Philosopher's Stone

One lonely night. Pete Pinel's decade-long goodbye to his murdered wife is interrupted by an escaped madman, a Nobel-prize winning psychiatrist who claims to have created a Philosopher s Stone a catalyst that can open every lock in the brain. Allegedly tortured for secrets his diseased brain has lost, he enlists Pinel's protection with hints at undiscovered motives for Veronica s death. When gunmen snatch the madman, leaving Pinel for dead, the detective is saved and befriended by a beautiful psychiatrist, the madman s legal guardian. In a mysterious ebb of his grief, Pinel's unquenched thirst for bloody justice surges, leading to a drug company s illicit experiments and an unholy alliance with a criminal kingpin. Recovering encrypted files detailing the Philosopher s Stone s sordid development, Pinel re-captures the madman in a climactic gunfight in a desert ghost-town. Driven by the guardian's dedication to saving the madman's work, Pinel puts justice on hold, racing to retrieve a forgotten password from memories inexorably deleted by the scientist's own creation. The woman's adamantine devotion, however, introduces a new catalyst into Pinel s impulse-trigger-target nature: choice. His black-and-white sense of right and wrong is mottled by an unfamiliar question: Does justice sometimes lie in mercy?