The Night Bird

43

Photographs.

The envelope contained dozens of photographs. Frost picked up each picture and laid them out in rows, taking up the entire surface of the desk. He spotted at least five different women among the faces. He didn’t recognize any of them, but Jess leaned over his shoulder and jabbed one of the photos with her fingernail.

“That’s Merrilyn Somers,” she said.

Newman had at least thirty photographs of his former neighbor. He’d stalked her everywhere she went. On campus at SF State, at a library computer, singing in a church choir, drinking coffee with friends on Market Street. The zoom lens he’d used captured every detail of her body and face in intimate, uncomfortable detail. Frost could see the brightness in Merrilyn’s distinctive blue eyes and the pencil-thin lines of her eyebrows, the curves of her hips in frayed jeans, and the ebony shine of her long, straight hair.

She was magnetic. And she’d attracted the wrong man.

There were more pictures of Merrilyn. After. She lay on her bed, naked. Her blue eyes were fixed, staring in death. Mouth open. Blood stained her body like red paint where the knife had violated her. Newman had recorded the murder in the same horrifying detail he’d used to stalk her.

“Do you know the other women, Jess?” Frost asked.

She didn’t answer immediately. Her eyes couldn’t let go of the photographs.

“That one there, I think that’s the girl in Green Bay who was killed when Newman was eighteen. And this other one, that’s his classmate at college in Boulder. I don’t know the rest.” She leaned closer to the array of pictures. “Wait, no, I know that girl, too. She’s local. A prostitute. She disappeared nine months ago, and a couple of the other street girls reported her missing. We never found her.”

“She doesn’t fit the pattern,” Frost said. “There are pictures of her after the murder, but not before. And he hid the body, rather than let us find her, like the others. I wonder why.”

“I know why,” Frankie murmured.

Frost turned around. Dr. Stein had crept up behind them. Her lips were pressed together in horror as she stared at the photos laid out on the desk. Rain dripped from her hair to the metal floor like music.

“He made a joke about it,” she said. “He talked about using a hooker to get a sperm sample from Leon Willis. And about how he would have had to get rid of the hooker if he did that.”

“And you didn’t think that information was worth sharing with the police?” Jess asked acidly. Her brown bangs fell in front of her eyes.

“He put it in a speculative context, not as a confession. It was all ‘what if.’ There wasn’t enough to break privilege. Even though my gut told me that he was telling the truth.”

Jess pounded out of the storage unit with loud, heavy footsteps. Frost knew she didn’t cover her anger well.

“There wasn’t anything I could do,” Frankie said to Frost. “I’m sorry.”

“What else do you see in these photographs?” he asked her. “What do they tell you? I need a read on this man, Frankie. I need to know what he’s really doing.”

“Well, for one thing, it’s pretty obvious why he stopped here that night,” Frankie told him.

“Why?”

“He was going to Berkeley to have sex with Simona. He stopped here first to look at the pictures.”

Frost was puzzled, and then he understood. “My God. This is what turns him on.”

“Yes.”

“What else? Get inside this guy’s head.”

He knew that was the last place she wanted to be, but she bent over his shoulder, until she could make out every detail in the collection of photographs. Then she turned around and studied the rest of the storage unit. The crates. The yellow walls. The tea and the pill bottles. The rain pouring across the open doorway.

“Something’s wrong,” she said.

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“You wrote that down on the note I found in your office, too. Something’s wrong. What did you mean by that?”

“Just that I can’t make all the pieces of the puzzle fit. I mean, most of them do, but there’s one piece that feels like it comes from a different puzzle. I’m sorry, I know that’s not helpful.”

“Right now, I don’t care what doesn’t fit,” Frost told her. “What does fit?”

Frankie hesitated. “The knife.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s consistent. Newman uses a knife on these women.”

“So?”

“Todd talked about seeing a knife. He remembered seeing a knife the last time he was taken.”

“The last time,” Frost said. “You mean, when the Night Bird took Lucy?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“What does that mean?” Frost asked.

“I’m not sure, Frost, but he says the game’s almost done, and now there’s a knife in the mix. He always uses a knife. It tells me we need to find Lucy soon. Before something happens to her.”

Frost got out of the chair. He took a long, hard look at the women pictured on the desk. Their faces. Their smiles. And then their bodies, riddled by knife wounds. He had a brief, grotesque image of Lucy in the same position. He thought about Darren Newman standing over her with a camera. After. His anger consumed him, and he felt powerless.

Then Jess walked back inside the storage unit through the waterfall of rain.

“Let’s go,” she said to him. “I’ve got a forensics team on the way, and the boy outside will keep this place secure until they get here.”

“Go where?” Frost said.

“The Night Bird just turned his phone back on,” Jess told him. “We got a ping.”

The GPS signal took them to one of the neighborhood’s ruined industrial sites. It was a three-story building, stretching the length of a football field. The walls were red brick, mottled by decades of salt water carried off the bay. Round arched windows lined the wall facing the street. The ground-floor glass had been replaced by heavy plywood, and above it, the windows were pockmarked with cracks and bullet holes. A barbed wire fence surrounded the entire property.

They parked a block away. Lightning lit up the night sky in streaks above the angled roof. Frost could feel the thunder under the street. He left Frankie behind in the Suburban, and he joined Jess and half a dozen other officers as they converged on the shell of the building.

“He knows we’re coming,” Jess reminded them.

Their flashlight beams led the way through the rain. They followed the fence along the exterior of the building, and when they reached the back corner, they found a section of netting that had been cut away, opening up a way inside. One by one, they pushed through the gap in the wire. The building wall was in front of them, and the plywood blocking the first window had been splintered with an ax, which lay on the sidewalk.

“Welcome to the party,” Frost murmured.

Jess went inside first. Frost followed.

The stone floor was a minefield of debris. His light passed over rusted tools, jagged chunks of mortar fallen from the ceiling, and garbage left behind by squatters who’d broken in over the years. Concrete support columns with peeling white paint made a row of soldiers from one end of the building to the other. The wind whistled like a ghost through broken windows. Standing pools of black water reflected the glow of the flashlight. He smelled mold and dampness in the shut-up space. It was cold.

Jess sent two officers along each of the perpendicular walls. She and Frost picked their way through rubble toward the center of the building. Each step dislodged rats, who squeaked and scurried. Rain squeezed through the ceiling. Drip. Drip. Drip. They didn’t hear anyone else inside the ruins.

Ahead of them, open stone steps led toward the building’s second floor.

“There’s a light up there,” Jess murmured.

Frost saw it, too. The light went on and off, throwing moving shadows above them. Jess took a step toward the stairs, but she didn’t have her flashlight aimed at her feet. Frost did, and he saw something in her path half-concealed by a grease-covered towel. It was gray metal, and it had teeth. He shouted for her to stop, and Jess put her foot down short of the towel, but the toe of her boot kicked the device forward. A metal bang rocked the space as the iron mouth snapped shut.

“A bear trap,” Frost said. “That was meant for us.”

Jess hissed into her radio. “Everybody, watch your step. We’ve got booby traps in here.” And then to Frost, “This is a setup. We’re getting out.”

“You go. I’ll check the second floor.”

“Frost, he’s not here. He lured us inside to make us targets.”

“Lucy might be up those stairs,” Frost snapped.

“I’m ordering you out.”

Frost shook his head. “No way, Jess. I’ll leave when I know the place is empty.”

He stepped over the bear trap and marched toward the stairs, using his flashlight to sweep the floor as he did. Behind him, he heard Jess exhale with a loud sigh. She barked into the radio again. “Hold your positions. Do. Not. Move.”

Jess followed him.

On the stairs, his flashlight lit up dust and broken glass. He saw glints of gold. The stairs were lined with long brass tacks, all of them pointing upward. He took the steps one at a time, knocking the tacks aside with the side of his boot as he went. They tumbled downward.

“Watch out, Jess,” he murmured.

“I see them.”

The light above them got brighter. The shadows got larger, dancing on the stairs. He saw an electric lantern hanging from the ceiling on a hook. The wind through the holes in the wall made the lantern swing back and forth, like a man dangling at the end of a hangman’s rope.

At the top of the steps, Frost found the front half of a rat, severed from the rest of its body. Two feet away, the rat’s back half spilled blood over the claws of another bear trap.

Jess caught up to him and saw it, too. “This guy is nuts.”

“Not nuts. Angry.”

They cast their lights around the building. The glass in the arched windows was mostly gone here, letting in sheets of rain. Thunder boomed like an earthquake over their heads. Dust and paint flecked from the ceiling. As the thunder quieted, he heard another kind of muffled thunder, louder and closer. A strange, snickering scrape joined the chorus, like fingernails on chalkboard. Something was alive in here. Jess heard it, too, and they both turned their flashlights toward the ceiling and flinched.

Sagging water pipes hung from the mortar. Lining the pipes, thousands of seagulls squeezed together, causing a rumbling noise with the shifting and rubbing of their wings. Their claws restlessly scratched on the metal pipes. As the light hit them, dozens flew toward the open windows in panic, and others spread their wings wide and screeched, their cries amplified into screams between the building walls.

“You a Hitchcock fan, Frost?” Jess asked.

“Not anymore.”

“This guy’s not here. Let’s go. These birds look hungry.”

“Wait,” Frost said.

He stopped and listened. Fighting with the cacophony of the gulls, he heard music close by. It started as low as a whisper and grew steadily louder. The song was sweet, but to him it was sickening.

It was “Nightingale.”

He swept his flashlight around the building again but saw nothing. The song came from in front of him. He headed toward the far wall, ducking gulls that swooped past his face. Slick guano covered the floor. At the wall, a rounded gap for a missing window looked out on a deserted parking lot and the street below them. A heavy plank had been nailed diagonally across the space to prevent someone from falling out. He moved his light along the floor and found a cell phone lying on the floor near a glistening pool of rainwater. The phone’s ringtone continued to sing.

“Nightingale.”

Over and over. The phone was ringing.

Jess came up beside him. “Nothing we can do but answer it.”

Frost bent down and snatched up the phone. He answered the call, but he didn’t say anything at all. He waited.

“You took the bait,” the Night Bird chanted, “but now you’re too late.”

And then another song began. It wasn’t Carole King. This song was hard rock, played so loudly that Frost had to wrench the phone away from his ear. He put it on speaker, and he and Jess listened to a synthesizer thumping out a chorus. No words. Just the beat. It annoyed the birds, who screeched in protest, and their cries became deafening.

“What the hell is that song?” Frost asked. “I know it.”

“This guy has a nasty sense of humor,” Jess replied. “It’s the Edgar Winter Group. The song is ‘Frankenstein.’”

Frost didn’t get the joke at first, but then he did. “Frankie.”

He splashed through the water to the giant window and looked down at the street. He could see his SUV parked at the end of the block. As he watched, the driver’s door flew open.

Francesca Stein climbed out, slammed the door shut, and ran.