One lonely night, a decade after the death of his wife, a still bereft Pete Pinel is accosted by an escaped madman who claims to have created a "Philosopher's Stone" - a catalyst that can "open every lock in the brain." To enlist the detective's protection from men torturing him for his secrets, he hints at undiscovered motives for Veronica's murder. Before he can say more, however, gunmen snatch the madman and leave Pinel for dead. Saved and befriended by a beautiful psychiatrist, the madman's legal guardian, Pinel begins to let go his grief. His unquenched thirst for bloody justice, nevertheless, leads him to a drug company's illicit experiments and an unholy alliance with an Orange County criminal kingpin. Finding the encrypted files that describe the twisted details of the Philosopher's Stone's development, Pinel rescues the madman in a climactic gunfight in a desert ghost-town. As an experimental drug rapidly erases the scientist's memory, Pinel and the psychiatrist race to retrieve his forgotten password. The psychiatrist's adamantine devotion to the madman and to "saving his work," introduces into Pinel's impulse, trigger, target nature an unacknowledged catalyst: choice. An unfamiliar perspective of forgiveness challenges Pinel's black-and-white sense of right and wrong with a question: Is there justice in mercy?