The Night Bird

27

Everyone in Todd Ferris’s videos had cell phones.

That was the first thing that Frankie noticed. It didn’t matter where he went — Golden Gate Park, a bar, the BART train, a diner, a bus — he took videos of the people around him, and they clung to their phones like umbilical cords connecting them to the rest of the world.

Frankie stared at her own phone on the coffee table in front of her. It felt like the enemy now. Her security consultant had confirmed Frost’s suspicions. She’d been hacked. For months, her phone had been a two-way street, exposing her entire life to the Night Bird. She had a new phone now, but that didn’t change the horror she felt. The violation.

He knew everything about her. Every person she’d met. Every e-mail or message she’d sent or received. He’d been listening as she took every patient down into their deepest fears and then back up into the sunlight. He’d been a spy on the most private conversations anyone could have.

How could she tell them?

She burned with shame. He’d spied on her personal life, as well as her professional life. She thought about the time in February when she and Jason had reconnected after months of remoteness. Pam had been away. The apartment was theirs. He’d made love to her with a ferocity they hadn’t experienced in years, and she’d found herself losing control in his arms. The connection hadn’t lasted. They were like strangers again, but they still had that one intimate night together.

Except now, she knew, it hadn’t been just the two of them in the bedroom. He’d been there, too. He’d heard the fights. The arguments. The confessions. The grief. The loneliness. Nothing had been private.

Frankie tried to put it out of her head. She couldn’t think about it now. She concentrated on the videos that Todd had given her. Everywhere he’d gone, he’d captured the faces. She’d watched two hours already, and she still had hours more to review. He’d told her that he hadn’t seen any of the women who’d died. Their paths hadn’t crossed. And yet Frankie had other reasons to watch.

Todd was missing time. Just like Christie Parke and Brynn Lansing. He claimed to have had visions of torture and then to have awakened on the streets in the industrial area known as Dogpatch. The most likely explanation was that he’d been abducted and drugged, like the women. If that was true, then somewhere in his travels around the city, Todd must have met the Night Bird.

Unless he was the Night Bird himself.

On her television screen, Todd ate late-night breakfast at a diner. It was a favorite spot; the same restaurant had shown up in his videos at least three other times. He sat at a window table, and he kept his phone near his lap as he recorded the comings and goings. The diner looked like a vintage greasy spoon, with red upholstery in the booths and a counter filled by overnight regulars who traded jokes with a long-bearded waiter. She caught a glimpse out the window of a MUNI bus stop, a Chevron station, and a wide avenue that looked like Market Street. Todd’s camera went from face to face, and she saw giggling teenagers, middle-aged nurses in scrubs, coffee-swilling businessmen, and flamboyant gays who looked like refugees from Beach Blanket Babylon. Every coffee shop was a microcosm of San Francisco.

But the people were all strangers to her.

She pressed “Pause” and took her wine glass from the table. She refilled it from the bottle, and she drank. When she started the video again, she found herself in a performance space, watching young people singing, like an episode of Glee. It was some kind of choral competition, and the arena was crowded. Todd zeroed in on each face around him and each of the young vocalists.

Strangers.

The front door to the apartment rattled, and Pam and Jason came inside. Monday night was meeting night for Pam’s drug rehab. She took off her long leather jacket and hung it up in the closet, and Jason did the same with his suede coat. Frankie felt him in the room like cold air blowing off ice. They hadn’t spoken since their argument in her office the previous day. He ignored her and took the stairs up to their bedroom.

Pam joined her in the living room. She was dressed in jeans and an untucked purple silk blouse. She looked good, as she usually did, and her hair was mussed. She picked up the wine bottle, which was mostly empty, and rolled her eyes.

“Maybe you should go to meetings,” Pam said.

“I really don’t need sarcasm right now.”

“I wasn’t being sarcastic.”

Pam kicked off her heels and sat down. Frankie started the video again. The venue shifted to the grassy hills of Lafayette Park. Todd lay on a blanket, with a laptop in front of him, and she could see southwest toward Sutro Tower in the distance. It was obviously a weekend afternoon. The park was busy, but Todd used his phone to zoom in on each group, close enough that she could see their faces.

One by one.

All strangers.

“Is this some kind of odd foreign film?” Pam asked. “Most people watch Jennifer Lawrence or Eddie Redmayne or something like that.”

“A patient took this video,” Frankie explained. “I’m looking for someone.”

“Who?”

“The person who’s killing my patients.”

Pam stared at her. “And what makes you think he’d be somewhere in this video?”

“I can’t say anything about that.”

“Of course not,” Pam said.

“I’m not hiding things,” Frankie told her. “It’s privileged.”

“Would it matter if it wasn’t? You don’t want help from anyone else. Frankie’s island has a population of one.”

“Don’t start with me,” Frankie snapped. “I get enough of that from Jason. He says I cut him out of my life. That I don’t need him.”

“You don’t.”

“That’s not true. Of course I do.”

“Like you need me?” Pam asked.

Frankie put down her wine glass. “I need you, too. Really.”

“Come on, don’t bother putting on an act. We’re way past that. You don’t really know either one of us, and I’m not sure it’s worth your time to find out. Maybe the ship has sailed, Sis.”

Frankie didn’t say anything. She felt slapped.

Pam didn’t have a glass, so she took the wine bottle and tilted it to her lips. “You know, when we were growing up, I always wanted it to be two against one. You and me against Dad. I thought maybe then I would stand a chance. But you were always out for yourself. Frankie protected Frankie, and I was on my own.”

She wanted to argue, but Pam was right.

“I didn’t want it to be that way,” Frankie said, “but let’s face it, you weren’t on my side, either.”

Pam nodded. “No, I wasn’t.”

“Don’t blame me. Blame Dad.”

“I blame both of you,” Pam said. She stood up and headed for her bedroom, but then she stopped. She came back to the sofa. “So what did Dad tell you?”

“What are you talking about?” Frankie asked.

“That last weekend. Before you two went away, Dad called. He said I should come along. He said there was something urgent he needed to talk to us about. I told him you wanted it to be just the two of you on this trip. So what did he say?”

Frankie squeezed her eyes shut. She’d blocked out so much of that weekend. What was left was just pictures in her head. “He didn’t tell me anything.”

“Come on, Frankie.” Her sister leaned down close to her ear. “What was it?”

“I already told you. Nothing. He did his usual irritating Q and A. He grilled me about taking risks. He asked about me and Jason. And then he got up and took a hike, and he never came back. Okay?”

Pam stood up and shrugged. Her lips folded into a smile. “Fine. I believe you. I just don’t want there to be any secrets between the two of us.”

She sauntered to her bedroom, and Frankie was left unsettled. Wine was the only answer to her problems. She poured what was left of the bottle into her glass, and she drank it down like beer until it was empty.

She went to the kitchen with an unsteady walk. She rinsed out her wine glass and washed it with soap, but as she dried it, the glass slipped from her hand and shattered on the marble countertop. Glass sprayed like the burst of a fountain. Looking down, she saw blood running from two cuts on her fingers. She put her hand under cold water, but the blood didn’t stop. As the water ran, as the blood ran, she realized she was crying. It had been years since she cried. There had been no tears when her father died, but she cried now, feeling the threads of her entire life split open. Her work. Her marriage. Her family.

She shut off the faucet. She wiped her face with a damp towel, and then she cleaned the glass from the counter. She bandaged her fingers. There was nothing else to do but keep moving forward.

Frankie returned to the living room, noting the two closed doors. Pam’s bedroom door down the hall was closed. So was her own in the loft. Pam and Jason had both shut themselves away from her.

She sat down and started Todd Ferris’s video again.

This time, she found herself in the crowded clutches of a nighttime bar. She didn’t know where it was. Wiz Khalifa played at a shattering volume, and strobe lights flashed on and off, casting a rainbow across the undulating pack on the dance floor. She saw bare skin, white teeth, and swirling hair. Lovers, smokers, and druggies slipped out through the bar door into the darkness. Others took their place.

She could see a can of craft beer in Todd’s hand as he swiveled his camera around the bar. The picture wobbled; he was a little drunk. Most of the faces came and went on the screen too quickly for her to see them. They were all pretty. Young. Dressed to kill. Todd pushed into the crowd, bumping against shoulders and getting wild close-ups of the people around him. She wondered why he was still filming. Maybe it had become his habit by now.

Todd broke free of the pack. He was in a corridor where the music was muffled. Band posters lined the walls. He wobbled, heading to the men’s room door. Frankie winced, wondering if he planned to keep filming in the bathroom. She reached for the remote to fast-forward just as Todd pushed open the door, revealing a lineup of three men at urinals. Todd waited behind them.

Frankie sped up the video.

And then she stopped and backed up. She realized that she couldn’t breathe. She played it again. And again. Each time, she stopped as one of the men at the urinals turned and bumped heavily into Todd as they squeezed past each other and traded places. His smiling face filled the phone camera.

It was the last face she wanted to see, but it didn’t surprise her at all.

“Jason!” Frankie called. When the bedroom door over her head stayed closed, she called again impatiently. “Jason!”

Finally, her husband opened the door and came to the loft railing, which he grabbed with both hands. He was still dressed. His face was angry, but his anger dissolved as he looked past Frankie to the familiar face frozen on the fifty-five-inch television screen.

“What is that?” he asked. “What are you doing?”

“I found him,” Frankie replied. “It’s Darren Newman. You were right. He’s part of whatever’s going on.”