The Night Bird, page 2
“What do you mean?” Frost asked.
“Brynn. I thought she was just making fun of me because I was so afraid to be stuck up here. I was freaking out.”
Frost nodded. “What is it that scares you? The height?”
“It’s the bridge, actually.”
“I’ve heard of that. Gephyrophobia, isn’t that what they call it? Fear of bridges?”
“Yes. You’re right.” She looked surprised that he knew what it was called.
“I guess everybody has something like that,” Frost told her. “With me, it’s frogs. Those slimy little things just scare the crap out of me.”
He smiled at her. He had a warm, slightly off-balance smile, and his blue eyes were lasers that never left her face. His thick blond-flecked eyebrows matched his trimmed beard. He stared at the girl until her head inched to the right, and she stared back with an empty expression. She was traumatized, like a robot with the power switched off.
“It’s Lucy, right?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“Lucy what?”
“Lucy Hagen.”
“Okay, Lucy, I’m Frost. I’m with the police. And I’m going to get you off this bridge just as soon as I possibly can, but I have to ask you some questions about what happened.”
“Okay.”
Frost pointed at a black SFPD Chevy Suburban parked on an angle between a police squad car and an ambulance. “Would you mind if we talked in my car? I’ve got forensics people who need to get evidence in the Camaro, and we can’t really do that with you in it, see what I mean?”
Lucy stared at her lap. “Well, I’d love to get out of this car, except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I can’t move,” she said.
Frost stood up and rubbed a hand over his beard. “You can’t move at all?”
“No. I can turn my head, but my arms and legs don’t work.”
Frost gestured to one of the uniformed ambulance workers. Lucy shook her head as she saw a paramedic coming closer.
“There’s nothing physically wrong with me,” she told him. “This has happened before. I’ll be fine as soon as I’m off the bridge. Sometimes the fear just overwhelms me, and my body shuts down.”
“We’ll take you to the hospital and get you checked out,” Frost said.
“I don’t need to go to the hospital. I just need to get off the bridge.”
“Well, unless you start moving soon, you’re going to the hospital, Lucy. It’s kind of a rule we have. Last time I left a woman paralyzed in the middle of the Bay Bridge, my lieutenant got really pissed at me.”
He smiled again. His cheeks and eyes had deep laugh lines. This time, Lucy’s mouth twitched upward into a shy smile of her own, and a blush deepened on her face.
“Please just get me out of this car,” she said. “I dragged myself back here after Brynn went over the side, and then I couldn’t move. It’s been an hour. I’m really cold.”
“I can carry you if you’d like. Or I could ask one of the EMTs to do it.”
“Do whatever you have to do,” Lucy said. “As long as I don’t have to watch. I can’t look over the edge.”
Frost opened the passenger door of the Camaro. Lucy Hagen was small, maybe five foot three. Her shoulder-length brunette hair had been mussed into tangles by the wind. She wore a long-sleeve gray shirt untucked over black tights, with calf-high boots. He guessed that she was no more than twenty-five years old. Life was about perspective; to Frost, at thirty-four, twenty-five sounded young. Her skin was creamy, her large brown eyes sunken by darker moons underneath. She had lips that pushed out from her mouth in a permanent pucker, and her lipstick was deep red. Her rounded nose was slightly too large for her face, but she was pretty.
Lucy closed her eyes. Frost leaned down to her waist and lifted her effortlessly. She was as limp as a sack of Chinatown rice. He hoisted her so that her torso nudged over his shoulder and carried her the short distance to his Suburban. With one hand, he opened the passenger door, and then he gently draped her inside. When he went around to the other side of the truck and got behind the wheel, her big eyes were open, and she was staring at him.
“Thank you.”
“No problem,” Frost said. He turned on the engine. Heat surged from the vents. “How are you feeling?”
“It’s better inside. The convertible makes the bridge thing worse.”
“That makes sense.” He tugged the knot to tighten his tie and smoothed his hair down as much as he could. It was still messy as it swept back high on his forehead, but messy worked for him. His hair was buzzed short on the sides of his head, emphasizing his small ears. “Can you move yet?”
“No, but I’m sure the feeling will come back soon.”
“Okay. Can you tell me what happened out there?”
“Brynn went nuts,” Lucy said. “That’s what happened.”
“Nuts how?”
“We were stuck in traffic. I was scared because of the bridge, but Brynn was fine. Joking, singing. Totally normal. And then she turned psycho. It came out of nowhere. She was screaming, going crazy, clawing at herself. She tried to climb the bridge, like she was being chased, and she fell. It was horrible.”
“Did she fall or did she jump?”
“I think she fell. I mean, she wasn’t trying to kill herself. This was something else, but I don’t know what it was.”
“Did she say anything while this was going on?”
“No, she never said a word. She just screamed.”
“Where were the two of you coming from?” Frost asked.
“A party in Alameda.”
“Was Brynn drinking at the party? Did she take any drugs?”
Lucy shook her head firmly. “No drugs. That wasn’t her thing. Brynn had a martini at the party, but that was it.”
“Could someone have slipped something into her drink?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. There are freak jobs who will do anything. But she seemed fine as we were driving home.”
Frost didn’t say anything for a while. He was making connections. “Do you know a woman named Monica Farr? Or do you know if Brynn did?”
“Monica Farr? I don’t think so.”
He slid his iPhone from his belt clip and swished through a few photos. He showed Lucy a picture of a young redhead. “Do you recognize this woman?”
“No. Who is she?”
Frost didn’t answer. “How well did you know Brynn?”
“Pretty well. We’ve been roommates for a year. We both worked at Macy’s.”
“Did she seem depressed or unstable? Did you notice any other instances of erratic behavior?”
“Brynn? No way. She’s Mary McCheery. Nothing gets her down. If anything, she’s been even happier the past few months. She’s dating a guy, and I think she felt like he might be the one, you know? Wedding bells. She’s been sleeping over at his place a lot. I didn’t see her the past couple of nights.”
“What’s the boyfriend’s name?” Frost asked.
“Gabriel Tejada. He’s an attorney in Sausalito.”
“How’d they meet?”
“He was in Macy’s, buying perfume for his girlfriend before Christmas. She became an ex-girlfriend pretty fast after Gabe met Brynn.”
“Okay.”
Frost paused as he heard a gravelly noise from the far back of the truck. He looked over his shoulder as a noxious cloud wafted into the front seat, making him cover his nose. “Aw, c’mon, Shack, really? Now?”
Lucy’s face scrunched in confusion. Then she screamed as a tiny tuxedo cat flew over the seat and landed on the dashboard of the SUV. It had huge, curious dark eyes, a pink nose, and a black chin set against white cheeks and chest. Its stubby ears ended in white wingtips. The cat cocked its head, snaked a short tail around its paws, and analyzed her face like a psychiatrist.
“Sorry,” Frost told her. “He always waits to hit the litter box until I have someone in the car.”
“Your cat?”
“Yeah, sort of. Long story. This is Shack.”
“Shaq? Like the basketball player?”
“No, Shack as in Ernest Shackleton. The Antarctic explorer.”
“Oh,” Lucy said.
“I’m sort of a history buff. Sorry, are you allergic?”
“No.”
Shack took that as an invitation. He padded from the dashboard onto Lucy’s lap, kneaded her thigh briefly, and stretched across her legs, exposing a black stomach with a single white stripe that looked like an Oreo cookie. The cat was barely a foot from nose to tail. Lucy lifted a hand and stroked under Shack’s chin, and Frost noted the movement in her arm.
“Looks like you’re not paralyzed anymore,” he pointed out.
“Oh!” Lucy exclaimed. She wiggled her fingers. “You’re right. I told you, it’s always temporary.”
“Do you want me to put Shack in the back? I have a carrier for him.”
“No, he’s fine,” Lucy said. “Is he like a police cat? I didn’t know they had such things.”
“No, he’s just a cat cat. He likes to ride along with me sometimes.”
“I thought cats hated cars.”
“Not Shack. He goes everywhere. He’s got the heart of an explorer. Hence the name.”
“I think that’s sweet,” Lucy told him. “I mean, that you take him with you.”
“Yeah, homicide inspectors. We’re as sweet as they come.”
Lucy’s eyebrows arched. “Homicide?”
“That’s my department. We look at any death that’s considered suspicious. Based on what you’re telling me, Brynn’s behavior is way out of character for her, and I’d like to know what caused it.”
“Have you seen anything like this before?” Lucy asked.
Frost hesitated. “Extreme behavior usually makes me think about PCP or certain synthetics. What you’re describing sounds like a severe hallucinogenic reaction.”
“I’m telling you, Brynn never did drugs,” Lucy insisted. “Not even a joint. She was a vegan. ‘My body is a temple.’ That kind of crap.”
“Did she smoke?”
“No.”
“And did you notice anything unusual prior to her breakdown?” Frost asked. “Did anything strange happen while you were stuck on the bridge?”
“No, nothing at all.” Lucy chewed her lower lip, and her eyebrows squeezed together, making crinkled lines on her forehead. She rubbed Shack’s stomach, and the cat stretched luxuriously with its front and back paws. Shack had very clear likes and dislikes among people, and he’d obviously decided that he liked Lucy Hagen.
“Nothing?” Frost asked, watching her face. “Are you sure?”
Lucy glanced at the other cars around them. A trickle of vehicles pushed westward through the one open lane the police had carved out for traffic. “There was the mask thing. That was odd.”
“The mask thing?”
“There was a car stuck on the bridge with us, and the driver was wearing a creepy mask. At least I thought he was. His window opened and closed so fast that maybe I just imagined it. Brynn didn’t see anything.”
“What kind of mask was it?” Frost asked.
“Scary. Bone white. Big, weird, exaggerated smile, red lips. Fly eyes. The hair was fake, too.”
“It doesn’t sound like you imagined it. Do you remember the car?”
“I want to say it was a Cutlass, but I’m not sure. It had smoked windows. Black, I think.”
“Could the car have been following you after you left the party?”
“I guess. I never looked back, so I don’t know. It’s not like the guy did or said anything while we were stuck on the bridge. He just opened the window and stared at me.”
“You’re sure it was a man?” Frost asked.
“I assume so, but I guess I don’t really know for sure.”
“Did this person get out on the bridge deck when Brynn began behaving strangely?”
Lucy shrugged. “If he did, he didn’t have the mask on. I was too freaked out to notice who came out of which cars. By the time I even thought about it again, the car was gone.”
“Okay.”
“Do you think it means anything?” Lucy asked.
“I don’t know. It’s strange, but the whole thing is strange.” Frost added, “You said you’ve never heard of a woman named Monica Farr. Are you sure about that?”
“Pretty sure. The name doesn’t sound familiar.”
“Have you or Brynn ever been to the San Francisco Film Centre at the Presidio?”
“No, I’ve never been there. I don’t think Brynn has, either, at least not since I’ve known her. Why are you asking me these questions? What does this have to do with Brynn?” When Frost didn’t answer, Lucy went on: “You know I’m just going to Google this woman when I get home.”
Frost knew that was true. There were no secrets anymore.
“Okay, the fact is, Brynn’s not the first person to go crazy like this,” he told her. “Two months ago, a woman named Monica Farr had a similar breakdown during a wedding reception at the Film Centre. She died, too.”
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.
“Brynn. I thought she was just making fun of me because I was so afraid to be stuck up here. I was freaking out.”
Frost nodded. “What is it that scares you? The height?”
“It’s the bridge, actually.”
“I’ve heard of that. Gephyrophobia, isn’t that what they call it? Fear of bridges?”
“Yes. You’re right.” She looked surprised that he knew what it was called.
“I guess everybody has something like that,” Frost told her. “With me, it’s frogs. Those slimy little things just scare the crap out of me.”
He smiled at her. He had a warm, slightly off-balance smile, and his blue eyes were lasers that never left her face. His thick blond-flecked eyebrows matched his trimmed beard. He stared at the girl until her head inched to the right, and she stared back with an empty expression. She was traumatized, like a robot with the power switched off.
“It’s Lucy, right?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“Lucy what?”
“Lucy Hagen.”
“Okay, Lucy, I’m Frost. I’m with the police. And I’m going to get you off this bridge just as soon as I possibly can, but I have to ask you some questions about what happened.”
“Okay.”
Frost pointed at a black SFPD Chevy Suburban parked on an angle between a police squad car and an ambulance. “Would you mind if we talked in my car? I’ve got forensics people who need to get evidence in the Camaro, and we can’t really do that with you in it, see what I mean?”
Lucy stared at her lap. “Well, I’d love to get out of this car, except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I can’t move,” she said.
Frost stood up and rubbed a hand over his beard. “You can’t move at all?”
“No. I can turn my head, but my arms and legs don’t work.”
Frost gestured to one of the uniformed ambulance workers. Lucy shook her head as she saw a paramedic coming closer.
“There’s nothing physically wrong with me,” she told him. “This has happened before. I’ll be fine as soon as I’m off the bridge. Sometimes the fear just overwhelms me, and my body shuts down.”
“We’ll take you to the hospital and get you checked out,” Frost said.
“I don’t need to go to the hospital. I just need to get off the bridge.”
“Well, unless you start moving soon, you’re going to the hospital, Lucy. It’s kind of a rule we have. Last time I left a woman paralyzed in the middle of the Bay Bridge, my lieutenant got really pissed at me.”
He smiled again. His cheeks and eyes had deep laugh lines. This time, Lucy’s mouth twitched upward into a shy smile of her own, and a blush deepened on her face.
“Please just get me out of this car,” she said. “I dragged myself back here after Brynn went over the side, and then I couldn’t move. It’s been an hour. I’m really cold.”
“I can carry you if you’d like. Or I could ask one of the EMTs to do it.”
“Do whatever you have to do,” Lucy said. “As long as I don’t have to watch. I can’t look over the edge.”
Frost opened the passenger door of the Camaro. Lucy Hagen was small, maybe five foot three. Her shoulder-length brunette hair had been mussed into tangles by the wind. She wore a long-sleeve gray shirt untucked over black tights, with calf-high boots. He guessed that she was no more than twenty-five years old. Life was about perspective; to Frost, at thirty-four, twenty-five sounded young. Her skin was creamy, her large brown eyes sunken by darker moons underneath. She had lips that pushed out from her mouth in a permanent pucker, and her lipstick was deep red. Her rounded nose was slightly too large for her face, but she was pretty.
Lucy closed her eyes. Frost leaned down to her waist and lifted her effortlessly. She was as limp as a sack of Chinatown rice. He hoisted her so that her torso nudged over his shoulder and carried her the short distance to his Suburban. With one hand, he opened the passenger door, and then he gently draped her inside. When he went around to the other side of the truck and got behind the wheel, her big eyes were open, and she was staring at him.
“Thank you.”
“No problem,” Frost said. He turned on the engine. Heat surged from the vents. “How are you feeling?”
“It’s better inside. The convertible makes the bridge thing worse.”
“That makes sense.” He tugged the knot to tighten his tie and smoothed his hair down as much as he could. It was still messy as it swept back high on his forehead, but messy worked for him. His hair was buzzed short on the sides of his head, emphasizing his small ears. “Can you move yet?”
“No, but I’m sure the feeling will come back soon.”
“Okay. Can you tell me what happened out there?”
“Brynn went nuts,” Lucy said. “That’s what happened.”
“Nuts how?”
“We were stuck in traffic. I was scared because of the bridge, but Brynn was fine. Joking, singing. Totally normal. And then she turned psycho. It came out of nowhere. She was screaming, going crazy, clawing at herself. She tried to climb the bridge, like she was being chased, and she fell. It was horrible.”
“Did she fall or did she jump?”
“I think she fell. I mean, she wasn’t trying to kill herself. This was something else, but I don’t know what it was.”
“Did she say anything while this was going on?”
“No, she never said a word. She just screamed.”
“Where were the two of you coming from?” Frost asked.
“A party in Alameda.”
“Was Brynn drinking at the party? Did she take any drugs?”
Lucy shook her head firmly. “No drugs. That wasn’t her thing. Brynn had a martini at the party, but that was it.”
“Could someone have slipped something into her drink?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. There are freak jobs who will do anything. But she seemed fine as we were driving home.”
Frost didn’t say anything for a while. He was making connections. “Do you know a woman named Monica Farr? Or do you know if Brynn did?”
“Monica Farr? I don’t think so.”
He slid his iPhone from his belt clip and swished through a few photos. He showed Lucy a picture of a young redhead. “Do you recognize this woman?”
“No. Who is she?”
Frost didn’t answer. “How well did you know Brynn?”
“Pretty well. We’ve been roommates for a year. We both worked at Macy’s.”
“Did she seem depressed or unstable? Did you notice any other instances of erratic behavior?”
“Brynn? No way. She’s Mary McCheery. Nothing gets her down. If anything, she’s been even happier the past few months. She’s dating a guy, and I think she felt like he might be the one, you know? Wedding bells. She’s been sleeping over at his place a lot. I didn’t see her the past couple of nights.”
“What’s the boyfriend’s name?” Frost asked.
“Gabriel Tejada. He’s an attorney in Sausalito.”
“How’d they meet?”
“He was in Macy’s, buying perfume for his girlfriend before Christmas. She became an ex-girlfriend pretty fast after Gabe met Brynn.”
“Okay.”
Frost paused as he heard a gravelly noise from the far back of the truck. He looked over his shoulder as a noxious cloud wafted into the front seat, making him cover his nose. “Aw, c’mon, Shack, really? Now?”
Lucy’s face scrunched in confusion. Then she screamed as a tiny tuxedo cat flew over the seat and landed on the dashboard of the SUV. It had huge, curious dark eyes, a pink nose, and a black chin set against white cheeks and chest. Its stubby ears ended in white wingtips. The cat cocked its head, snaked a short tail around its paws, and analyzed her face like a psychiatrist.
“Sorry,” Frost told her. “He always waits to hit the litter box until I have someone in the car.”
“Your cat?”
“Yeah, sort of. Long story. This is Shack.”
“Shaq? Like the basketball player?”
“No, Shack as in Ernest Shackleton. The Antarctic explorer.”
“Oh,” Lucy said.
“I’m sort of a history buff. Sorry, are you allergic?”
“No.”
Shack took that as an invitation. He padded from the dashboard onto Lucy’s lap, kneaded her thigh briefly, and stretched across her legs, exposing a black stomach with a single white stripe that looked like an Oreo cookie. The cat was barely a foot from nose to tail. Lucy lifted a hand and stroked under Shack’s chin, and Frost noted the movement in her arm.
“Looks like you’re not paralyzed anymore,” he pointed out.
“Oh!” Lucy exclaimed. She wiggled her fingers. “You’re right. I told you, it’s always temporary.”
“Do you want me to put Shack in the back? I have a carrier for him.”
“No, he’s fine,” Lucy said. “Is he like a police cat? I didn’t know they had such things.”
“No, he’s just a cat cat. He likes to ride along with me sometimes.”
“I thought cats hated cars.”
“Not Shack. He goes everywhere. He’s got the heart of an explorer. Hence the name.”
“I think that’s sweet,” Lucy told him. “I mean, that you take him with you.”
“Yeah, homicide inspectors. We’re as sweet as they come.”
Lucy’s eyebrows arched. “Homicide?”
“That’s my department. We look at any death that’s considered suspicious. Based on what you’re telling me, Brynn’s behavior is way out of character for her, and I’d like to know what caused it.”
“Have you seen anything like this before?” Lucy asked.
Frost hesitated. “Extreme behavior usually makes me think about PCP or certain synthetics. What you’re describing sounds like a severe hallucinogenic reaction.”
“I’m telling you, Brynn never did drugs,” Lucy insisted. “Not even a joint. She was a vegan. ‘My body is a temple.’ That kind of crap.”
“Did she smoke?”
“No.”
“And did you notice anything unusual prior to her breakdown?” Frost asked. “Did anything strange happen while you were stuck on the bridge?”
“No, nothing at all.” Lucy chewed her lower lip, and her eyebrows squeezed together, making crinkled lines on her forehead. She rubbed Shack’s stomach, and the cat stretched luxuriously with its front and back paws. Shack had very clear likes and dislikes among people, and he’d obviously decided that he liked Lucy Hagen.
“Nothing?” Frost asked, watching her face. “Are you sure?”
Lucy glanced at the other cars around them. A trickle of vehicles pushed westward through the one open lane the police had carved out for traffic. “There was the mask thing. That was odd.”
“The mask thing?”
“There was a car stuck on the bridge with us, and the driver was wearing a creepy mask. At least I thought he was. His window opened and closed so fast that maybe I just imagined it. Brynn didn’t see anything.”
“What kind of mask was it?” Frost asked.
“Scary. Bone white. Big, weird, exaggerated smile, red lips. Fly eyes. The hair was fake, too.”
“It doesn’t sound like you imagined it. Do you remember the car?”
“I want to say it was a Cutlass, but I’m not sure. It had smoked windows. Black, I think.”
“Could the car have been following you after you left the party?”
“I guess. I never looked back, so I don’t know. It’s not like the guy did or said anything while we were stuck on the bridge. He just opened the window and stared at me.”
“You’re sure it was a man?” Frost asked.
“I assume so, but I guess I don’t really know for sure.”
“Did this person get out on the bridge deck when Brynn began behaving strangely?”
Lucy shrugged. “If he did, he didn’t have the mask on. I was too freaked out to notice who came out of which cars. By the time I even thought about it again, the car was gone.”
“Okay.”
“Do you think it means anything?” Lucy asked.
“I don’t know. It’s strange, but the whole thing is strange.” Frost added, “You said you’ve never heard of a woman named Monica Farr. Are you sure about that?”
“Pretty sure. The name doesn’t sound familiar.”
“Have you or Brynn ever been to the San Francisco Film Centre at the Presidio?”
“No, I’ve never been there. I don’t think Brynn has, either, at least not since I’ve known her. Why are you asking me these questions? What does this have to do with Brynn?” When Frost didn’t answer, Lucy went on: “You know I’m just going to Google this woman when I get home.”
Frost knew that was true. There were no secrets anymore.
“Okay, the fact is, Brynn’s not the first person to go crazy like this,” he told her. “Two months ago, a woman named Monica Farr had a similar breakdown during a wedding reception at the Film Centre. She died, too.”
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.
