Frost sized up Francesca Stein. He’d met plenty of psychiatrists in his investigations, and they hadn’t impressed him. They were happy to pretend they had all the answers, but if one of their patients shot up a movie theater, the finger of blame pointed everywhere except at themselves. He thought of them as gray little Freuds, probing for weaknesses like a child poking the stomach of a fat uncle.
Stein didn’t convey arrogance, but her brown eyes were cool. She had a classy grace about her that kept people at a distance. Her body was paper thin, but she didn’t look fragile. Her sister at the other table—they were obviously sisters—was the bombshell, but Frost found Frankie more interesting. She looked as if you could dig down a long way and never hit bottom.
The server with the wild white hair, Virgil, found an empty window table for them. Outside, the pedestrian traffic filled the sidewalk. It was Friday night, and despite a cool mist off the ocean, the Tenderloin regulars were out in force on Post Street in the wildest of fashions. Frost’s Suburban was parked in a red zone in front of the restaurant. Shack slept on top of the steering wheel, and the drunk girls who passed the SUV stopped to coo at him through the window.
“So what did you want to talk about, Inspector?” she asked. Her voice had a surprising softness.
“Brynn Lansing,” he said. “She was one of your patients.”
“I’m sure you know I can’t say anything about my patients,” Stein replied. And then, with a flicker of concern, she said, “Was?”
“Brynn’s dead.”
Stein’s dismay flew onto her face. It looked sincere. “I’m so sorry to hear that. What happened?”
“She tried to climb the Bay Bridge. She didn’t make it.”
“What?”
He explained the incident in detail, and he watched Stein’s face for a reaction. He saw only confusion.
“That’s a terrible thing,” she said when he was done. “And baffling.”
“Well, I was hoping you could unbaffle it for me,” Frost said. “After all, you were her therapist.”
“Even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything. The patient privilege isn’t automatically canceled by death.”
“I thought you might say that,” Frost replied, sliding a folded piece of paper from inside his coat pocket. “That’s why I had Brynn’s parents sign a release form. Upon her death, they took over her power of attorney.”
Stein read the form. “Fair enough. I want to help if I can. Unfortunately, in this case, I don’t think there’s anything useful I can share with you. I hadn’t seen Brynn in several weeks. The treatment we conducted was for a fairly minor problem. She was almost embarrassed to ask me about it.”
“Her fear of cats,” Frost said.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And you helped her forget about it?” Frost asked. “Is that how your treatment works?”
He’d done his homework on Francesca Stein over the course of the afternoon. He tried to keep the cynicism out of his voice, but he failed. What he’d read made him think that Lucy was right. As pretty as she was to look at, this woman was a little like Dr. Frankenstein.
“In simple terms, it’s something like that,” Stein told him. “The process is called memory reconsolidation.”
“And how exactly do you do that?”
Stein took her phone from her purse. It was connected to a portable battery charger. She pushed a few buttons, then extended her arm and gave the phone to Frost. “This is a video I show people at conferences. Take a look. It only lasts a few seconds.”
Frost pushed the play button on the phone screen. He expected a dry academic lecture in a classroom, but instead, he saw a video of an urban street somewhere in San Francisco. There were cars parked on the opposite curb. The street was lined with retail shops. Pedestrians walked back and forth in groups on both sides. As he watched, puzzled, a dark car drove into the frame and went without stopping through the intersection, where it T-boned another car with a sharp bang. Steam erupted. Voices shouted. And then the video cut off.
“I don’t understand,” Frost said.
“Let’s say you witnessed this actual incident,” Stein said, taking back her phone. “That ten seconds would be your reality. You can’t reexperience it, you can’t watch it again. All you can do is remember it.”
“Okay.”
“In other words, reality happens once, but memory happens over and over,” Stein told him. “Every time I ask you to think about the blue car that zipped through the stop sign and had an accident, your brain goes back and retrieves the memory, like a file from a cabinet. However, memories—unlike reality—aren’t fixed. With every recollection, we reshape what we saw. Our memories of an event are influenced by how we want a situation to be, how we perceive our role in it, what people tell us, and even by what we hear or read about what took place. After a while, our brains can’t distinguish between reality and our reconstruction of reality.”
“Eyewitnesses are unreliable,” Frost said. “I get it.”
“Exactly. Not only are they unreliable, they can be stubborn about it, too. Witnesses are often one-hundred-percent convinced of the facts, even when they’re wrong. And trauma can actually make it worse. You wouldn’t think a rape victim could ever misidentify her assailant, right? And yet it happens. Innocent men have gone to prison because of it.”
“Like I said, people get it wrong. How does that relate to what you do?”
Stein responded with a slight dip of her chin. She had a calmness and precision in everything she did. “My point is that people can change their own memories without even being aware that they’re doing so. The danger—and the opportunity—is that memories can also be deliberately altered. You may have heard about a controversy back in the nineteen eighties, in which therapists helped patients recover repressed memories of abuse. Most of those recovered memories were discredited, but to the patient they became real. And it’s not just therapists who are guilty of this kind of manipulation. Attorneys do the same thing, and so do police officers. Sometimes it’s accidental, and sometimes it’s intentional.”
“How does that work?” Frost asked.
“Think about the video I showed you. The blue car races through the stop sign and gets into an accident. There were a variety of retail stores in the background. Which coffee shop was on the street? Do you remember? Think about it.”
Frost did. Finally, he said, “I think it was Starbucks.”
“Are you sure?”
“No, but I think so.”
“It wasn’t Seattle’s Best?”
“I don’t think it was. Why? Am I wrong? Was it really Seattle’s Best?”
“Actually, there was no coffee shop on the street at all,” Stein told him. “But if we went over this a few more times, you would swear to me that it was a Starbucks. You’d see it in your head. Most coffee shops are Starbucks, so if someone plants the suggestion that there was a coffee shop, people tend to leap to the conclusion that they saw a Starbucks. Even when it wasn’t there at all.”
“Sneaky.”
“No, it’s just how memory works. How fast do you think the blue car was going when it blew through the stop sign? Want to hazard a guess?”
Frost shrugged. “I’d say thirty-five miles an hour.”
“It was going twenty. The control group in my studies typically guesses twenty-five. You went much higher. Do you know why?”
“I’m sure you’re going to tell me,” Frost said, slightly irritated.
“I’ve described the blue car several times as zipping or racing through the intersection. ‘Blew through the stop sign.’ My characterization influences your brain. You sped up the car because of how I described the incident, not because of what you actually remembered.” Stein leaned forward and added, “In addition, you haven’t corrected me about two important details, even though I’ve made the same mistakes several times.”
“Namely?”