The Night Bird

3

“Come on, Shack,” Frost said.

He scooped a hand under the small cat’s belly and tramped up the steps of the Russian Hill house where he and Shack lived. It was a two-story brown stucco home on a high dead-end spur of Green Street. Inside, it had a multi-million-dollar view of the bay. The furnishings were dark and baroque, as if the house had been decorated by an eighty-year-old woman with European tastes. Which it had.

Frost blinked with exhaustion. It was four in the morning. He didn’t bother turning on a light, because the city lights through the bay window allowed him to see. He was hungry; he hadn’t eaten anything since a hot dog near the Moscone Center eighteen hours earlier. When he’d left in the morning, the refrigerator had been empty, but he made his way to the kitchen and opened the fridge door anyway. He grinned, seeing four small silver trays topped with aluminum foil.

Care package.

His brother, Duane, who was five years older, was a chef. Nine months ago, Duane had opened a food truck that could usually be found at lunch or dinner in the city’s SoMa district south of Market Street. Duane practically lived in his truck, but two or three times a week, he found time to park leftovers in Frost’s fridge. His brother knew that, left to his own devices, Frost would subsist on Pop-Tarts and Kraft mac and cheese.

Frost peeled back the foil and found Korean kimchi, bulgogi, and two mandu dumplings. He grabbed a fork and took the meal to the massive dining room table in the next room and ate it cold. Shack hopped up on the table and rubbed against his arm until Frost gave him the chance to lick some of the bulgogi sauce from his fork.

Outside, the overnight lights of the city melted down the hill into the blackness of the bay. He’d lived in San Francisco his whole life. He’d only set foot outside California twice, and both times, he couldn’t wait to get home. When you lived in paradise, going anywhere else seemed anticlimactic. It was still hard to believe that his parents had left the state for the heat of Arizona, but he knew that their move was about other things, not the city itself.

The dining room table, which sat ten, doubled as his home office. It was covered in paperwork. He had photos there, too. Family pictures. His parents. Himself and Duane. Their sister, Katie, mugging for the camera at a Giants game. That was the last picture he had of her. It made him remember that Katie’s birthday was coming up soon. He and Duane usually celebrated it together.

The girl on the bridge, Lucy, reminded him a little of his sister. Lucy had the same sweet, fresh-faced look. The same single-in-the-city attitude. Their voices even sounded alike, enough that if he closed his eyes, he could picture Katie in his head. That wasn’t easy to do anymore.

His MacBook Pro was open, and he booted it up as he finished his dinner. The screen glowed white in the semidarkness. He returned to the fridge and grabbed a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and drank it as his index finger swirled the touch pad and called up the video file he wanted.

He’d seen the seven-minute video dozens of times. He’d advanced it frame by frame. It made no more sense to him now than it did the first time. Frost turned up the volume.

“Hey, Mike and Evelyn! Can you believe you’re really married?”

The iPhone video showed an uncomfortable arm’s-length close-up of a plus-sized couple with their faces smooshed together as they filmed themselves. Their cheeks were flushed from champagne. He could see up their noses and spot salad between their teeth. In the background, a DJ played a Blake Shelton bro-country stomper. Frost heard the clatter of crystal and silverware and the burble of other guests talking and laughing. He’d watched the video so many times that he’d been able to piece together most of the conversations.

As if someone in the room might have said something to explain what was about to happen.

He knew the names of the couple with the camera, because he’d interviewed them. They were Jeff and Sandy Barclay. Jeff was the groom’s cousin. Neither of them knew the guest named Monica Farr. She wasn’t connected to the happy couple at all; she was the last-minute date of one of the groomsmen. They’d met at a dry cleaner two weeks before the wedding, when Monica was dropping off and he was picking up. The groomsman had broken up with his long-time girlfriend the previous day. It was pure chance that he asked Monica out. That was the only reason that Monica Farr attended the wedding and reception of Michael Sloan and Evelyn Archer-Sloan. She didn’t know anyone there.

“Great party, guys!” Jeff Barclay shouted into the camera.

“Love the quinoa salad!” his wife, Sandy, called.

Frost chuckled to himself. What San Francisco event would be complete without quinoa? And organic kale, of course.

“Next stop, honeymoon!” Jeff bellowed. “Aruba, mama! Sex on the beach, am I right?”

“Jeff, shhh!” his wife hissed.

“Hey, come on, it’s their honeymoon. Remember ours? I didn’t think that bed in Paris was going to hold up!”

“Shhh!” Sandy said again, but she turned and kissed her husband on the lips, and the camera bounced, losing them from the frame. When they appeared again, both of them were rumpled and smiling. Frost could hear the music changing behind them. Blake was done. The DJ went to a mellow ’70s pop song. People shouted for Mike and Evelyn to take the floor, and a cheer went up from the guests as they did.

“Love you guys!” Jeff said.

“Hey, they’re dancing! Quick, quick, turn the camera around.”

Jeff Barclay fumbled with his iPhone. The video went in and out of focus, and Frost saw a blur of Jeff’s black shoes. When the camera came up again, the picture jittered as Jeff tried and failed to hold it steady. Frost saw the Palm Room of the San Francisco Film Centre. Strings of orchids threaded around the white columns. Round tables dotted the glistening hardwood floor. Guests lingered over dessert and wine, and some, in suits and dresses, bobbed on the dance floor. He saw Michael Sloan in a gray tuxedo and, in his arms, Evelyn Archer-Sloan in an off-the-shoulder white wedding dress. They weren’t great dancers, but they swayed with the beat, beaming and leaning into each other. This was their big day.

Jeff Barclay zoomed in on the couple.

Frost’s mouth twitched. He knew what came next.

Off camera, he heard a woman scream. There were so many kinds of screams. Tittering, yelling, cheering, even laughing screams. This was a scream Frost had never heard before — a scream from inside a black hole, a scream where death was preferable to life. He watched Michael and Evelyn separate on the dance floor and look toward the source of the cry.

He could read Evelyn’s lips: “Who’s that?”

He heard Sandy Barclay: “Oh my God, what’s going on?”

The screaming rose like the wail of a banshee, but the music warbled on, gentle and unaffected. The DJ was too shocked to switch off the sound system. Crystal goblets and champagne flutes shattered as guests lurched away in surprise. Chairs tipped over and clattered. The camera swung, bouncing, off-kilter, to a young redhead in a low-cut emerald dress.

Monica Farr.

Frost froze the video and stared at her face. He’d seen other photos of Monica since that night — happy, smiling pictures. Vacations. Graduations. This was something completely different. Even out of focus, caught for a brief moment, her face was as primitive as a trapped animal. Her eyes were wide and wild. According to the groomsman who’d brought her to the party, she’d been completely normal up to that moment. Her breakdown came out of nowhere. In midsentence.

Just like Brynn Lansing.

Frost started the video again. Monica grabbed her purse from the table and dug inside it, and as she did, shouts of terror arose in the ballroom. He saw something dark in her hand, and then he heard:

“Gun!”

“She has a gun!”

People dove. The phone, still filming, fell to the floor, and all Frost saw was the ceiling and track lighting of the ballroom. He heard the soundtrack to the chaos — people stampeding, tables crashing — and then the explosion of a bullet and glass breaking in the bayside windows. He heard a voice wailing louder than everyone else — it was Monica Farr again — and then, horribly, one more gunshot cut off the scream as a bullet went from under Monica’s left ear, upward through the bone and brain of her skull, and exited and buried itself in the ceiling.

A body dropped with a sickening thud. He heard whispers. Crying. The devastated aftermath. The whole incident took less than thirty seconds to unfold.

Frost shut down the video and closed his laptop.

He’d talked to everyone in Monica Farr’s life since her death two months ago. It made no sense to anyone. He’d found no evidence of drugs. No evidence of depression. No history of strange behavior. Monica had been an unmarried twenty-seven-year-old woman living with her parents in a townhome near Lake Merced, working as a marketing manager for a downtown accounting firm. Her parents didn’t even know where or how she’d acquired a gun. The autopsy showed no abnormalities, no tumors pressing on the brain that could have caused hallucinations, no foreign substances in the blood work.

There was absolutely no explanation Frost could find for why Monica Farr had shot herself in the head at a wedding reception.

Just as there seemed to be no reason for Brynn Lansing to fall to her death from the Bay Bridge.

And yet he was convinced there was a connection.

Frost got up from the dining room table. He needed at least a couple of hours of sleep. He whistled a song idly to himself as he walked from the dining room and climbed the steps to the master bedroom. Undressing, he threw his clothes in the walk-in closet. When he turned on the bedroom light, he saw the pale-pink remnants of a bloodstain on the white carpet near the heavy walnut bedroom set. At first, he’d tried to clean it. That hadn’t worked. Then, for weeks, he’d walked around it, giving it a wide berth with his bare feet. Now he didn’t even care. He crossed the bloodstain like it was part of the decor.

He didn’t sleep in the king-sized bed. Instead, he went back downstairs to the living room with one of his pillows and stretched out on the tweed sofa near the bay window. It didn’t match the rest of the upscale decor, because it was the only piece of furniture in the house that belonged to him. His face sank into his pillow; his arm draped to the floor. Shack tiptoed up his back and curled up in the crook of his neck. Seconds later, they were both asleep.