The Night Bird

9

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?”

“The car in the video was dark green, not blue. And there was no stop sign at the intersection. It was a yield sign.”

Frost thought back to the video, and he realized to his dismay that he wasn’t sure if she was telling him the truth or not. Stein smiled at him with a slight turn of her lips.

“I’m not trying to make you feel like a fool, Inspector. It’s simply that this is how memory fails us. It’s highly suggestible. If an attorney or police officer did what I did to an accident witness, they’d be very likely to remember a blue car going through a stop sign the next time they tried to recall the incident. And that might be in a courtroom.”

“No offense, Dr. Stein, but you’re not exactly making me feel good about your memory treatments. The whole process sounds dangerous. I read that some of your colleagues have tried to drum you out of the profession because of what you’re doing.”

“You’re right,” Stein admitted. “Altering memories is very risky. Because of the dangers involved, the traditional viewpoint in psychiatry is that you should never do it. You can try to sever the emotional response from the memory, but you shouldn’t try to erase or replace the memory itself. Many therapists and scientists think our life is the product of our varied experiences, good and bad, and that we shouldn’t mess with that.”

“But you’re right, and they’re wrong?” Frost challenged her.

“Not necessarily. I just take a different view. I believe that a patient can decide for himself or herself how they want to be treated. It’s their life, not mine, not anybody else’s. The people who argue against assisted suicide aren’t the ones who have to experience debilitating pain or watch a family member suffer. It’s the same with painful memories. I’d rather empower the patient to live a better life, and if they want to do that by altering part of their past, that’s their choice. After all, a tumor is part of your life experience, too, isn’t it? But we wouldn’t hesitate to surgically remove it. So I don’t think memories are sacrosanct.”

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.”