The Night Bird

49

“Ferris is a ghost,” Jess said.

The three of them stood in an empty hospital room. Frost, Frankie, and Jess. Todd had checked in for observation hours earlier, under the watch of one of the uniformed officers. He’d pretended to sleep, and when the officer at his door took two minutes to go to the restroom, he’d made a silent escape. The cop hadn’t even realized that Todd was gone until Frost came looking for him.

“What does that mean?” Frankie asked. “A ghost?”

“It means there’s no such person,” Jess replied. “There’s no one by that name in any of the state databases. The address in Pacifica that he used with you is a fake. Todd Ferris doesn’t exist.”

“You were right about the drugs, too,” Frost added. “The hospital tested a blood sample. Todd — or whatever his name really is — had no drugs in his system. The whole thing was an act.”

Frankie thought about the young man who had first come into her office. She’d sized him up as shy. Overwhelmed by the world. His eyes had a childlike dreaminess, and his stories of bullying made her feel sorry for him. She’d only caught a glimpse, every now and then, of anger. Now she realized that anger overrode every other emotion in his life, and he’d kept it carefully hidden from her.

But anger about what?

“What else did he tell you about himself?” Frost asked.

Frankie shook her head. “Does it matter? I don’t know what to believe anymore. It sounds like everything he told me was a lie.”

“People who lie often tuck in kernels of truth,” Frost said. “Sometimes they do it unconsciously, because the truth is so familiar to them. Other times it’s a taunt. Or they may find it’s easier to build a fake story on top of something that’s real.”

She tried to remember what Todd had told her. Then and now. “He said he did freelance tech work. He mentioned some kind of tech start-up near SF State that was like an Uber for computer support. He worked for them.”

“We’ll check it out,” Frost said. “He was a tech wizard, no doubt about that. He built an elaborate setup inside that room, and he had to have a lot of experience to pull off something like that. It must have taken him weeks of planning.”

“What else?” Jess asked her. “The Night Bird is still out there, Dr. Stein, and you’re our only link to him.”

Frankie shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember much. It was months ago.”

“Why did he come to you in the first place?” she asked.

“He said he’d been bullied as a child by one of his cousins. He had a boss whose treatment at work was bringing the memories back.”

“Do you think any of that was true?” Frost asked.

“Knowing what I know about him now? No. If I had to guess, he used someone else’s story and pretended that it was his own. He wanted to get into my treatment room. He wanted to see exactly how I worked with people’s memories. The whole thing was a way to spy on me.”

“He learned his lessons,” Frost said.

Yes, that was true. Todd was smart. He’d figured out exactly how to lead her down the path he wanted her to follow. How to make her play his game move by move. The unexpected meetings outside the office, designed to startle her and keep her off balance. The fake horror of his memories of torture, perfectly timed with the deaths of Brynn Lansing and Christie Parke. He fed her the clues, and she put them together.

“Todd was the one who led me to Darren Newman in the first place,” Frankie recalled. “He knew I’d recognize Darren in the videos he gave me. I saw him in that men’s room in the bar, and I leaped to the conclusion that Darren was stalking Todd. Which was exactly what he wanted me to believe. I never dreamed that it was the other way around. Todd was stalking Darren. He probably bumped into Darren and stole the button off his sport coat, too. So you could find it, and I could see Darren wearing the coat with the missing button. He covered all the bases.”

Jess said, “Videos?”

Frost jumped in at the same time. “Todd gave you videos of places he’s been over the past few weeks. This guy likes to play games. I doubt that anything you saw was in there by accident.”

“Did you recognize specific places in these videos?” Jess asked. “Did he film anything in or near his apartment? Or places he’d worked?”

Frankie was tired, and her mind was slow. She’d watched the videos from Todd Ferris in a marathon fueled by wine, in the midst of an argument with Jason and her usual sparring matches with Pam. Most of what she’d seen was a blur. Restaurants. Bars. Parks. Street scenes.

“There was a choir,” she said.

Jess cocked her head. “What?”

“He took video at some kind of student choral competition. It was in a performing space. I thought it was a little strange. It didn’t fit with the other places he’d visited.”

“Did you recognize the space?” Frost asked.

She shook her head. “No, I’d never been there.”

“What else?” Jess asked.

Frankie tried to think. “A diner. He went there several times. I saw it at least three or four times in the videos on different nights.”

“Nights?”

“Yes, he always went there at night. Late. One of the videos showed a clock, and the time was like two in the morning. I figured he was going there after his tech jobs.”

“So it’s a twenty-four-hour diner,” Frost said. “Any idea where it was located?”

Frankie thought back. She’d seen the greasy spoon in the videos. He’d wanted her to see it. He’d wanted her to remember it. “Red upholstery,” she said, with her eyes closed. “The guy behind the counter had a big, full beard and a lot of piercings. It was near Market, and there was a gas station and a bus stop across the street.”

“I know where it is,” Frost said.

“Is that a taxi driver flashback?” Jess asked him.

“Exactly right. I had a lot of four-in-the-morning meals there when I was driving. It’s Orphan Andy’s in the Castro.” He held out a hand to Frankie. “I could go for some hotcakes. How about you?”

The diner was located on Seventeenth between a funky card shop and a tattoo parlor. The time of the night didn’t matter. It was crowded. They found two seats together at the counter, under a Tiffany-style overhead lamp. Frost ordered banana hotcakes, and Frankie, who realized she was starving, ordered stuffed French toast. She watched Frost study the diner with a mixture of nostalgia and curiosity.

“It hasn’t changed at all,” he said. “I don’t see Woody, though. I wonder if he still works here. Woody’s the guy with the beard. You can’t miss him.”

She thought that Frost looked completely at home here. He knew what to say, whom to look at, what to order, what jokes to make. He had a way of fitting in wherever he was, and she admired that about him. She didn’t move well outside her own comfort zone. That was why she usually went to the same places over and over.

Frost called over the man behind the counter, who didn’t look older than nineteen. Frankie described Todd, but the waiter didn’t recognize him, and she wasn’t surprised. Todd blended into the background. You could stand next to him for an hour and not remember what he looked like.

“So now what?” she asked Frost.

“Now we eat,” he said.

Somehow, in the midst of chaos, he knew how to be normal. He acted as if nothing strange were going on, and maybe, to him, that was true.

Their meals came fast. She ate all her French toast, which was stuffed with cream cheese and spiced apples and gave her a sugar high. Frost had three cups of coffee in the time they spent at the counter. Watching him, she remembered what she’d thought when she first met him at Zingari. He was smart. Handsome, with that off-kilter smile and eyes that wouldn’t let go. Young, but with maturity in his face. She felt no raw attraction to him, and she didn’t think he felt any attraction to her, but she found herself enjoying being around him. Maybe because he was outside her comfort zone.

Talking to Frost at a diner in the middle of the night, she forgot about Todd Ferris for a few brief minutes.

But the Night Bird was still alive.

“Excuse me,” said a female voice behind her.

Frankie turned and found a young woman hovering by her chair at the counter. She could sense Frost’s tension at the interruption. His eyes shot around the diner. Anything new, anything unexpected, was a threat.

The woman had shock-red curly hair and freckled skin. She wore a big smile with slightly crooked teeth. Her cheeks had a rosy flush, and alcohol wafted from her breath.

“Are you Frankie?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“A guy outside asked me to give you this.”

She extended an envelope in her hand. Frankie could see her own name written in black ink on the outside.

“Where’s this guy?” Frost asked immediately, but he didn’t wait for the answer. He bolted to the street. Frankie could see him on the sidewalk, scanning the late-night pedestrians in both directions. He ran across the MUNI tracks to the gas station, but he was too late. Todd was already gone.

Frankie stared at the envelope in her hand. She didn’t open it. The woman with the red hair left to take a seat halfway down the counter, and she flirted loudly with the waiter. Five minutes later, Frost came back and took his seat again. His hair was mussed and wet, and he looked frustrated.

“I couldn’t find him.”

Frankie pushed aside the dirty plates and put the envelope down on the counter. “Should I open it?”

“That’s what he wants,” Frost said.

She hesitated and then tore open the flap. A greeting card was inside, but as she extracted it from the envelope, something loose fluttered to the ground. Frost bent down and retrieved it and held it up for both of them by pinching the corner with his fingers. It was a photograph, four inches by five inches.

“A choir,” Frankie said with a question in her voice.

The picture showed the members of a student choir. It had to be a high school singing group, based on the ages of the kids.

“Is this the same choir, the same space, that you saw in Todd’s video?” Frost asked.

She shook her head. “No.”

“What about the kids? Do you recognize any of them?”

Frankie looked closely at the photograph. The group shot made the faces small, so it was hard to pick out the details. Kids all looked the same in student photos. Same smiles. Same hair. Same school uniform. Then her eyes focused on a tall boy in the back row. She recognized the feminine line of his jaw and the faraway expression. None of that had changed in the years since the picture was taken.

“That’s Todd,” she said, pointing with her finger.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

She focused so tightly on him that she didn’t immediately pay attention to the pretty black girl next to Todd. Then, when she did, she couldn’t take her eyes off her. The face was familiar. Not someone she knew. Not even someone she’d seen. But she recognized that same high school smile from other photographs.

“Oh my God,” she murmured. “That’s Merrilyn Somers.”

Frost leaned closer and swore. He flipped the picture and saw what was written on the back. “The Nightingales. Reno.”

“They sang together in choir,” Frankie murmured.

Frost shook his head. “I’m guessing it’s a lot more than that. Jess said Merrilyn was engaged to a boy from her high school. Look at the two of them. They’re two kids in love.”

Frankie felt a sickness all the way into her heart. “Darren murdered his fiancée. No wonder Todd did all this. He must have been insane with grief. He wanted revenge against Darren in the worst way.”

“Not just Darren,” Frost reminded her softly. “Against you.”

Frankie remembered the card in the envelope. She slid it into her hand. The cover showed a watercolor painting of the California coast, with waves tumbling onto sand and bluffs looming over the strip of beach. She opened the card and saw one sentence written inside.

“Frankie?” Frost asked.

She couldn’t tell him anything. She couldn’t form the words.

“Frankie, what does it say?”

She felt as if her world had come full circle. Everything that had gone wrong in her life lay inside that card in one sentence. One sentence, burning her eyes. One sentence, meant only for her. Todd knew the truth. Todd knew everything that she’d forgotten.