The Night Bird

29

Darren Newman.

Frankie hated that what she remembered most about Newman was his looks. He was ridiculously handsome, and he knew it. He was tall, with the sleek, strong build of a tennis player. He had LA-blond hair, short and layered, with tight curls above his forehead. His eyebrows angled sharply, and his dark eyes seemed to be laughing at a joke inside his head. He didn’t show teeth when he smiled; his lips simply nudged upward. He dressed to impress, always in a suit, with pastel-colored shirts and wild Jerry Garcia ties. He was young — only in his late twenties. She never should have been attracted to someone like that, but she was.

He first came into Frankie’s life a year ago because of his mother. Alana Newman came to Frankie after her son had been arrested for rape, and she offered a lot of money for her to talk to him. Her instinct, seeing that many zeroes on a check, was to say no. She wasn’t a hired gun. But Alana was as smooth as her son. She told a good story, and she cried the right amount of tears. She didn’t claim that Darren was guiltless in his life, but she claimed that he was a victim of his past. He’d been abused in school. He’d never learned how to respect women. He’d made mistakes, but he wasn’t a rapist. The case was a he-said, she-said between her son and an SF State senior he’d met at a party. The prosecutors were trying to make an example of him.

If Frankie could have gone back in time, she would have torn the check in half. Instead, she agreed to meet Darren. To talk. To judge him for herself, face-to-face. That was her mistake. She had enough arrogance as a therapist to believe that no man could manipulate her, but she hadn’t counted on a man like Darren Newman.

He knew that the best lies started with the truth. The first story he told her was a true story from his childhood. He’d spent his first eighteen years in Wisconsin, in a small town outside Green Bay. At age seven, he’d built a snow fort in his front yard during a Thanksgiving Day blizzard. He’d burrowed into its tunnels and stayed there while the family was inside, but as the snow continued to fall, the fort collapsed on top of him.

It was half an hour before anyone noticed. He spent that time trapped in a cave of white, slowly suffocating, his air leaching away breath by breath. He couldn’t move or free himself. All he could do was stare at the white snow from inside his tomb. By the time they dug him out, he was unconscious, and the doctors said another five minutes would have killed him.

He still had vivid flashbacks of that near-death experience, he told her. He didn’t cry about it, though. He softened his voice and stared into space, as if the trapped child were still inside the man. He looked at her with those magnetic eyes, which said, I need you to help me.

She was hooked.

It was also the last true story Darren told her.

He described losing his virginity to a ninth-grade math teacher, whose after-school tutoring sessions became evening seductions at her home. Looking embarrassed, he explained in explicit physical detail what she did to him and what she made him do to her. How she made him dominate her. Humiliate her. Live out her submissive fantasies. He had this way of shaking his head, as if he couldn’t really believe any of it himself. That was how I learned about women, Frankie. Is it any wonder I turned out the way I did?

Months later, she found out that Darren’s ninth-grade math teacher was a fifty-six-year-old married man, not a woman at all. There was no relationship. No virgin seduction. He’d fabricated everything. By then, it was too late.

Frankie had already given him what he wanted. She submitted an affidavit to the court that in her professional opinion, Darren would be better served by treatment for his childhood issues rather than imprisonment. The prosecution, already on shaky ground on the rape charge, accepted a plea of misdemeanor assault, rather than risk an outright loss in court. Darren did community service at a local homeless shelter, and he began therapy sessions with Frankie every week.

She blamed herself for letting him twist her around his finger. She was slow to realize that he had an answer for everything. An excuse. A reason. An explanation. His parents moved to Colorado when he was eighteen, and he went to college in Boulder. Frankie grilled him about two accusations of rape in the college dorms, and he dismissed them as the result of alcohol and morning-after regrets. She asked about cases of stalking and revenge porn, and he put the blame on his roommate. No matter what happened, he found someone else to take the fall, some way to deflect guilt away from himself. That should have been a red flag.

Despite everything he told her, despite the lies she discovered as the months wore on, she also found herself intensely attracted to him. She dressed differently on days when she knew he’d be with her. She obsessed over every detail of his face. She let herself fantasize about him. Once, in therapy, he put a hand high on her thigh, and she left it there and didn’t break away until it was obvious they were about to cross a physical line from which there was no going back.

He knew exactly the effect he had on her, and he played her accordingly.

Then came Merrilyn Somers.

Smart, pretty, nerdy, artsy Merrilyn Somers.

She was an SF State junior, originally from Reno, where she’d been her high school valedictorian and a singer in the state champion choir. She was a computer science major and gamer and had already done two summer internships in Silicon Valley. Sony and Samsung were competing to recruit her after graduation. She was engaged to her high school sweetheart, and her academic scholarships meant she was debt-free. She had her whole future lined up like a row of dominoes.

Merrilyn lived with three college girlfriends in a Balboa Park apartment. Her neighbor two doors down was Darren Newman.

Frankie had seen Merrilyn’s picture in the newspaper. She was black, with straight dark hair parted in the middle and arresting, luminous blue eyes. You could see intelligence in a person’s face, and Merrilyn was smart. Her confident smile didn’t need to prove anything to anyone, regardless of her young age. Her left arm sported a Jesus tattoo, and she wore a cross around her neck. Her body was slim and tall.

Nine months ago, on a Friday night when her roommates went to a party in Menlo Park an hour away, Merrilyn stayed home to code a gaming app she’d built from scratch. When her friends arrived back at their apartment at four in the morning, they found Merrilyn naked on her bed, gagged, tied, dead of multiple stab wounds. The coroner confirmed sexual assault. The perpetrator used a condom, but he’d made a mistake in removing it, because the CSI team found a small amount of semen on the bed sheet near Merrilyn’s body.

Suspicion landed immediately on Darren Newman. He asserted his innocence to Frankie, the police, and the media — but the evidence pointed his way from the first day of the investigation. Merrilyn’s roommates told police that Darren had stalked her for months. That she’d fended off passes from him since she moved into the building. His history of assault and date-rape charges made the headlines. So did Frankie’s affidavit that had kept Darren out of jail.

Everyone knew he was guilty. The police and prosecutors were simply waiting for the DNA results to come back to prove it.

Except, when the results did come back, the DNA found at the murder scene of Merrilyn Somers didn’t match Darren Newman. Instead, it matched another man living in the same apartment building. Leon Willis’s DNA was in the California state database because of a felony conviction for mail fraud four years earlier, for which he’d served six months in prison. He had no alibi for the night of Merrilyn’s murder and no memory of the night at all. He claimed that he’d been drinking and passed out.

Faced with the DNA evidence, Leon Willis took a plea. He was serving the first year of a twenty-year sentence. Darren Newman received a public exoneration and an apology from the San Francisco Police.

Frankie remembered seeing Darren not long after he was vindicated. She expected him to be angry about his ordeal. Instead, she saw a twisted triumph hiding in his smile. She knew the truth. He was guilty. He’d raped and murdered Merrilyn Somers. And somehow, he’d gotten away with it by framing another man.

She didn’t tell him what she thought, but he had a way of reading her mind.

“You still think I did it, don’t you?” Darren asked as he was leaving her office that last time. “That’s just crazy, Frankie. I mean, think about it. For me to be guilty, you’d have to assume that I knew that Leon’s DNA was in the state database. Not much point planting evidence on a guy who will never be found, right? Of course, maybe the guy who owns the apartment building is a college buddy of mine. So I guess I could have scoped out the background checks on new tenants and found somebody with a criminal record. Then I’d need to make sure that whoever it was didn’t have an alibi on the night of the murder. That’s even tougher. Well, unless I stopped by for a drink with Leon that night and spiked his beer with Rohypnol. I guess I could have poured out a couple dozen cans while he was sleeping it off, so he’d come out of his blackout thinking he drank himself into a coma. Do you think that would work? Maybe it would. But wow, Frankie, the semen they found on Merrilyn’s bed. No way I could pull that off. I mean, what are you suggesting? That I paid a hooker to come on to him and give him a hand job in the men’s room at some bar? And then she gave me a sample of his swimmers that I could plant near Merrilyn’s body? You must think I’m some kind of evil genius to do something like that. Besides, do you think I wouldn’t freak out knowing that this hooker might spot my face in the paper and go to the cops? I’d probably have to get rid of her, too, Frankie. Of course, that would be the easiest part of the plan. Nobody misses hookers.”

He laughed. His face had the look of the devil.

“Anyway, that’s what you’d have to believe to think I’m really guilty, Frankie. See how crazy that sounds?”

She knew that Darren was right.

It was crazy.

What chilled Frankie to the bone was knowing that he had told her exactly what he’d really done.