Page 78 of Borrowed Pain
"He knows tradecraft," I said quietly.
"Better than most civilians." Dorian pulled up the GPS tracking data. "Look at the route he drove before abandoning the vehicle. Surveillance detection patterns, counter-surveillance loops. Someone taught him how to disappear."
The data points connected across a map of greater Seattle—seemingly random stops at gas stations and convenience stores, but actually a sophisticated pattern designed to flush out pursuit teams.
Who had trained a neuropharmacologist to run like a federal agent?
I closed my eyes and let memory pull me backward.
University of Virginia campus. Coffee shop tucked between the psychology building and the medical library, with afternoon light filtering through windows that needed cleaning.
Dr. Tobias Rook sat across from me.
"I thought we were helping people," he said for the third time. "Memory restructuring for trauma recovery. Clinical trials with informed consent."
Lucia leaned forward, her voice gentle but persistent. "What changed your mind?"
"The retention rates." Rook's voice cracked. "Ninety-seven percent of patients showed complete symptom resolution within eight weeks. Ninety-seven percent, Agent Reyes. That's not therapy—that's magic. Or something worse."
He pulled out a flash drive, setting it between us like evidence in a murder trial.
"I started documenting everything. Drug protocols, patient responses, outcome measurements. The breakthrough wasn't healing trauma—it was erasing the patients' ability to form coherent memories around the traumatic events."
My pen stopped moving. "Explain that."
"Imagine you could selectively damage someone's hippocampus." Rook stared down at his coffee. "Not enough to cause obvious cognitive impairment, but enough to prevent emotional memory consolidation. They'd remember the trauma happened, but they couldn't access the feelings associated with it."
"That sounds like healing."
"Until you realize they also can't access joy, love, attachment—any emotional memory formed before or after treatment." Rook's hands shook as he lifted his mug. "We weren't curing PTSD. We were creating emotional zombies."
The coffee shop bustled around us—students cramming for midterms, professors grading papers—while Rook described a form of psychological murder dressed up as cutting-edge medicine.
"How many patients?" Lucia asked.
"Hundreds. Maybe thousands across all their facilities." He looked at her. "And they're expanding. New locations every quarter, recruiting more researchers and refining the protocols."
That night, Lucia called me at home. "Rowan, we need to move fast on this. Rook's willing to testify, but he's scared. Says they've been monitoring his communications."
I remember the exact words from Rook because I wrote them down, pen scratching across the notepad I kept beside my bed: "They're not healing trauma—they're weaponizing it. And they know I know."
Two days later, Lucia's car went through the guardrail on I-95.
"Rowan."
Dorian's voice pulled me back to the present.
"You look like you've seen a ghost."
"I have." I rubbed my eyes, trying to erase the sound of Lucia's laugh lingering in my head. "Rook was our best source. He was the only person willing to go on record about what Healing Horizons was doing."
"And after your partner died?"
"He disappeared. Vanished so completely that we assumed he was dead, too." I turned back to the monitors. "But someone taught him to run. Professional evasion techniques."
Dorian's fingers flew across his keyboard. "If he's been hiding for three years, he's had help. Let me run a cross-reference on his known aliases and federal witness protection protocols."
Numbers cascaded down the screens while databases talked to each other in languages I couldn't read. After ten minutes, Dorian leaned back in his chair.
