“And you didn’t think that information was worth sharing with the police?” Jess asked acidly. Her brown bangs fell in front of her eyes.

“He put it in a speculative context, not as a confession. It was all ‘what if.’ There wasn’t enough to break privilege. Even though my gut told me that he was telling the truth.”

Jess pounded out of the storage unit with loud, heavy footsteps. Frost knew she didn’t cover her anger well.

“There wasn’t anything I could do,” Frankie said to Frost. “I’m sorry.”

“What else do you see in these photographs?” he asked her. “What do they tell you? I need a read on this man, Frankie. I need to know what he’s really doing.”

“Well, for one thing, it’s pretty obvious why he stopped here that night,” Frankie told him.

“Why?”

“He was going to Berkeley to have sex with Simona. He stopped here first to look at the pictures.”

Frost was puzzled, and then he understood. “My God. This is what turns him on.”

“Yes.”

“What else? Get inside this guy’s head.”

He knew that was the last place she wanted to be, but she bent over his shoulder, until she could make out every detail in the collection of photographs. Then she turned around and studied the rest of the storage unit. The crates. The yellow walls. The tea and the pill bottles. The rain pouring across the open doorway.

“Something’s wrong,” she said.

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“You wrote that down on the note I found in your office, too. Something’s wrong. What did you mean by that?”

“Just that I can’t make all the pieces of the puzzle fit. I mean, most of them do, but there’s one piece that feels like it comes from a different puzzle. I’m sorry, I know that’s not helpful.”

“Right now, I don’t care what doesn’t fit,” Frost told her. “What does fit?”

Frankie hesitated. “The knife.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s consistent. Newman uses a knife on these women.”

“So?”

“Todd talked about seeing a knife. He remembered seeing a knife the last time he was taken.”

“The last time,” Frost said. “You mean, when the Night Bird took Lucy?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“What does that mean?” Frost asked.

“I’m not sure, Frost, but he says the game’s almost done, and now there’s a knife in the mix. He always uses a knife. It tells me we need to find Lucy soon. Before something happens to her.”

Frost got out of the chair. He took a long, hard look at the women pictured on the desk. Their faces. Their smiles. And then their bodies, riddled by knife wounds. He had a brief, grotesque image of Lucy in the same position. He thought about Darren Newman standing over her with a camera. After. His anger consumed him, and he felt powerless.