Page 73 of The Broken Places

“You might be surprised.” He shot her a wink, then turned and gathered two water bottles out of the minifridge and set them on the desk.

She looked up at all the clippings and notes he’d taped to the wall, chewing as she considered each piece of evidence from the case. “Reallife,” she said, the first unpleasant sensation she’d felt since she’d woken up taking hold. “We have to figure out who’s using Dr. Sweeton’s formula against people.” She turned to him. “Tell me what you’ve learned so far or come up with while we’ve been apart.”

His expression softened as he looked at her. “You’re not going to expose the project.”

She took another bite, chewing more slowly before swallowing. “I mean ... I’m still probably just a little bit high, so I’m not making any definitive decisions at the moment.”

“Wise,” he said, with a cock of his head.

She smiled, but it quickly dwindled. “But I think ... I think we have to protect the project. It’s ... the most incredible thing I’ve ever experienced, and I didn’t consider myself damaged.” She thought for a moment about the stories she’d listened to onThe Fringe, about the way so many people suffered. And she didn’t know how to make something like this available to more people, but the fact that it was being given to any seemed like a small miracle she refused to deny to anyone. “The problem, Ambrose, is that it’s been corrupted. We have to figure out how—and why—or it won’t be up to us whether it ends. It will have to.”

“Agreed.”

Lennon opened a container of lasagna and took it over to the bed, where she sat against the propped pillows, eating and considering the wall again. Ambrose was obviously experienced with investigations. “How’d you become a bounty hunter anyway?” she asked. “I read about the crime you helped solve in Kentucky,” she said, feeling a moment of apprehension that he’d be angry that she’d looked him up.

But he just nodded, as if he’d already figured out that she’d looked into his past. Of course he had—he’d possessed this uncanny knack for figuring her out from the get-go. Instead of being annoyed by it, like she’d been at first, now it made her want to smile, though currently her mouth was too full of food to do that. “Well, like I told you, I started out as a correctional officer. After going through Dr. Sweeton’streatment, and what happened in Kentucky, I knew I wanted to work in law enforcement. When I returned to San Francisco, the quickest way in was a job at San Quentin.”

“Wow, you started in the prison big leagues.”

A smile flitted across his lips. “That’s one way to put it. Anyway, long story short, I made some solid connections in the law enforcement community, and then I went into business for myself. There was a prison break a year later, and I was called in and ended up apprehending both prisoners within days. After that, a few agencies contacted me to assist on cases, and I proved beneficial on those as well. It snowballed from there. Over the years, I had to turn down more jobs than I could take.” He looked at the curtain-covered window for a second. “I seem to have this sixth sense for locating people, especially once I have a profile. Maybe I’m just naturally good at the job, but I think the treatment I went through sort of ...”

“Honed your instincts?”

“Yes. Others have said similar things. I think you’ll find it’s true of you as well,” he said.

She took another bite, and he watched her for a moment. “Speaking of which, do you want to talk about your experience?” he asked somewhat tentatively.

She thought about that. “Not yet, but I will. I’d like to let it settle for a little while longer. But I’d like to tell you about it, and I’d like to hear about your experience, too, if you’re willing to share.”

“I’d love that,” he said before walking to the bed and sitting down on the edge.

She focused back on the wall, going over the victims and the crime scenes. Her mind felt both slightly foggy and clearer than she could remember it feeling in a long time. She recalled all those illuminated but also translucent lines that had connected one thing to the other while she’d been under the influence of Dr. Sweeton’s drug cocktail, and something told her she should take advantage of any connections the residual effects of that might allow her to make. “I think our killersomehow found out about the project and is using it for his own purposes,” she said.

“His purposes being terror and death.”

“Yes.”Terror and death.“The exact opposite of what Dr. Sweeton intended.”

“Who hates the people who need that therapy enough to turn it around on them? Not to cure them, but to make them suffer further, and suffer horribly?”

She shook her head as she placed the empty container on the bedside table, finally satiated. “Someone very sick. He hates them. He blames them for something.”

“Yes. But what?”

“That’s the question,” she murmured.One of many.

She glanced at Ambrose, and she saw that he was looking over the wall, too, his expression deeply troubled. “This is what I’ve concluded so far. From the evidence, from what I experienced in my treatment, it looks like he or she used Dr. Sweeton’s cocktail but tweaked it until they got it ‘right.’ Let’s call him ahefor ease. He accesses their trauma center, and then he triggers it. He makes them think they’re back there and that it’s happening again. But this time he makes sure they have the tools to fight back. And they do. All of them at once. It’s why he forgoes the sedatives that Dr. Sweeton uses. He wants their body to be active while their mind is submersed in their past.”

Her shoulders drew up as a cold shiver blew through her. Who would do that to a fellow human being? Whohatedthat deeply? “If that’s the goal,” she said, “he seems to have achieved it with the last two killings. I don’t have the details on the most recent murder, but Lieutenant Byrd says the murder weapons were all there, which I’m assuming means our killer or ... whoever’s setting these poor souls up, didn’t have to be part of it.”

Ambrose nodded distractedly. “I think he’s using items that trigger their trauma,” he said, pointing to the list of seemingly innocuous itemsat each scene. He mentioned the wine coolers and the cigarette brand and why they felt off.

“I see what you mean,” she murmured. “They don’t quite fit, do they?” She scratched her head, remembering that she’d had the same gut feeling about the belt but hadn’t been able to explain why. “So ... he’s accessing their trauma center with the drugs, then he’s triggering them with a physical item that connects to that trauma. It’s serving to give the experience texture and weight and maybe sometimes a visual, too, the same way Dr. Sweeton uses dirt under your feet and a drumbeat to ground you.”

“Yes. These people are the opposite of grounded, though. They’re left to flail, seemingly indefinitely, in the worst moment of their life.”

“Hell,” she murmured. “It would be like hell. God, no wonder their faces look like that.” She pulled in a breath and let it out slowly. It was gruesome.

“It is. We have to stop it.”

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