The Night Bird

15

Frankie spent the evening alone at Zingari. Jason texted that he was in his laboratory, and Pam still wasn’t speaking to her after their last argument. She sat at a window table beginning at six o’clock, and by the time she got to her fourth glass of wine, darkness had taken over the neighborhood outside the restaurant. She had her Kindle with her. She started the night by rereading The Myth of Repressed Memory by Elizabeth Loftus, but at the halfway point in the bottle of pinot noir, she switched to The Magus by John Fowles.

When she heard the ping on her phone, she knew her mysterious stalker was back. She opened the e-mail and saw

He was baiting her to write back, but instead, she forwarded the e-mail to Pell Security, and then she called the CEO of the company to see if they’d had any luck tracing the overnight message to its source. She reached him, but he didn’t have good news. The GMX account had been accessed via a generic IP address on a public Wi-Fi server and couldn’t be linked to an individual.

He also confirmed that the sender had been logged in at Zingari on Friday while she was there.

The Night Bird was definitely watching her.

Frankie hung up her phone and spent a long time examining every face in the restaurant. No one looked back at her. No one looked familiar. She realized that the stranger had what he wanted. He was playing with her head.

“Everything okay?” Virgil asked as he refilled her glass, emptying the bottle. His lavish white forelock spilled down his forehead. He was dressed in the usual black uniform, which he wore a size too small to show off his physique.

“More love letters,” Frankie said. She connected a charger to her phone to juice the battery.

“Well, aren’t you the lucky one.”

“Not so lucky. This one says he wants to watch me die.”

The dark brows over Virgil’s hawk-like eyes arched in surprise. His smirk froze as he tried to figure out whether she was joking. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Are you going to call the cops or something?”

“They won’t do anything. They’ll come if he shows up waving a gun, but short of that, I’m on my own.” She added, “He was in here last night, Virgil.”

“The hell you say.”

“My security company traced him to the Wi-Fi at the restaurant. Was anyone asking about me? Or watching me?”

“Just that tasty cop.”

“Keep an eye open, okay?” Frankie asked. “If you see somebody, let me know.”

“My eyes are always open,” Virgil said.

Frankie went back to her wine. She picked at the plate of yellowfin tuna in front of her. She gazed at Post Street to see if anyone lingered in the arched entrances of the Marriott, but no one outside the hotel paid special attention to the windows at Zingari.

She wondered if she should call the CEO at Pell Security again and ask him to provide personal protection for a few days. She’d had to do that once before, when the Darren Newman case exploded. The knifing death of the young woman, Merrilyn Somers, had put Frankie in the headlines, and she’d received anonymous threats from people who were convinced that she’d set a killer free. Legally, she was blameless, but morally, she couldn’t shake her own sense of guilt. She was relieved when Newman was cleared, but her doubts about him had never gone away.

Frankie felt surrounded by ghosts in the restaurant. Her father. Darren Newman. The Night Bird. And now Todd Ferris, too — the man at the Bay Trail with his memories of torture in a white room. She wasn’t convinced that what Todd had experienced was real. Some people made up stories that put themselves at the center of current events. It made them feel important. His descriptions also had a hallucinatory quality, maybe from drugs, maybe from dreams. Even his recollection of Brynn Lansing — if it had happened at all — could be easily explained. Brynn worked near Frankie’s building; he might well have seen her as he was going in or out of the Union Square office.

She’d urged Todd to schedule an appointment, but he declined. He still didn’t want anything in writing. And then he’d left. That was that. She wondered if she would hear from him again.

Virgil slid into the chair opposite her. He smoothed his beautiful hair. “Want company?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Oh good, because I wasn’t going to give you a choice.”

“Can I ask you a question, Virgil?”

“Nine inches,” he said.

“Oh, oh, oh, TMI,” Frankie replied, knowing she was drunk and not particularly caring. “No, I want to know if you take drugs.”

“Say it a little louder, honey,” Virgil told her.

Frankie realized she was almost shouting, and she was glad the noise of the restaurant drowned her out. She lowered her voice and leaned across the table and took Virgil’s hands. “Sorry. Do you?”

“Are you a cop now?”

“No.”

“Well then — duh. Of course I do.”

“Are you careful?”

“I’m careful about all things I allow inside my body. It pays to be cautious, no?”

“It does.” She added, “What drugs do you take?”

His teeth flashed behind his plump lips. “Are you in the market? Do you need me to hook you up?”

“No. Just curious.”

“Well, I don’t usually share that information with people I’m not sleeping with,” Virgil said, “but since you’re a friend, let’s just say I don’t discriminate between legal and illegal pharmaceuticals.”

“Have you heard anything on the street about bad drugs? Laced heroin? PCP? Bath salts? Any reports of extreme hallucinogenic reactions?”

“Only among your patients,” Virgil replied.

Her face bloomed with shock and anger, and he held up his hands in surrender. “Sorry, honey, that was nasty. Pam was in here for lunch. She told me what’s going on. Didn’t mean to poke the porcupine.”

Frankie leaned back in her chair and shook her head. “Am I an evil person, Virgil?”

“What, for messing with minds? Some minds need to be messed with.”

“I change reality for people,” Frankie said.

“Because they ask you to, right?”

“Yes, but maybe I have no business playing God with what’s real and what’s not. My father accused me of being no better than a lobotomist.”

“What a charming man Marvin was,” Virgil said.

“Can I tell you a secret? I don’t really miss him. I can’t even say I’m sorry he’s dead. I’ve never said that to another human being. Not even Jason.”

It lifted a burden for her to say the words out loud. She’d felt that way for months. Her father had been emotionally abusive to her and Pam his whole life. Making them feel small. Making them feel worthless. To have him gone was — a relief. It was horrible, but it was the truth.

“Do you feel guilty for feeling that way?” Virgil asked. In black, he looked like a priest in the confessional.

“Yes.”

“Well, don’t.”

“He was my father.”

“And that means what, exactly? It’s biology. He donated a sperm cell. Is that some kind of noble act? Parenthood ain’t the sex, honey. It’s everything that comes after.”

“Is your father still alive?” Frankie asked.

“I have no idea, but I suppose he is. I don’t think God is too anxious to meet him. Do you know what he did when I told him at age ten that I thought another boy was cute? He shoved a broom handle into my mouth until I vomited. He said, ‘No son of mine is going to be a filthy homo.’”

Frankie closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, V.”

“Don’t be. All I’m saying is, some parents aren’t worth mourning. There’s good ones, and there’s bad ones. You and me, we had bad ones.”

“I guess I should be grateful it wasn’t worse. He never physically harmed us.”

“You can get plenty of scars without ever being touched,” Virgil said.

“You’re right. Ever thought of changing careers? You give good shrink.”

He winked. “You’ll get my bill.”

Virgil pushed back the chair and stood up. He bent down and kissed Frankie on top of the head, and then he disappeared into the Zingari crowd. She felt lonely being alone now. She called Jason, but the call went to voice mail. She called Pam to apologize for their fight, but her sister didn’t answer, either.

And then ping.

Another e-mail.

It was almost as if her stalker were keeping her company. As if he knew she was alone and he wanted to be there for her. She studied the restaurant again, but if the Night Bird was here, he was hiding in a crowd of faces. She opened the e-mail.

Frankie told herself, Do not respond. That was what the security company had said. Never respond. He will try to goad you into replying. That’s what he wants. To engage you. To suck you in.

Do not respond.

She tapped out a response on her phone: “Who?”

Her finger hovered over the “Send” button. To send or not to send. She knew she was making a mistake by playing his game, and yet the darkness of his messages felt ominous.

No.

Frankie deleted the reply without sending it. She deleted the original message. No more games; it was time to go home. With a sigh of relief, she removed her wallet from her purse and peeled off cash to pay for her dinner and wine. She left the money on the table. She looked for Virgil in the crowd to wave good-bye, but she didn’t see him.

Outside, on Post Street, the night air was cool. Trees shivered in the planter boxes. High buildings dwarfed her on all sides. She checked the street, but she felt safe among the garish throngs of Saturday-night partiers. Her condo on O’Farrell was only five blocks away.

She heard the chime of her phone again. Ping. He wasn’t giving up.

Frankie hesitated. No matter how much she wanted to pull away, she found herself going deeper into this man’s game. She had no choice. She opened the message:

This time, there was something more to the e-mail. She saw an attachment file — a JPEG picture. He’d sent her a photograph.

Do not respond.

Never open attachments.

But she did. She clicked on the image, wondering if she’d made a mistake that would give him access to her whole electronic life, but it felt as if he knew everything about her already. Where she was. What she was doing.

Frankie stared at the photo on the small screen of her phone. It had been taken from above, like a still image captured from a ceiling-mounted webcam. The photo showed the inside of a busy cocktail lounge. People crowded shoulder to shoulder in the semidarkness. The bar glowed with red and green lights reflecting on dozens of liquor bottles stocked on mirrored shelves. She squinted and saw something else, too — three vintage pinball machines from the ’80s. She knew where this place was.

It was a bar two blocks away. She and Jason had been there many times. Loud pop music. Drinks. Dancing.

Frankie checked the time. It was five minutes to midnight. Five minutes.

She didn’t understand why this photograph was supposed to mean anything to her, but then she remembered: She needs you. With a pinch of her fingers, she enlarged the image and scrolled from face to face. No one was looking at the camera. No one knew they were being photographed. She didn’t see anyone she recognized. The faces were all strangers, except—

Frankie felt the breath leave her chest.

She zoomed in on one face until the image began to lose its focus. And she realized that she knew this woman. Her name was Christie Parke. She was thirty-seven years old. She lived in Millbrae and worked as a loan officer at a branch of Wells Fargo downtown. Five years ago, while volunteering at a homeless shelter, she’d been stuck with a dirty needle and diagnosed with AIDS. The lab result turned out to be a false positive. She was fine. But the experience had left her with a deadly fear of needles.

It was a fear that Frankie had helped her erase.

Christie was one of her patients.

Frankie stared at the steep Mason Street hill that led up toward the bar. She started running.