Alice and Claude met back up with Detective Green to share the information they had received from James.
"We asked him if he would be willing to meet with you as well. I'm sure there are things you might want to follow up on."
Marsha nodded, "Thank you. I need to go through these notes and then I think that would be a good idea. What about the other missing person, Steve? Right? Were you able to find out his friend's contact information?"
Claude shook his head. "No, I've tried to reach out to him on the boards but haven't gotten any response. And I can't track the user to a person. It's been bounced around and masked. Honestly I don't know anything about Steve's friend at all. I keep using he, but for all I know they could be a woman. It's really hidden and they've been really vague about who they are."
"Why would they do that?"
"It's normal for these types of boards on this part of the web. I mean, you would have be to really good at what you do to be able to ever track my username back to me. There really is no point in having a hidden part of the web if you weren't hiding right?"
Marsha shrugged. It went against something in the very core of her being. The hiding. The avoiding. It felt like a crime was being committed just by being secretive. "But James was different?"
"Yeah, he wasn't trying to hide who he was. The username he was using and the direct line in to the boards was more like a beacon. He wanted help and he wanted people to be able to find him and see who he was. He was hoping that if he was open someone who knew something would trust him enough to share."
"So, the basic tendency in this world is to be secretive but the way to gain trust is by being an open book? That doesn't seem like it makes sense."
"And because of that for a lot of people what James did would have scared them off. Being too open looks like a trap. I actually tracked him in other areas for awhile before I ever showed the information to Dane or to you. So yeah, being really open doesn't make sense, unless you are really desperate."
"And did James seem desperate to you?"
Alice shook her head, "When he was first posting he was, but not now. He seemed resigned to me. He even said he had accepted that Joanna was probably dead. That she wouldn't have just stopped contacting him. I think whoever recruited her didn't pay enough attention to the relationship with James. They assumed no current boyfriend, no living family meant no strong social contacts. She was a loner. James said that aside from him all of her social contacts were really superficial. That nobody else in her life would have noticed that she left town and never contacted them again. She didn't have close friends like that. But she was close to James. Very close. And I think the people who screened her didn't realize that."
"You say recruit and screen, did James have information about that?"
"No, and I don't actually know that's what happened, but it makes sense. She told him she was getting a chance to work in the neurology field. Working with memory and storage. She was going to have a job that paid for her to go to college as she worked with them. There would have been a screening process. It would have looked like a typical job application, interview system, right? But they would have been looking for people with an interest in this field, along with no strong social ties. That fits with JJ and with the brief description of Steve that we found."
"Why though?"
"Want my best guess?" Claude asked. "I think they were running experiments using Dane's technology. They needed people who were interested in the field so they would be more willing to work with them and they needed people with no ties just incase things went bad."
"Or went exactly how they wanted them to go." Alice interjected.
"What?" Marsha asked.
"Think about it, what if the experiment they were running was how effective a complete wipe and rewrite of memory could be? They recruit people with no ties, erase and reset, then place them in another part of the country. Sort of a witness protection, but the protection is for whoever wiped their memory in the first place. It's what Dane was worried about when the CIA first came calling. That they'd try to use the technology to extract a confession and then wipe any memory of how they got it. Enhanced interrogation, torture, with no represcussion."
"But why would they then send JJ to you? That seems like a bad idea."
"I don't think they did. Not on purpose. They 'created' Jean by overwriting Joanna, but Joanna was still there. Memory is part of who we are, and it's like shorthand, we tell people things about us by what we remember, but you did those things for more complicated reasons than just the memory reveals. Like I go and get chocolate ice cream every July 3rd. If I were to share with you a memory of that day, you would see it's a tradition. But why is it a tradition? What started it? And if you erased every memory I had of getting chocolate ice cream on July 3rd, would I still go get ice cream?"
Claude was nodding along, "Ask yourself, why are you on the police force? What memory led you there?"
Marsha thought for a little bit. "I don't know that I can point to one thing. I've sort of always known that this is what I wanted to do. I want to help people, I want to answer questions, I want to be a force of good in the world, yes, I know it sounds corny, but that's the truth."
"Right. And JJ would have had the same drive. They took away her memories, but they didn't take away who she was. Not really. So when she saw the ad for Memory Lane she would have found the idea interesting. I think it was an oversight on their part that she came to work for us."
"But who are they?"
"That's the big question isn't it?" Claude shrugged.
"We should probably fill Dane in on all of this. See if he has any ideas."
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