Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 111860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 559(@200wpm)___ 447(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 111860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 559(@200wpm)___ 447(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
“Bullshit.”
Finch laughed and then squinted one eye. “You still box?”
“Hell yes, I still box.” Ambrose ducked his head and did a few jabs into the air. “Do you wanna go a few rounds for old times’ sake? Think you can take me?”
Finch laughed. “Probably not. You look cut. Good for you.”
His expression became serious again, and Ambrose could tell he was still peering down that fog-filled road less traveled. And Ambrose understood, because he did that sometimes too. “Hey, Finch, those what-ifs, that other life that got cut short—it’s the point of all this.”
“I know, man. I know.” He met Ambrose’s eyes. “The project, it has to go on. It can’t stop. All the work . . . all the lives. We’ve gotta protect it.”
“That’s what I’m doing. I’m taking a big risk. And it can’t last much longer unless I wanna end up behind bars. I wouldn’t do well in prison, Finch.”
“Yeah, I know. What have you discovered so far?”
Ambrose took the six-pack of water bottles he’d bought out of the grocery bag, tore one off, and held it up to Finch in offer. Finch shook his head, and Ambrose opened the cap and took a swig as he thought back to the information he’d acquired from the police files on the two previous crime scenes. “The pills are almost identical to Doc’s product. Same imprint. The concoction is the same in both ingredients and strength, with the singular addition of an LSD coating.”
“LSD?”
“Yeah. Out of a therapeutic setting, these ones would send anyone for a loop, and likely not a good one.”
“The shape is the same?”
Ambrose nodded. “Same shape, same color, and like I said, identical imprint.”
“That can’t be a coincidence.”
“No, I don’t believe so either.”
“What does the addition of the LSD mean?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a mistake. Maybe something to make it stronger, or more likely to achieve some sort of something.”
“Maybe a message?”
“What kind of message?”
“That this person knows about the project and is adding his own twist?”
Ambrose thought about that for a moment. “Could be.” A sign that this person wasn’t simply stealing or recreating product but adding to it somehow. “Another thing that strikes me as a message is the scattering of pills left at each scene. Even if you purchased a drug like that on the street, you’d most likely buy one for each person joining you.”
“Like ecstasy or acid,” Finch said.
“Yeah. This isn’t the type of drug to support a habit. It’s a party favor.”
“For a fucked-up party.”
“Well, yes. But still. The fact that there are several left behind tells me the person leaving them very much wants us to see the pills themselves, and not just the ingredients that show up in an autopsy.”
“Agreed.” Finch blew out a breath. “What else are you thinking?”
Ambrose took another long drink of water. “I think someone is doing a bad mock-up of the project.” It’d been his worry going into this, and the reason he’d taken the risk he had. The existence of the pills hadn’t yet been released to the media, but Doc knew someone in the SFPD who had leaked the information to him after he’d recognized the pills—or thought he had—in the evidence room. Ambrose had been contacted, and he’d come to San Francisco to infiltrate the SFPD. He just needed to get his hands on the case files and make some copies, nothing more, nothing less. But not more than twelve hours after he’d arrived, he’d been called to a murder scene. The opportunity to set foot inside one that held the similarities he’d been looking for was a stroke of luck. The fact that it’d made him even more certain that the similarities were purposeful worried the hell out of him. Feeling immediately drawn to the inspector working the case had come completely out of left field.
Life. It sure could be strange.
“A bad mock-up of the project,” Finch repeated. “There must be other similarities, then.”
“The victims, for one. Homeless. Strung out. The police have only ID’d one and are still gathering information on him, but I’d bet anything that as soon as they ID more, they’ll find that several have been diagnosed with PTSD.” He paused. Or maybe they hadn’t. Maybe it’d been missed and buried under a whole slew of other diagnoses that were the side effects of that one. “There’s evidence that some purposeful regression occurred,” he told Finch.
Finch’s forehead crunched into folds of wrinkles. “What evidence was there of that?”
“Children’s toys and also sex toys.”
Finch seemed to think about that. “Some people get off on that stuff. Or they think they do. But . . . yeah, in the midst of the purple pills with a ‘BB’ imprint, it looks like something we need to figure out.” He pinched the sides of his bottom lip. “Who the fuck would be doing this, Ambrose?”