The Night Bird

44

Frankie thought to herself again, Something’s wrong.

She felt as if she were in a strange bubble inside the SUV. Streaks of rain covered up the windows so that she couldn’t see the street, and all she could hear was the hypnotic drumming of the storm on the hood. Her wet clothes felt cold, and she sat and shivered. She kept the doors locked.

She turned the key in the ignition and ran the windshield wipers long enough to see through the glass. Down the street, the police disappeared inside the building through a hole in the fence. She was on her own, and all she had to do was wait, but waiting wasn’t something she did well. She didn’t like the idea of putting her life in anyone else’s hands.

She adjusted the mirror and looked at her own reflection. Her wet hair ran down her forehead and face like snakes. Shadows brought out the bones of her face. Her dark eyes stared back like the eyes of a stranger. She wished she could see behind them. For all the time she spent in the minds of other people, she didn’t really know herself.

Something’s wrong.

What?

Her phone pinged with an e-mail, making her jump. She saw the glow of the screen on the seat next to her. He was still with her. Still stalking her. She didn’t want to pick it up, but she had no choice. She checked the e-mail, and the return address was the same as it had been in the beginning.

The Night Bird was writing to her again.

He was right. One way or another, this all ended now. She leaned forward to watch the silhouette of the ruins a block away, and somehow she knew it was all a ruse. The white room wasn’t inside that building. Neither was the Night Bird. Neither was Lucy Hagen. He’d lured the police there, because in the end, this came down to the two of them and no one else.

She waited impatiently, knowing another e-mail would follow soon. Seconds passed, and her phone pinged again.

Lucy Hagen was in his hands. Another patient. Another death. More blood. She didn’t know how much more loss her conscience could stand. She could see their faces in her brain. Monica Farr. Brynn Lansing. Christie Parke. She could even see the face of Merrilyn Somers in the photographs that Frost had laid out on Darren Newman’s desk. Merrilyn Somers, alive, and Merrilyn Somers, dead. Frankie could have stopped him, but she’d let Darren fool her, the way he fooled everyone else in his life. He’d seduced her mind and almost seduced her body, too.

It ended now. Tonight.

He e-mailed her again. Another ping.

She knew she should alert Frost. She could get out of the car and scream for the police. End the ruse; get them out of the ruins. Her voice would bring them running. They could save her, but they couldn’t save Lucy Hagen. And it would start all over again with someone else. She wasn’t going to let that happen.

She finally sent an e-mail back.

Frankie held her phone in her hand, and she waited for him to reply. The silence went on and on. No e-mail. Nothing. It was a slow torture, as if he wanted her to suffer in anticipation.

Finally, her phone vibrated. She sucked in her breath, realizing that he was making a video call this time. He wanted to see her, and he wanted her to see him, too. That was part of the game. She wished she could throw the phone out of the car into the rain, but she held it up in front of her face and steeled herself as she answered the call.

There he was.

The mask.

Everyone else had seen it before, but not her. Frost. Todd. Lucy. They’d described it to her and shown her pictures, but the reality was a thousand times worse. Close up. Filling the entire screen. The plastic was deathly white, drained of all color. Candy-red lips grinned at her, a huge grin, stretching from the point of the chin to the high false cheekbones. His teeth looked like gold railroad tracks. The eyeholes were rimmed in silver, and where the eyes should have been was the gleaming black mesh of an insect’s eyes. Dreadlocks dripped down the mask in braids of fake hair.

The mask spoke to her.

“Fran-kie... Fran-kie.”

She knew he could see her, and she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of letting him see how terrified she was. She made her own face into a pale mask. Her lips curled with contempt. “Where’s Lucy?”

“Wanna see... wanna see?”

“Show me.”

Like a page turning, the camera reversed. Frankie couldn’t help herself. She cried out in anguish at what she saw. The screen blazed with whiteness, as if the luminous ivory paint on the walls could blind her. Everything was white — walls, floor, and ceiling. In the midst of it, she saw Lucy Hagen. Tears, like rain, streamed down the young woman’s cheeks. The huge whites of her eyes matched the walls. Frankie knew she was drugged. Hypnotized. So far into a trance that she stood on the surface of another planet. It was the look that her patients had when she was working with them to change their memories, but this was the dark side. This was everything she’d ever tried to do in life turned against her.

Lucy had both hands wrapped around the black handle of a knife. Its silvery blade was almost a foot long, its razor point facing downward. Her arms were outstretched from her body. Every muscle trembled. She stared into the camera, her glassy eyes helpless.

“Help me,” she called, with the whimper of a child. “Save me.”

Then she screamed, so loudly that Frankie jerked back in her seat.

“Stop me!”

Frankie could barely hold the phone in her hand. She wanted to run to Lucy and gather her up in her arms. “Let her go,” she shouted into the phone. “Let her go. Take me. I’m the one you want!”

The camera reversed, and the mask came back, grinning at her with its red lips. Behind the mask, the Night Bird laughed. His laughter bubbled up from his throat and filled the SUV, getting louder. She could still hear Lucy in the white room. “Save me, save me, save me.”

“Where are you?” Frankie yelled into the phone. “I’ll come to you. I’ll let you do whatever you want. Let Lucy go!”

He kept laughing.

The call ended, and the screen went black. The Night Bird was gone.

“No!” Frankie shouted. “Tell me where you are!”

She waited. Her breaths were short and fast. Her fists tightened the way they would around the man’s throat. “Come on, come on, come on,” she murmured, knowing he wasn’t done with her, waiting for the next e-mail.

Ping.

She whipped her fingers across the screen.

Frankie punched back her reply in capital letters.

The seconds ticked. One, two, three, four. She rolled down the window, and rain poured inside. Where did he want her to go? What did he want her to see? She leaned out and looked up and down the street. She was alone.

Ping.

Another e-mail.

“I know that!” she shouted out the window. “Don’t you think I know that? Tell me where you are!”

Her fingers trembled as she typed a message.

One minute of her five minutes was gone. Frankie cried; sobs wracked her chest. That was what he wanted. To torture her. And this was how he did it. Not by laying hands on her body, not by feeding drugs into her brain. He made her sit in the truck, impotent and desperate. He let the time go by, until there was no time for her to stop what came next. To pry the knife out of Lucy’s hands.

Ping.

She read the e-mail through her tears.

Frankie pushed her head out of the window of the SUV and craned her neck to stare at the cloud-layered sky. It was night. Lightning flashed. Silver curtains of rain descended.

“What am I supposed to see?” she shouted.

But then she saw it.

She was across the street from a four-story white stone building. It looked like a government palace airlifted out of Washington DC. Columns divided the rows of windows. A balcony jutted out from one window, as if Evita might stand there, waving to adoring crowds. But this building, like everything also around her, was abandoned. Dirt marred the white stone. The windows were covered over. Everything was dark.

No, she realized as she looked closer. Not everything.

Where she’d seen nothing before, now a pinpoint light blinked on the top floor. It flashed behind the center window, on, off, on, off. A message. That’s where he was.

That’s where she had to go.

She threw open the door of the car.

Frankie climbed out, slammed the door shut, and ran.

Frost climbed into the open window frame. He braced himself against the walls on either side and delivered a kick to the diagonal plank that was nailed across the space. The first kick splintered the wood, and the second dislodged it from the side of the building and sent it spiraling to the ground. Behind him, Jess shouted, but Frost simply took a step forward and jumped.

The ground didn’t look far from the second-floor window, but it felt far as he dropped. He picked up speed and landed on his feet with an impact that shuddered through his spine. One leg crumpled under him, and he collapsed to the ground, which was a rocky slope of dirt and weeds. He got up and half limped, half ran toward the locked gates.

Jess yelled from the window. “What the hell are you doing?”

Frost pointed at the white building on the far side of the street, where Francesca Stein was disappearing inside. “There!”

He reached the property gates, which were eight feet high but free of barbed wire. He dug his shoes into the mesh and climbed. His fingers slipped on the wet netting, and spasms shot up and down his legs. He reached the top, wobbled, and basically let his body fall to the street on the other side.

“Frankie!” he shouted, but she was already out of sight.

He dragged himself toward the building’s main door at the street corner. A block away, he heard police officers sprinting to catch up with him. He limped up the outside stairs to a boarded door, which flapped open and closed as the wind blew. He wrenched it open and saw elegant marble steps in front of him, making a spiral toward the upper floors. Concrete dust littered the stone. Picture frames hung askew on the walls.

Heels tapped over his head, climbing the stairs.

“Frankie!” he called again. “Stop!”

She stopped, but not because he’d called to her. She stopped because at that moment, a guttural scream filled the entire stairwell. It came from speakers; it came from everywhere. High above him, and right beside him, he heard a man’s wail, throaty and terrible, begging for mercy that never came. It began, cut off, and began again, and died away into the gasp of someone laboring to breathe. It was a scream he’d never heard in his life, but there was no mistaking what it was.

It was a scream of death.