“No. You heard him. He wants to see me die. If you’re out here looking for him, I want to be here, too.”

He didn’t try to dissuade her. He knew she was stubborn. Another stretch of silence lingered between them.

“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” he said.

Stein shrugged. “Go ahead.”

“Why did you say you’re not sure if you’ve done more harm than good in your life?” he asked.

She gripped the steering wheel tightly. Her eyes closed briefly and then opened again. The rain drowned out any other sounds around them.

“Oh, there are about a thousand answers to that,” she replied. And then a moment later, she added, “I’m an arrogant human being.”

“There are worse flaws.”

“Well, it can be fatal in a scientist. All this time, I thought I knew what I was doing, and the people who opposed me were simply misguided. Now I wonder if I was just a child pushing buttons on a computer I didn’t really understand.”

“People aren’t computers,” he pointed out.

“Maybe it would be better if we were. Then we’d know the right answers. It’s ironic, really. We build machines that remember everything, but our own brains are like the world’s most disorganized storage units. We put memories away and never see them again, or if we find them, they don’t look anything like we thought they did. I thought I was bringing order to all this chaos, but maybe I was just making it worse.”

He was trying to think of something to say when Dr. Stein stopped the car.

“Storage units,” she murmured.

“What?”

“I’m so sorry. I’m a fool. Here I am complaining about memory, and I forgot something important. I followed Darren that night when he went across the bay, but before he did, he stopped at a storage unit here in Dogpatch. I couldn’t see what he kept inside—”

“Where is it?” Frost interrupted her.

“At the end of Twenty-Second Street near the bay.”

“Let’s go. I’ll have Jess and a squad car meet us.”

“Do you think it means something?”

“I think a man who owns multiple buildings in this area doesn’t need a separate storage unit unless he has something to hide.”

Stein accelerated his Suburban through the rain. They headed east toward the water, and once they crossed the main artery at Third, they found themselves in a deserted commercial area leading toward the piers. Frankie drove until it looked like the road was ending, and then she turned again, where the street was barely wider than the SUV. She continued to the gates of a self-storage complex, and she stopped.

“It’s here,” she said.