Normally, she cleared her head when she ran, but the overnight threat lingered in her brain.

I’m going to watch you die.

She’d hardly slept. She kept telling herself that the e-mail was no more than a variation on the same kind of hate mail she received every day. Sometimes the work she did made her enemies. She’d forwarded the e-mail to a private security firm she’d used in the past and asked them to look into it. End of story.

Even so, thinking about it made her shiver.

Frankie ran full speed with the beach beside her. Whitecaps broke on the surface of the bay. She tasted salt on her tongue. At Torpedo Wharf, she continued around the bluff, following the paved road all the way to Fort Point below the bridge. She could see the webbed red metal of the Golden Gate here, behind the ghosts of fog. At the fort, she stopped long enough to catch her breath. She bent over, with her hands on her knees. She always thought of Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo in this spot, rescuing Kim Novak from a fake suicide attempt in the frigid bay waters. She’d watched the movie over and over as a teenager, trying to understand Stewart’s dangerous obsession. That was when she’d begun to think of mental health as a career.

She remembered telling her father about her plans to be a psychiatrist. He was appalled. To him, psychiatry wasn’t science. It was nothing more than astrology with a prescription pad. For years, she’d endured his nasty jokes.

What’s the difference between physics and psychiatry?

One’s full of quarks, and the other’s full of quacks.

And then he’d laughed. He had the meanest laugh of anyone she’d ever met. If he were still alive, he’d be laughing at her now. Blaming her for what happened to Brynn and Monica. “Psychiatrists are like children pushing buttons on a machine they don’t understand,” he would say. “And now look at what you’ve done. These women trusted you, and you killed them.”

Except it wasn’t Marvin’s voice in her head, blaming her for what happened. It was her own.

Frankie started running back toward the city skyline. She ran even faster, so that the noise of her breathing blocked out other sounds. If she couldn’t hear, she couldn’t think, and she didn’t want to think right now. She focused on the domed roof of the Palace of Fine Arts, and beyond it, the hilltop skyscrapers, including the pyramid of the Transamerica building. Beside her, the beach sand was wet and brown, and the morning was gray. She wove through the Saturday crowd, trying not to slow down.

She ran so fast that she sprinted right by the man on the bench.