The Night Bird (Frost Easton #1)(21)

Frost thought about his sister, Katie. All he had left of her was what he remembered. It made him believe that memories were sacred, the good and the bad. Even though there were things that he wished he could forget.

The car in the parking lot at Ocean Beach.

The body in the backseat.

“And how exactly do you alter someone’s memory?” he asked.

“If you talk to my husband, Jason—he’s a neuroscientist—he’ll tell you that someday soon, we’ll be able to use a laser and an MRI machine to light up the synapses in your brain and zap a particular memory. I try to do the same thing therapeutically. It’s a process I’ve spent more than fifteen years honing and perfecting. It combines hypnosis with audiovisual stimuli.”

“And drugs?” Frost asked.

“For some patients, yes, I’ll use drugs to increase susceptibility to hypnotic suggestion.”

“Does it always work?”

“No, of course not. There are no guarantees in psychiatry. My patients sign a release before treatment, because working on the brain is not like working on a car. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Some people can’t let go of memories. In very rare circumstances, treatment can even make it worse—intensifying the emotion or the memory, rather than removing it.”

“Enough that someone might, say, jump off a bridge?” Frost asked.

“If you’re talking about Brynn Lansing, my answer is no. Her treatment was weeks ago. It went fine.”

“So she couldn’t suddenly wake up and imagine herself being attacked by hundreds of feral cats?”

“That’s not how it works, Inspector. I don’t know what caused Brynn to behave as she did, but it was nothing that happened in my treatment room. This was something else entirely. There’s no connection.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am,” she insisted.

“Really? Then how do you explain Monica Farr?”

He saw anxiety bloom in Stein’s eyes. “What?”

“Monica Farr was another of your patients, wasn’t she? I checked the contacts on her phone. She had an entry for ‘Frankie.’ Guess whose number it was? And don’t worry, I can get a signed release for her patient records, too.”

“Are you saying that Monica—”

“Is dead,” Frost told her. “She had a psychotic breakdown just like Brynn. She shot herself in the head.”

The color vanished from Stein’s face. Her lips parted in horror. “Oh my God.”

Frost leaned forward across the table, and his voice was harsh. “Let’s face it, Dr. Stein, that’s a hell of a coincidence. Two patients come to you for treatment, and both of them wind up going crazy and killing themselves? I think you better start asking yourself what you really did inside their heads.”





10


“What do you remember about Monica Farr?” Jason asked.

Frankie stood in front of the solarium windows in her penthouse condominium on O’Farrell. It was almost midnight. She watched the city, and she could feel the city watching her. The art deco building between Leavenworth and Hyde was tall, with an east view toward the bay. When the Giants played at home, she could see fireworks over the stadium. In the distance, the lights of the Bay Bridge stretched toward Oakland, and she shivered as she thought about Brynn Lansing. Heights had never bothered Frankie, but she wondered what it was like to die that way, at the mercy of gravity. Like Brynn did. Like her father did.

Jason came up next to her and handed her a new glass of red wine. She’d already drunk too much this evening, and she felt the world floating, but she wanted more.

“Monica was an emergency-room nurse from Utah,” Frankie told him. “Three children arrived at the hospital after a house fire in Salt Lake. All of the kids were badly burned, and all of them died. Monica couldn’t get the episode out of her head. She moved to San Fran to get away from it, but she kept having flashbacks. She couldn’t do her job anymore.”

“How did you deal with it?”

Frankie pictured Monica in her head. Young. Redheaded. Slightly overweight. Monica’s face lit up when she talked about patients she’d helped. They had that in common. Frankie remembered the treatment strategy she’d chosen for her. The strategy was the most delicate part of therapy; that was where she had to read her patients and create a new reality that their minds would embrace.

“I didn’t want her to forget that the kids had died,” she said. “She dealt with loss every day. It was too much a part of who she was as a nurse. Instead, I helped her believe that she wasn’t really in the room when it happened. She didn’t see them die with her own eyes. I was hoping that would be enough to let her work through it. Monica wasn’t fragile. Nurses are tough. This was simply one tragedy too many.”

“Did the treatment work?” Jason asked.

“I thought it did. Monica called me a few weeks later. She was working as a nurse again. Graveyard-shift ER. It doesn’t get harder than that. But she sounded happy. She was calling to thank me.”

“So you did your job, Frankie. Don’t second-guess yourself.”

“Yes, but now she’s dead, and so is Brynn Lansing. That’s two of my patients showing signs of severe brain dysfunction.”