The Night Bird, page 25
“I’ll have to use the back door to the alley,” Lucy murmured to herself.
She sat up sharply, almost spilling her tea. She had no idea why she’d said that or where the thought had come from. It just popped into her head.
Lucy got up and paced, unable to shake her restless, anxious feeling. Nothing felt right. Time barely moved. She didn’t want to put on music. She didn’t want to eat, because she wasn’t hungry. She turned on the television, despite Frost’s warning, but five minutes later, she turned it off. She wished he would come back, but she knew it might be hours before she saw him again. And even if he did come back, it wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t be what she wanted.
“This is stupid,” she told herself.
She reheated her tea and took it to the window to watch the black clouds slouch across the sky. The downpour sounded like fingernails tapping on the glass.
Luuuucy.
She spun around, stifling a scream. The mug slipped from her fingers and spilled. She’d heard a voice, but no one was there. The apartment was empty. She was alone in the silence. And yet the voice was in her head, as crystal clear as if someone were standing next to her.
Lucy grabbed her phone and dialed. She wanted to talk to Frost, and she was disappointed when the call went to his voice mail.
“Hey, it’s me,” she said, leaving him a message. “I’d love to talk to you. Will you be able to come by later? Or I could come to your place. Don’t worry, everything’s fine.”
She hung up. Then, almost immediately, she called him again.
“Actually, no, everything’s not fine. Something’s wrong. I don’t know what it is. Call me as soon as you can, okay?”
Lucy put down her phone and went to get paper towels to sop up the spilled tea. Before she got there, her phone started ringing, and she sprinted back to scoop it up and answer it on the second ring. “Wow, that was fast,” she told him. “I’m so glad you called back. I really needed to hear your voice.”
But it wasn’t Frost.
At first, there was a long stretch of eerie quiet.
Then the music began.
She heard a flourish of drums and guitar and the whine of a synthesized keyboard. The monster beat started in her ear and wormed into her brain. Her jaw went slack. Her breathing got faster. She didn’t want to look down, but she had no choice, and when she did, she saw the gorge below her and felt the sway of the rope bridge. Her body was paralyzed. She couldn’t move.
“Luuuucy,” the Night Bird whispered into the phone. “Luuuucy.”
“Please . . . no . . . please . . . don’t do this . . .”
The song thumped its rhythm over and over. The synthesizer drowned out the storm and the wind. Spasms rippled through her muscles. She didn’t see her apartment anymore. Her world was a thousand feet of air, descending past stone cliffs to an icy glacial river.
“Listen to me, do you want to be free?”
“Yes . . . yes . . . what do you want?”
“It’s up to you, you know what to do.”
Tears streamed down Lucy’s face. She listened to the music. She felt the bridge go back and forth, bucking with the gusts. She wanted to fly, to die, to go anywhere, to do anything, if only she could make it stop.
“It’s up to you, you know what to do.”
He said it again. And again.
“You know what to do. You know what to do. You know what to do.”
Calmly, Lucy hung up the phone. Yes, she knew what to do. She walked to her closet and collected her raincoat and umbrella. She gathered up her purse from the dinette table.
Go out the back, she remembered.
She marched to the door of her apartment and opened it, but she paused as she stared into the dusty hallway. Her work wasn’t done. Not yet. She wasn’t ready to leave. There was one more thing.
Leaving the door ajar, Lucy turned around and went to the kitchen.
She opened the middle drawer, extracted a carving knife with a ten-inch blade, and slid it inside her purse.
41
Frankie waited as long as she could.
Five minutes passed. Lightning lit up the trees, and thunder followed, reverberating under the ground. Frost didn’t come back. The backup he’d requested didn’t arrive.
Sitting alone in the car, she heard a distant noise. It was almost part of the air. Moments later, she heard it a second time. She opened the door, letting in the rain, and leaned out to listen. Whatever the noise was, it was gone now, and it didn’t happen again. She pulled the door shut. Her impatience grew. She called Frost’s phone number, but there was no answer.
Ten minutes passed.
He should have been back by now.
Frankie climbed out of the truck into the driving rain. The street was empty. Trees bent, waving their branches at her. She continued past the bend in the road and saw that Darren Newman’s Lexus was gone. It had left recently; there was still a dry patch where the car had been parked. She squinted into the storm but couldn’t see taillights.
“Frost!” she shouted. Her voice sounded muffled, and she shouted again, as loud as she could. “Frost!”
She hiked up the shoulder to the gravel trail beside Stow Lake. The first thing she saw, sopping wet and lying in the mud, was a wool cap.
It was Todd’s.
Six feet away, in the middle of the path, was a gun.
“Frost!” she screamed again, but he didn’t answer. A finger of worry crept up her spine.
She started running into the wind. At the stone arch bridge, she crossed over the water to Strawberry Hill. Her hair was plastered to her skin, and she wiped rain from her eyes. The mud grabbed at her shoes. She followed overlapping footprints next to the lake, with leaves and pine needles blowing into her face. Where the path curved, she found a cross trail leading sharply uphill.
There she saw a ghost.
It wasn’t the White Lady. A man rose in darkness from the ground, barely visible against the forest. It was Frost. His skin was pale. Dirt matted his hair and clothes. He moved slowly, cupping the back of his skull with one hand. His other hand was striped with blood. He navigated one step downward, and Frankie rushed to his side and let him ease his weight against her with an arm around his waist. They struggled to the lakeside trail.
“Did you see them?” he asked.
Frankie shook her head. “No. Darren’s car is gone. I think he has Todd Ferris with him. I saw a gun on the trail.”
“One of them jumped me,” Frost said. “I don’t know which one. He hit me from behind. Did the backup get here?”
“Not yet.”
She checked the back of his head. Rain had washed away most of the blood, but she found swelling near the back of his ear, and when she grazed the area with her fingers, he winced with pain.
“Let’s get you to a hospital. They’ll need to check for concussion.”
“I’m okay.”
“Did you pass out?”
“A couple seconds, no more.”
“You’re not okay,” Frankie said.
She helped him along the path and across the stone bridge. The rain showed no signs of stopping. They retrieved the gun from the trail, and then Frankie helped Frost into the passenger seat of the Suburban. She went around the other side and got behind the wheel, but before she could start the engine, red lights flared ahead and behind, lighting up the park and the downpour. Silently, without sirens, four police cars surrounded her like phantoms. A dark-blue sedan joined them and pulled adjacent to the window, close enough that Frankie couldn’t open the door. She saw a severe, heavyset Hispanic woman climb out of the sedan.
“That’s my lieutenant,” Frost said. “Jess Salceda.”
“I know her,” Frankie murmured. “From last year.”
Frost lowered the passenger window. The lieutenant leaned inside, dripping rain. Her eyes acknowledged Frankie, but there was no love lost between them. Frankie knew that Salceda blamed her for Darren Newman. Then and now.
“Did you pass Newman’s car on the way in?” Frost asked.
“No.”
“We need a BOLO. He has a hostage with him.”
Salceda passed on the details to another officer, but she didn’t move from the Suburban. Her eyes shot coldly to Frankie and then back to Frost. “Lucy Hagen is gone,” she said.
“What?”
“Violet checked on her. The apartment is empty. I’m sorry, Frost, but I wanted you to know. We’ve put out a report on her, but right now, the best thing we can do is find Newman. Chances are, if we find him, we find Lucy.”
Salceda marched back to her sedan. Frankie watched Frost stare through the windshield. His face was black with shadows. He didn’t even roll up the window. Rain swept inside. The red lights of the police cars made the water shine like blood.
“Frost?” she said.
He didn’t answer.
“Are you okay?”
He still said nothing.
And then, making her jump, her phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number, but she knew who it was.
“Oh my God, what do I do?” she asked.
His voice was calm. “Answer it. Put it on speaker.”
She clicked open the speakerphone. “Hello?”
She heard breathing on the end of the phone and the noise of city traffic. He was in a car. She said again, “Hello?”
A singsong voice, as bitter as the wind, chanted to her.
“Fran-kie . . . Fran-kie.”
She tried to answer, but she couldn’t make her mouth form any words.
“Fran-kie . . .”
Chills wracked her wet body. She hissed into the phone. “Stop this, you sick son of a bitch. Stop playing this game.”
He didn’t answer; he simply breathed. And then he said with an odd, childish giggle, “Game’s almost done . . . game’s almost done.”
Frost gestured for the phone, but Frankie clutched it tightly in her hand. “What else do you want from me? Leave my patients alone. Leave me alone. Don’t you know you’ve already destroyed me? What more is there?”
The Night Bird didn’t answer. Laughter bubbled out of his throat.
Frankie felt her self-control bleeding away. “For God’s sake, why are you doing this? Why?”
The laughter faded to silence, and when he spoke again, his voice was low and cruel.
“You know why . . . to watch you die.”
Frost peeled the phone out of Frankie’s fingers and barked into it. “This is Frost Easton. Stop the car, and tell us where you are.”
He listened to the dead air.
“You don’t have anywhere to run. Where are you? Where’s Lucy?”
The Night Bird finally whispered back. “Luuuucy . . . Luuuucy . . . where are you . . . Luuuucy . . .”
Frankie watched Frost close his eyes and try to control himself. “What did you do to her?”
“Luuuucy . . .”
He slapped the phone shut and pushed it back into her hand.
“Drive,” he told Frankie. “We need to hurry.”
“Drive where?”
“You said Todd woke up in Dogpatch. We’ll start there.”
“Frost, what do you think he’s doing?”
He turned to face her. She could almost hear the pound of the detective’s heartbeat. “I don’t know what this game is all about, but Lucy’s in the middle of it. And so are you.”
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.”
