The Night Bird

23

What’s your worst memory?

Frost didn’t have to paw through his brain to find it. He knew exactly what that was. A single memory haunted him every day of his life.

Katie. In the car.

“Is there anything you’d forget if you could?” he asked Duane. “If you could wipe out something from your memory, would you do it?”

The two of them sat on opposite ends of the cushioned window seat in Frost’s Russian Hill house. His brother drank fresh-squeezed carrot juice from a wine glass. Frost was on his second bottle of Sierra Nevada ale. The nighttime view looked out toward the bay, Alcatraz, and the Berkeley hills. Shack patrolled the window, tapping his black-and-white paws at moths outside the glass.

It was the kind of view that never got old. There were nights when Frost stayed awake for hours, watching the city.

“What are you talking about?” Duane asked him.

“It’s this case I’m working on. The women who were killed had their memories manipulated. I think someone made their worst fears come to life.”

“Well, I don’t care how it bad it is, I don’t want to forget anything,” Duane said. “Me, I worry about not remembering.”

“Me, too.” Frost added after a long pause, “Sometimes I can’t picture Katie’s face in my head anymore, you know? Not unless I look at a photograph.”

His brother nodded. “I know. It’s the same for me.”

“She gets farther and farther away. I hate that.”

Duane waggled a finger at him. “Come on, no bad shit on her birthday. We agreed. Only good stuff.”

“You’re right. Sorry.”

“So, who’s the girl?” Duane asked.

“What girl?” Frost asked, but he knew what Duane wanted.

“The one you brought to the food truck.”

“Her name’s Lucy,” Frost said.

“She’s pretty. She’s a little young for you, but that’s okay.”

“This from the man who sleeps with a different twenty-something sous chef every week,” Frost pointed out.

Duane grinned. “‘Sous chef’ means ‘under the chef,’ so what do you want from me? Blame it on the French.”

Despite being five years older than Frost, Duane was an incorrigible child at heart. Most chefs were. He had limitless, espresso-fueled energy, which he needed in order to work fourteen-hour days in his kitchen. When they were together, his brother was relaxed and casual, but Duane became a different person when he ran his restaurants. He was impatient and demanding, like a little dictator chopping off the heads of anyone who crossed him. Most of his employees didn’t last long, but even a few months under Duane Easton was a calling card with other chefs around the city.

Duane was a compact package. He was only five foot six and skinny. He had chin-length black hair, parted in the middle, which was how he’d worn it since culinary school in Paris. His face made a sharp V, and his nose was drooping and narrow. He had thick dark eyebrows. Like Frost, his eyes were laser beams, and they had a way of cutting through anyone in front of him, whether it was a chef who’d overcooked the lamb or a single woman looking for a postdinner drink. His fashion sense was eclectic. Right now, he wore a button-down white dress shirt, nylon running shorts, and pink Crocs.

“How’d you meet her?” Duane asked.

“She watched her roommate take a header off the Bay Bridge.”

Duane’s eyebrows rose. “Strange life you lead, bro. Is it serious?”

“I like her a lot, but we’re not going out.”

“Why not? I saw the kiss. She’s obviously into you.”

“I know, but she’s a witness in this case,” he said, which was the obvious excuse.

“So what? That won’t last forever. I think you should go for it.”

Frost hesitated and then said, “There’s something else, too. When I’m with her, she reminds me of Katie. It’s not fair, but I’m not sure I can get past that.”

“Is it her, or is it the time of year?” Duane asked. “We all go a little crazy around Katie’s birthday.”

“It’s probably both,” Frost admitted.

“You know what Katie would say about that? She’d say you’re being an ass.”

“True.”

“What does Shack think of Lucy?”

“Oh, it’s love at first sight between them,” Frost said.

“See? For you, that sounds serious.”

“It is, but not in a romantic way. I just like hanging out with her. She doesn’t pretend to be anyone she’s not. Katie was the same way.”

“Have you told her that?” Duane asked.

“No.”

“Well, you probably should.”

Frost didn’t disagree. He finished his beer and went to the kitchen to get another. The house had a briny seafood smell. Duane had made crab mac and cheese from scratch, which included dunking two live Dungeness crabs in boiling water. Shack got fresh-cooked claw meat as a treat, which he enjoyed so much that when the plate was empty, he licked it from one side of the kitchen to the other.

Frost opened his third beer. He didn’t usually drink this much, but it was a special occasion.

He returned to the living room and stretched out in the window seat again. Duane was flipping through a thousand-page biography of Harry Truman that Frost had left there. When he was alone at home, Frost liked to sit in the bay window and read. Just him, Shack, the past, and San Francisco.

“So why do you like history?” Duane asked.

“I know how it ends.”

“That’s funny.”

“Actually, historians and detectives have a lot in common. We both love details, but it’s easy to lose sight of which are important and which aren’t.”

Duane turned to Frost’s bookmark in the biography. “So you’re at the part where Harry dropped the bomb?”

“Yes.”

“You think we’ll see another nuke go off in our lifetime?”

“Yes.”

“Spoken like a pessimist,” Duane said.

“Spoken like a cop,” Frost replied.

Duane’s mouth was pinched in a frown. “Think about all those people who woke up that day and didn’t know they’d be dead before it was over.”

Frost nodded. “It happens that way a lot.”

They didn’t speak for a while. Frost knew what Duane was thinking, and his brother knew that Frost was thinking the same thing, but neither one of them said it out loud. Katie didn’t know. She woke up that awful day, and it should have been one day of many more to come. But it wasn’t. It was the last. By midnight, she’d be in the backseat of her Malibu near Ocean Beach, which was where Frost would find her.

Katie would have been thirty-one years old today.

“You call Mom and Dad?” Duane asked.

“Yeah.”

“They sound okay?”

“Mom more than Dad,” Frost said. “It hits him hard. But Tucson has been good for them.”

Duane sipped his carrot juice and didn’t say anything. His eyes shined with tears, and he stared out at the bay. Shack, who had an uncanny way of knowing when people were upset, climbed up Duane’s chest and began to lick his face. His brother couldn’t help but laugh. He kissed Shack’s head and put the cat down on the window seat next to him.

“I better get some sleep,” he said. “I’ve got to be back at the food truck at four. Mind if I crash here?”

“Take the master bed,” Frost told him.

Duane stood up from the window seat and drained the last of the juice from his wine glass. “Any reason you don’t sleep there?”

Frost shrugged. “I don’t know why. I prefer the sofa. It’s mine.”

“Well, it’s your house.”

“Oh, no. It’s Shack’s house. I’m just a guest.”

Duane smiled. “Right. I forgot.”

“Thanks for dinner,” Frost said.

“Any time.” Duane clinked his empty wine glass against Frost’s beer bottle. “Happy birthday to Katie.”

“Yeah. Happy birthday.”

Frost waited until Duane disappeared into the bedroom, and then he drank his beer and said to the stars outside the window, “Blow out the candles, kiddo, wherever you are.”

He woke up in the middle of the night and wasn’t sure why. One of the windows was cracked open, and the house was cold and dark. Shack was missing. He got up from the sofa and rubbed his palm over his beard, and his fingers pushed back his brown hair. His eyes adjusted to the darkness.

“Shack?” he called.

Usually, hearing his name, the cat came running, as if he thought he were a dog. But not now. Frost climbed the stairs to the master bedroom, where the door was ajar. He peered inside and could make out the shape of his brother, asleep on top of the covers. Shack wasn’t with him. Duane always slept hard, and Frost sometimes had to wake him up to turn off his alarm.

He went back downstairs. He checked the kitchen, which still smelled of crab. He was thirsty, and his mouth had a metallic taste, so he grabbed a bottle of sparkling water from the refrigerator and drank most of it. He kept the bottle in his hand as he returned to the living room.

“Shack?” he called again.

Frost heard an odd noise from the dining room. It was the kind of low, mean growl a tiger would make. He knew it was Shack, but he’d only heard a noise like that from the cat once before. That was when he’d first found Shack on top of his owner’s body, protecting her from anyone who wanted to come close.

He went into the formal dining room with its heavy table, where he kept most of his work notes. One tall window faced Green Street in front of the house. Shack was on the window ledge on the other side of the curtains. The tiny cat’s angry rumble rose and fell like ocean waves.

“Hey, what’s up?” Frost said.

He went to the window and swept aside the curtains. Shack didn’t acknowledge him. The cat was focused on the street.

Frost looked outside, where the view faced apartment buildings on the other side of the narrow lane. He noticed an old Cutlass parked sideways in front of his garage. The driver’s window of the car was open. As Frost watched, a head leaned out from inside the car.

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

It wasn’t a face. It was a mask. The driver wore a bone-white mask with a grin reaching to his ears and huge, chambered eyes like a giant insect would have. The man with the mask stared up at the window, and Shack began to hiss and spit.

Frost had seen that same mask in Union Square. Lucy had seen that mask, too, on the Bay Bridge, moments before Brynn Lansing fell to her death.

Frost spun around and found his holster, which he’d slung over one of the dining room chairs. He unlatched it and grabbed his service pistol and his badge from the inside pocket of his jacket. Without bothering to put on shoes, he ran for the front door of the house and threw it open. He bolted down two sets of stone steps to Green Street.

The Cutlass was still parked by the house. Its engine was off, its windows closed. He couldn’t see behind the smoked glass. He leveled his gun, and he held up his badge.

“Police!” he shouted at the closed door of the car. “Roll down your window and put your hands on the wheel.”

There was no response from inside the car. Frost repeated his order.

“I said, roll down your window!”

He approached the car, took hold of the door handle, and threw the door open. Inside, the car was empty. Frost swore. He backed up and made a full circle, studying the street around him. He watched the dark entrances to the apartment parking ramps across from him. The area was deserted.

Then, distantly, he heard the pound of footsteps.

Frost ran to the pedestrian steps that led down the hill to Taylor Street. He took them two at a time, and at the bottom, he sprinted into the middle of the sharply angled street. He swung back and forth with his gun in both directions. Dark buildings rose around him. Cars were parked up and down the steep hill.

No one was there.

The Night Bird was gone.