The Night Bird

42

Frost guided Dr. Stein up and down the streets of the bayside area south of the ballpark known as Dogpatch.

The neighborhood was a study in contradictions. Million-dollar lofts looked out on warehouses. Trendy restaurants sprang up next to boarded-up buildings. At midnight, in the midst of the driving rain, the hip neighborhood was mostly empty. The headlights of a dozen squad cars crisscrossed the streets, searching the ruins near the water. Flashlights swept through the weeds and parking lots underneath the concrete jungle of the elevated 280 freeway.

Two hours had passed, but the hunt had turned up no evidence of Darren Newman’s Lexus or the torture chamber of the Night Bird. Frost’s mood was dark, and his head throbbed with intermittent shocks of pain.

The windshield wipers ran back and forth, pushing away rain. They drove past a long, low building with windowless metal walls, and Frost gestured for Frankie to stop. He got out into the rain and shined his light around the grounds. He saw metal storage sheds painted over with graffiti. The beam lit up the columns of the freeway ramp beyond the industrial yard, and trucks kicked spray over the side of the highway as they passed overhead. There were no signs of life.

He got back inside, and they inched down the street, checking each vehicle parked on both sides.

“It’s late,” he said finally. “I can get someone to take you home.”

“No. You heard him. He wants to see me die. If you’re out here looking for him, I want to be here, too.”

He didn’t try to dissuade her. He knew she was stubborn. Another stretch of silence lingered between them.

“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” he said.

Stein shrugged. “Go ahead.”

“Why did you say you’re not sure if you’ve done more harm than good in your life?” he asked.

She gripped the steering wheel tightly. Her eyes closed briefly and then opened again. The rain drowned out any other sounds around them.

“Oh, there are about a thousand answers to that,” she replied. And then a moment later, she added, “I’m an arrogant human being.”

“There are worse flaws.”

“Well, it can be fatal in a scientist. All this time, I thought I knew what I was doing, and the people who opposed me were simply misguided. Now I wonder if I was just a child pushing buttons on a computer I didn’t really understand.”

“People aren’t computers,” he pointed out.

“Maybe it would be better if we were. Then we’d know the right answers. It’s ironic, really. We build machines that remember everything, but our own brains are like the world’s most disorganized storage units. We put memories away and never see them again, or if we find them, they don’t look anything like we thought they did. I thought I was bringing order to all this chaos, but maybe I was just making it worse.”

He was trying to think of something to say when Dr. Stein stopped the car.

“Storage units,” she murmured.

“What?”

“I’m so sorry. I’m a fool. Here I am complaining about memory, and I forgot something important. I followed Darren that night when he went across the bay, but before he did, he stopped at a storage unit here in Dogpatch. I couldn’t see what he kept inside—”

“Where is it?” Frost interrupted her.

“At the end of Twenty-Second Street near the bay.”

“Let’s go. I’ll have Jess and a squad car meet us.”

“Do you think it means something?”

“I think a man who owns multiple buildings in this area doesn’t need a separate storage unit unless he has something to hide.”

Stein accelerated his Suburban through the rain. They headed east toward the water, and once they crossed the main artery at Third, they found themselves in a deserted commercial area leading toward the piers. Frankie drove until it looked like the road was ending, and then she turned again, where the street was barely wider than the SUV. She continued to the gates of a self-storage complex, and she stopped.

“It’s here,” she said.

Frost got out. The storm lashed his face. He walked up to the locked gates of the storage complex and found a bell to alert the security guard. Behind him, he saw the flashing lights of a police car racing to join them. Jess’s sedan followed.

The guard, who wore a hooded raincoat to stay dry, didn’t protest when he saw their badges. He slid the gates open for them. Like a mini parade, Frankie drove them through the gates, and Jess and the squad car entered behind them. She navigated the maze and stopped in front of a green trailer with a metal door. All of the other trailers had white doors, but here, the door had been painted green to match the rest of the unit. Frost wondered why.

“You saw Darren Newman go inside this storage unit?” he asked Frankie. “You’re sure it was this one?”

“I’m sure.”

Frost got out. Jess was waiting for him. They checked the door, which was secured with a heavy padlock. The rain on the metal roofs around them sounded like nails being hammered into wood. Jess wiped her face and had to shout to let Frost hear her.

“What do you think is inside?” she called.

“Lucy Hagen,” Frost replied. “I hope.”

Jess stared at his wet face, reading his eyes. Her round face showed no reluctance to break inside the compartment. She gestured at the squad car, and when a burly cop got out of the door, Jess put her arms over her head and banged the heels of her palms together. The cop retrieved a large bolt cutter from the trunk of his car, and he used it to make two cuts in the lock’s shackle, as easily as if he were slicing butter. The lock fell to the ground, and the door was open.

Frost hesitated. Part of him didn’t want to see what was inside. He slipped gloves over his hands, then bent down and threw the door open on its tracks with a loud jolt. The small interior space was dark, and he groped for a light switch. When he found it, two overhead fluorescent bars blinked to life.

He couldn’t hide his disappointment.

No one was there.

The storage unit was no more than ten feet by twenty feet in size. The metal walls were painted bright yellow. Packing crates lined the walls and took up most of the floor. Frost saw an oak desk on the back wall, with a mirror hung above it. The interior had an odd, heavy smell of tea, and when he pushed aside the lid on the nearest crate, he saw bulk Chinese tea stored inside.

He saw Frankie in the doorway. She didn’t cross the threshold. “Are you sure Darren came in here?” he asked. “There are a lot of units around this place. Maybe you got it wrong.”

“This is the one, Frost.”

He opened another crate and found more tea. He dug down as far as his arm would reach, but he found sealed plastic bags of tea all the way to the bottom. When he withdrew his arm, his wet skin smelled of cinnamon and cherry. The same was true of the next crate. And the next.

“Man likes his tea,” Jess said. Then she eyed the depth of the crates. “Hang on. Hand me those bolt cutters.”

The uniformed officer handed the bolt cutters to the lieutenant, and Jess shoved them inside the nearest crate as deep as they would go. She marked the point on the handle of the cutters with her thumb and then pulled out the bolt cutters and measured the length of the crate on the outside.

“There’s a six-inch difference. The crates have a false floor.”

Frost overturned the crate and dumped the tea on the floor. Using the blade end of the bolt cutters, he made a sharp downward thrust to the base of the crate, splitting through the wood. He repeated the motion until he’d made a jagged hole in the floor of the crate, and then he reached through the hole. He found dozens of vacuum-sealed bags under his fingers, and he pulled one out.

Six plastic bottles were locked inside the sterile bag.

“Oxycodone,” Jess said, reading the labels. “Newman is smuggling prescription pain pills.”

Frost looked around at the storage unit, as if it held more answers. He didn’t think this place was just about pills. “Did Newman load or unload anything when he came here?” he asked Frankie.

“Not that I saw. He went inside, stayed for fifteen minutes or so, and then came out.”

“So what was he doing here?” Frost asked.

No one in the room answered. Frost went to the desk at the back of the storage unit and sat down in the chair in front of it. He stared into the mirror reflecting his face. That was odd, too. A mirror. He wondered why Darren Newman felt the need to look at his reflection.

Then he thought, He wants to see if anyone comes inside behind him.

Frost studied the desktop, which had almost nothing on it, other than a bright lamp, a letter opener, and a magnifying glass. He opened the drawers and found billing orders and invoices. All of it was for tea. It still told him nothing about Lucy.

“What was Newman doing here?” he asked aloud again.

He opened the deepest drawer of the desk, which contained a series of vertical files. He scooped the entire set of files out with his hand and stared at the bottom of the desk drawer.

“Fool me once,” he said.

Using the letter opener, Frost pried at the wood panel on the bottom of the drawer, and it came up easily. Immediately underneath the panel was a manila envelope. He retrieved the envelope, opened the flap, and dumped the contents across the surface of the desk.

Behind him, Jess sucked in her breath.

“That son of a bitch,” Frost said.