

“If I had this information sooner, the investigation would be further along.”

He understood that, and he’d gone back and forth and back and forth on that. “You can understand why I couldn’t tell you.”

“You wasted time. More people might have died because you waited.”

“I couldn’t jeopardize the project.”

Lennon huffed out a frustrated breath. “This is so fucked up,” she murmured. She shook her head. “I need to think. And I can’t think right now because I’m too overwhelmed.” She was quiet for several moments as he waited. “I won’t do anything without giving you advanced warning.”

“Thank you.” It was all he could ask for, and he trusted her word. “Lennon ... I want to tell you ... I’m sorry for lying to you, but I’m not sorry for what happened between us. It had nothing to do with any of this. It was completely separate. For me—”

“How can it be completely separate? It’s literally sitting smack-dab in the middle of us.”

He felt frustrated and regretful about that, and he was having a hard time explaining himself. Because though she was right, she was also wrong. But before he could say another word, she stood. “Please go.”

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