Frost studied the grease-stained concrete. It didn’t tell him anything more. On the wall six feet away, he spotted a metal box with a glass door and a fire extinguisher inside. He noticed something on top of the wall-mounted box and walked over to check it out. He put on gloves and removed the object, which was a compact disc of an old music album inside a jewel case.

The CD was Wrap Around Joy by Carole King. Frost turned the jewel case over, and he read the track list.

The first song was “Nightingale.”

With his gloved hands, he opened the case and was startled as dozens of tiny silver needles spilled from inside and bounced and scattered on the floor, like metal insects. He squatted down and picked one up and rolled it between his fingers. It was shiny and sharp.

He remembered what Frankie had told him.

Needles.

That was what Christie Parke feared the most.

What’s your worst memory?

22

22

Fog chased Frankie into the coastal hills.

She took the southbound 280 freeway out of the city, then merged west onto Highway 1, the road that hugged the California coast all the way from Santa Barbara to Crescent City. It was twilight. The deep-blue sky darkened to black minute by minute. The fog made the ocean invisible below her, and its first threads feathered across the highway as the cloud moved inland.

The address that Todd Ferris had given her was on the coast in the small town of Pacifica. She didn’t know if the address was fake—like the phone number—but she needed to find Todd again and find out what else he remembered from inside that white room.

The highway cut through green hills. She saw gnarled trees that grew sideways under the assault of gusts off the Pacific. Damp chill worked its way inside her car. A few drops of rain spit on her windshield. More fog washed across the road, playing games with her eyes, and she slowed and squinted to follow the curves that wound like a snake. The trees on the hills became ghosts. Milky parkland surrounded her, appearing and disappearing.

Frankie glanced in her rearview mirror. The headlights of another car came and went in the cloud. The car hung back, keeping a steady distance behind her. She had a strange feeling about it. She liked having company on the treacherous road, and yet a paranoid voice in her head made her wonder if she was being followed.

As she neared Pacifica, the GPS advised her to turn in a quarter mile, but the road to Todd Ferris’s apartment was barely an alley, and she missed it in the fog. She kept going to the next turn that led toward Rockaway Beach. Pacifica by the water was no more than a jumble of buildings and a few dead-end streets. Mist blurred the beach road, and a few gauzy lights shined in the windows of the local motel.