Frost slipped inside and closed the office door. He reholstered his gun. He found the light switch for the office suite and turned on the lights in the waiting room. The door to Dr. Stein’s private office was directly in front of him, and he headed quickly across the carpet and let himself inside.

Like most scientists, Stein was obsessively organized. That was unfortunate. When he’d been here before, she’d kept patient files on her large oak desk, but she’d refiled them in two locked cabinets on the wall. He sat down in her chair and booted up her computer, but the hard drive required a password to access her files. He shut it down again and frowned.

Stein kept a yellow manila pad on the desk for notes, but the pages were blank. He turned on her desk light and held the pad near the bulb to see if there were visible indentations of the notes she’d made. He found nothing. Then he pulled a garbage can from under her desk and saw two wadded balls of paper inside. He removed them and flattened them on the surface of the desk.

On one page, he saw a handwritten address. The location was near the city’s container ship piers. That was one advantage of his past life as a taxi driver; he knew every street location around San Francisco. He folded the page and shoved it in his pocket.

He checked the other note. Stein had written,

White room. Where? Near Dogpatch?

Owns warehouses.

TF. Fall guy. Same as before.

And then a little lower on the page,

Something not right! What?

Frost tried to make sense of the notes, but he didn’t have enough information. He reached forward and pulled the office phone closer to him. He navigated the menu to the list of recent calls, and he punched redial on the last call she’d made, which was several hours earlier.

The phone rang six times, and then a male voice answered. “So what is it now, Frankie? Can’t stay away from me?”

Frost waited. He let the silence draw out without speaking.

“Frankie?” the man went on, his voice colored with suspicion. “Don’t be shy. We both know what you want.”

Finally, when Frost let the dead air continue, the man hung up.

Frost grabbed his own phone to call for a reverse directory on the number, but the listing came back with no identification. Whoever Stein had called was using a pay-as-you-go burner phone.

He didn’t have much, but he had an address near the pier.

Frost stood up to leave, but then he heard another male voice. This one was in the room with him.

“Who the hell are you?”