Lost and Found (Masters & Mercenaries: The Forgotten #2)(107)

“Veronica?’ He leaned forward like that name was a lifeline. “Who was she?”

A vision of a pretty young woman with long, dark hair floated through her brain. “She was one of the research assistants McDonald brought over from Texas with her. She was fresh out of UT medical. From what I could tell, she wrote up a lot of the research for the group.”

“Could we find her?”

She nodded. “Yes, but I don’t know that you’ll like what she says about you. She hated you. You were mean to her. Again, you were pretty much mean all the time. You ran the group while McDonald was traveling, and she traveled a lot. She had speaking engagements and conferences. Well, that’s what she said she was doing. She said she worked with the US Army on some projects dealing with retrograde amnesia. I didn’t ask for proof.”

She should have, apparently.

He sat back. “She wouldn’t want to talk to me.” He seemed to shake it off. “Did I ever talk about my family? Did you know where I lived? We found evidence of a Dr. Reasor when we found McDonald’s personal notes, but we can’t find me. Anywhere. It’s like I never existed.”

And that was odd. “There’s no record of you at Yale?”

He shook his head. “No. We checked all the medical schools. I know that sounds crazy, but the team I work with has a couple of excellent hackers. There’s a whole company we work with. They do nothing but track missing persons. In this case they’re working backward, but if anyone could find me, it would be them. Nothing.”

“There can’t be nothing,” she said, her mind working. “You haven’t looked in the right place yet. Hope’s father would have had the power to change records perhaps, but he was dead by then. Why would she have erased your memory? Could you have seen something you shouldn’t have? I don’t think that’s it. She let you have power over the project when she was gone. I was limited in what I could see of her research, but you often used her computer. I think you had to have threatened her in some way.”

“Like I threatened you?”

She set aside the yogurt and put her hands on the table because she needed balance. This would be easier if Owen were here in the room with her, but she had to forget about him in a comfort role. She was certain all his talk was about keeping her under control. Pleasing her sexually had worked well once. He was simply going back to a familiar tactic. “Yes, you threatened me. You scared me so badly that I ran and I didn’t look back. It was the only time I ever left a job.”

“What did I threaten to do?” He seemed to brace himself as well, his shoulders squaring and spine straightening.

He was a lovely man. He always had been, but there had been a hardness to the old Steven Reasor, a sneer that seemed to dominate his every expression. There was none of that on this man’s face. He seemed younger than Reasor. Despite the doctor’s youthful age, he’d always seemed so much older than she was. Not so the man in front of her.

Maybe she needed to start thinking of him as a patient. If this man had walked in with a degenerative brain disease and had wanted to call himself Tucker, she would let him do that. She would allow him to do anything that made him comfortable.

And she would have had someone confront him with events that might spark his memory.

“You threatened to kill me.” She was happy with how even her tone was. “Not before you’d sampled the goods, as you put it, but you promised that after you’d figured out what made me tick, you were going to kill me. I believed you.”

“I threatened to rape you?” He looked sick at the thought.

“Not in so many words, but that was the gist.” She needed to know a few things. Faith had talked about what had happened to her husband, but only in vague terms. “McDonald was there the last few days I spent at the Kronberg lab. You and she were fighting about something. I don’t know what because she refused to acknowledge that anything was wrong.”

McDonald had smiled, a gesture that didn’t reach her eyes, and sent her back to work. Nothing to worry about. She would handle everything, and could Becca bring her the latest results on the primary testing?

“In her journal she talked about dealing with Reasor if she had to. She didn’t say why, but she said if he continued to cause problems, she knew how to handle him.” His eyes became steady, focused utterly on her. “Did I rape you?”

“No.” She sighed. “I don’t think so.”

His breath hitched and he stood up, panic plain in every movement of his body. This was killing him, and she didn’t think he was faking it.

“I don’t think you did anything to me physically, but I had a dream the night before I left.” It was past time to figure this out. “It was weird. I had dinner and I felt sick. That was the last thing I remembered. I woke up in one of the patient beds, and someone had given me IV fluids. The nurse on duty told me I’d had a terrible stomach flu and I’d passed out. She said it happened to a couple of us who ate in the cafeteria.”

He shook his head as though the blows just kept coming. “You think I poisoned you?”

“I had dreams that night. The worst dreams I’ve ever had. They were so vivid. It felt like weeks passed and you were there. You tortured me.”

“In your dreams.”

She nodded. “And when I got back to my room, that was when you confronted me. You were angry because Dr. McDonald was talking about bringing me on full time. I was supposed to go on a trip to Argentina with her the week after, and you’d just found out. I guess you wanted to be the one to go.”