The Night Bird

21

The only evidence Frost found at Christie Parke’s apartment in Millbrae was a ticket from a downtown parking ramp in the cup holder of her Honda Civic. It was stamped on Friday morning at 7:36 a.m. As far as Frost could tell, no one had seen Christie again until her date with Noah on Saturday night.

The parking ramp was on California Street, where the financial district bled into Chinatown. The ramp attendant was a dark-skinned Filipino kid with black hair that sprouted from his head like wheatgrass. Frost guessed that he was no older than nineteen. His long legs were propped on the office desk as he watched the Giants on television and ate cold lumpia from a plastic container. The name tag on his shirt said Arne.

Frost introduced himself, and Arne sprang to his feet.

“What can I do for you, Inspector?”

He dangled a plastic evidence bag in front of the kid’s face. “This ticket came from your ramp, right?”

Arne leaned closer and studied it. “Yes, sure did.”

“The date stamp shows a car entering this ramp on Friday morning. The bank where the owner worked is just a couple blocks away, but she never showed up. Is there a way to look up when she left?”

“Sure, sure, come on over.”

Arne rolled his wheely chair to a flat-screen monitor and keyboard. When he nudged the mouse, the screen awakened and revealed a series of camera angles on different levels of the underground ramp. He clicked on an app that showed daily ticketing activity.

“What’s the number on the end of the ticket?” Arne asked.

Frost rattled it off, and the kid’s fingers flew on the keyboard.

“Here you go. In on Friday at seven thirty-six a.m., just like you said. She didn’t stay long. Ticket stamped back out on Friday at seven forty-nine a.m.”

“Less than fifteen minutes?” Frost asked.

“Yes, sir.”

Frost frowned. Christie worked at one of the downtown branches of Wells Fargo. According to her supervisor, Christie had a client meeting scheduled in Santa Rosa on Friday afternoon, which meant driving to work that day, not taking BART as she usually did. Instead, she missed work and missed her meeting. And yet here she was, arriving at the ramp downtown on Friday morning — and then heading back out almost immediately.

“Your security cameras,” Frost said. “How far back do you keep the video?”

“A month. Then the files get deleted automatically.”

“Can you pull up footage from the entry and exit camera on Friday morning?”

“Sure,” Arne replied. “It’s all web-based now. The app saves a new file for every camera every hour.”

He clicked over to the archive and selected Friday from a calendar pop-up. He chose the camera focused on the main entrance and played the video file beginning at 7:00 a.m.

“We should have her going in and out in the same file. What time did she come in? Just after seven thirty? I’ll speed it up.”

Frost saw a steady stream of cars entering the ramp in fast motion. When the on-screen clock approached the time at which Christie Parke entered the ramp, Arne slowed the video down to normal speed. Frost watched two more cars turn into the garage, and then, after a gap of about ninety seconds, he recognized Christie’s burgundy Honda Civic and matched the license plate. The car stopped at the ticket machine, and he saw a woman’s slim bare arm reach from the window to take a ticket.

“Freeze it,” Frost said.

The video motion stopped.

“Can you zoom in?”

“A little, but this isn’t high-def.”

Arne was right. By the time he’d enlarged the video to make out the front window, the features of the driver were unrecognizable. Even so, the woman’s general look was consistent with the photographs Frost had seen of Christie Parke.

“Okay, keep going,” Frost said.

He watched the car disappear. There was another minute-long gap before the next vehicle entered the ramp. He waited to see a few more cars turn into the garage, and then he asked Arne to fast-forward the video to Christie’s departure time. At that time of the morning, the exit lane was mostly unused. The only departing vehicle he saw was Christie’s Civic, which pulled up to the payment machine at 7:49 a.m.

“Maybe she forgot something,” Arne suggested. And then he whistled. “Whoa.”

“Freeze it!” Frost said.

Arne wasn’t fast enough, and he had to back up the video. Then he stopped the playback just as an arm reached from the window of the Civic to insert the ticket in the payment machine. It was the same car — Christie’s car. But Christie wasn’t driving. The arm they saw was covered by the sleeve of a black sweatshirt, and the hand with the ticket was protected by a surgical glove.

“That don’t look like her,” Arne muttered.

“No, it sure doesn’t. What other cameras do you have in the ramp?”

“We’ve got a camera on each aisle on each floor.”

“I need to see where she parked,” Frost said.

“Yeah, sure, let’s take a look.”

Arne went back to the archives and selected a camera focused on the first aisle on the next level down. Only seconds after she arrived in the garage, Christie’s Civic drove into view on the down ramp and passed a full slate of parked cars and disappeared. Arne tracked her back up the next aisle and down another level.

“There,” Frost said.

The Civic pulled beyond an open parking space at the far end of the ramp, and Christie backed into the empty spot. He saw the car’s headlights go dark as she turned off the engine. A few more seconds passed, and then he saw Christie Parke appear, purse over her shoulder, her phone in her hand. She made the long walk from one end of the ramp to the other, getting closer to the camera.

Frost waited. He knew what was going to happen; he just didn’t know when. He wished he could tell her, Don’t pay attention to your phone. Pay attention to your surroundings. And walk down the middle of the aisle, not the side. But she didn’t. She was preoccupied, her head down. She approached one of the concrete support columns, and that was when he grabbed her. It didn’t even take five seconds. An arm reached out, took hold of her neck, and pulled her out of view. There was no sound on the camera, but Frost doubted that she even had time to scream.

He kept watching. Christie never appeared again. Neither did her attacker. He watched another car arrive and park, and then one more, and then he saw the headlights of Christie’s Civic go on again. The car pulled out. It was too dark and too far to see who was behind the wheel, and the angle of the camera was too sharp to see inside as the car drove closer. Then it was gone.

“I guess he was waiting for somebody to come along,” Arne said.

No, he was waiting for her, Frost thought. He’d been studying Christie Parke. He knew where she parked and when she usually arrived. Frost wondered if he’d hacked her phone to keep an eye on her calendar. A meeting in Santa Rosa meant she’d be driving. There was nothing spontaneous about this abduction; it had been planned for weeks. The same was probably true of Monica Farr and Brynn Lansing. And the fact that it had happened to Christie and Brynn so close together meant that this man was now playing his game on a fast schedule.

Frost didn’t think he was done.

“I’m going to give you specs for a file upload site,” he told Arne. “I need you to transfer all of the camera video files for Friday morning, starting at five o’clock. Can you do that?”

“Sure thing. You trying to spot when the guy got here, huh? Thing is, he may not have parked in the ramp. He could have walked in at our pedestrian entrance off California. We don’t have cameras in the stairwell.”

“Understood,” Frost said, but he thought the safer play for this guy was to drive a stolen car into the ramp, rather than risk being spotted by one of the security or ATM cameras out on the street. The Night Bird wasn’t a fool.

“I’m going to write down a few other dates this month,” Frost added, “and I need the morning files for those dates, too.”

Christie had already been to this parking garage several times this month, according to the tickets he’d found in her Civic. Maybe her stalker had been right behind her one of those days, and maybe he hadn’t been so careful when he was following her.

After he gave the information to Arne, Frost walked to the stairwell at the back of the ramp. He headed down two flights to the parking level where Christie had been abducted. The structure was well lit with overhead fluorescents, but it was still a parking garage. There were plenty of shadows, and every car offered hiding places.

He walked slowly. The ceiling was low, and he smelled exhaust and gasoline. He spotted the webcam mounted on the wall and guessed that Christie’s stalker had scouted the positions of every camera in the ramp. To do that, he would have been visible, but he would also have been one person among thousands in the garage every day. A needle in a haystack.

Frost counted the support columns to the spot that Christie was passing when she was snatched. When he got there, he stopped. He was only ten feet from the garage wall. It would have been easy to hide, easy to wait for her. Maybe he used chloroform on a rag or a fast-acting sedative injection. Pull her back, hold her, count the seconds until she was unconscious. Then drag her along the wall back to her own car.

He followed the wall and used his flashlight to illuminate the shadows. At each parked car, he squatted and shined the light underneath. Three feet under the chassis of a white SUV, something glinted in the beam of light. He squirmed toward it and saw that it was a brass button, the kind men wore on their suit coats.

Frost slipped a plastic evidence bag from his pocket and swept the button inside it. Maybe it had come from one of the businessmen who parked here every day. Or maybe Christie had yanked it off during a struggle, and it had rolled here. There wouldn’t have been time for the attacker to retrieve it.

Maybe.

He reached the spot where Christie had parked her Civic. The spot was empty now. She’d been dragged here, unconscious, and her assailant had used her keys to pop the trunk and deposit her body inside. And then he drove her — where?

Where did he operate on their minds?

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?