The Night Bird (Frost Easton #1)(16)

“What was the shrink’s name?” he asked. “Do you remember?”

“Sure, because it was a little creepy. Francesca Stein. You know—Frankie Stein? Frankenstein? We joked about it. I have one of her cards. Do you want it?”

“I do.”

Lucy went over to her side of the apartment and rummaged through her nightstand drawers. She came back and handed him a business card. “Her office is right near Macy’s, so it was pretty convenient for Brynn.”

“Thank you, Lucy.”

Frost headed for the door, and Lucy hesitated, as if there was more she wanted to say. He thought she wanted to ask him out, but he knew she wouldn’t. It was too easy to follow the path you were on, rather than looking for cross-trails that might take you somewhere scary. He was like that, too.

“Well, say hi to Shack for me,” Lucy said lamely.

“I will.”

“Hey, did you ever catch the guy that killed the old woman? You know, Shack’s original owner?”

“Yeah, that was easy,” Frost told her with a grin. “He showed up at a hospital about two hours after the murder. Bleeding profusely. He had cat scratches all over his body.”





8


Frankie waited for her sister at Zingari, which was their traditional meeting spot twice a week. She had a glass of Russian River pinot noir in front of her, along with an order of cozze. That was her dinner. The jazz bar was loud, with a nighttime piano and saxophone duo rising in a mellow beat over the voices of the crowd. A candle flickered on her table. She leaned back into the cushioned bench and watched the reflections of faces in the mirrored wall.

Pam was late. As usual. But it didn’t matter. She sipped wine and lost herself in the noise. The garlic mussels were perfect.

She checked e-mails on her phone. Most of the messages were business related, which she could answer in a sentence or two. Follow-up on articles she’d published in scientific journals. Queries from colleagues. Conference invitations from around the world. She’d spoken on memory reconsolidation on nearly every continent over the past decade. In her field, she was widely known, but her fame had also brought controversy. Many of her peers disagreed bitterly with the ethics of her treatments, and they’d waged an academic war to discredit her.

Frankie didn’t care. What mattered to her was the outcomes for her patients.

Fame as a therapist had other strange side effects, too. Every night, when she scrolled through her e-mail, she found messages from ordinary people. Some were harmless. Some were desperate. Others were hate mail she’d learned to ignore. She clicked on one as she drank her wine: You are playing God. You are going to Hell, and I am praying for your salvation.



She deleted the message, along with several others in a similar vein. She kept the e-mails from people who had read her book and wanted to share stories of how their own painful memories had taken over their lives. Many wanted help, and she could reply to those from her office in the morning.

There was one message left that she hadn’t opened. The e-mail had no subject line. When she checked the date stamp, she saw that it had come into her in-box only five minutes earlier.

Frankie opened the message, which contained one line: Remember me?



There was nothing else. No signature. No attachment. She checked the return address of the sender and saw, [email protected]



Frankie’s brow furrowed with puzzlement. Something about the message unnerved her more than the others. She wasn’t sure what it was. She’d received much worse from strangers. This was nothing. And yet— She realized what was bothering her. When she checked her name, she saw that the message had come to her personal e-mail account, not the business e-mail address from her website. Her personal address was private. She gave it out only to family and friends, and to a very small number of patients whom she considered at risk of suicide. Even when she muted her phone at night, that e-mail address was programmed to ring through and alert her to a new message.

“Fan mail?”

Frankie looked up. Her favorite waiter, Virgil, hovered over her table with a bottle of wine. He had a luxuriant wave of shock-white hair that even women envied. His dark eyes were wicked, and his lips curled into a permanent smirk. He was tall and wore a tight black shirt and black pants.

She put down her phone. The battery was low, so she removed a portable charger from her purse and connected it. “Someone’s praying for my soul again.”

“Well, you and me need all the help we can get,” Virgil replied. “I figure I’m on the smite list if God gets bored. I keep looking up at the sky for a lightning bolt.”

“This is California, Virgil. When the smite comes, it’ll be an earthquake.”

Virgil spread his long arms wide. “Did you feel that? Was that a tremor?”

Frankie laughed. Virgil could always make her laugh.

“More fruit of the vine?” he asked her.

“Definitely.”

Virgil refilled her glass. His pours were generous. She was a regular, and she tipped well. The other servers at the restaurant knew that Virgil took the table whenever Frankie, Pam, and Jason came in. Frankie liked him. He was a San Francisco party child, always short of cash and crashing with gay friends. He was technically homeless, but nothing vanquished his sense of humor, which Frankie admired. He was proof that you could still live off the kindness of strangers.