Dryden followed the road through a sharp curve. Dense forest on both sides of it now, high in the hills above the canyon. The road would lead over the pass and come back down on the other side, somewhere at the west end of the San Fernando Valley.

“Drugs,” Dryden said. “A combination of them—a cocktail. The idea was to permanently damage someone’s memory going back weeks or months beforehand. If it worked, the witness wouldn’t remember the thing they’d seen. Problem solved.”

“They forced people to take the drugs?”

Dryden nodded. “Forced them, ordered them, tricked them, whatever. It wasn’t a pill, if that’s what you’re picturing. This would have been chemicals in a drip bag. And it wasn’t anything that went through FDA trials for safety. There were people who died from it, going by the stories I heard. Even when it worked, it was major brain trauma, with weeks of recovery. Christ, it was supposed to be brain trauma. That was the point of it. It wasn’t some careful thing they spent years refining; it was just a class of drugs that had memory damage as a side effect. Pretty simple, really. And it was the lesser evil. It was better than killing somebody, that’s all.”

He indicated the stack of papers and continued: “A scrub file is a write-up of whatever the witness knew, before taking the drug. Like a snapshot of the memories that were about to get erased.”

They rode in silence for thirty seconds. The pine forest gave way to a region of blackened trunks where a wildfire had burned through, probably a year or two before. Dense green grass covered the forest floor beneath the dead trees, dotted with yellow and purple flowers.

Danica held up the pages. “Is this tied to something from your time in the military? Is that why these people are after you? Do you think someone used drugs like that on you?”

Dryden shook his head. “Like I said, they stopped doing that stuff way before my time. And even if someone had done it, I’d know. Trust me. People who had this done to them, they knew it. It wasn’t anything subtle at all. You’d have weeks or even months missing from your memory. There’s no gap like that from my time in the military.”

Danica was quiet for a long moment, looking at the stack.

“My father was in the Army,” she said. “He got out when I was a kid, junior high.” She looked up at Dryden. “That man back at the house, the older man—my stepdad—he told me this document was my mom’s. He said my dad gave it to her. He said she never wanted me to see it, because—” She paused, maybe piecing together whatever she’d heard. “He said she was afraid I’d dig into it and wake up sleeping dogs.”