The Night Bird, page 8
Whatever the voice told her to see, she saw.
The voice. It controlled her.
Suddenly, it told her to awaken. It said her name in a high-pitched, singsong way, like a child playing a game: “Chris-tie, Chris-tie.”
She didn’t want to wake up. Her dreams were too perfect. She knew she would awaken in the white room. It had all happened before. She didn’t know how many times it had happened, but this wasn’t the first time.
“Chris-tie, Chris-tie.”
The voice sang in her head like a nightingale, but there was nothing happy about the song. She had a memory of asking: Who are you?
And she had a memory of his singsong reply.
“The Night Bird . . . that’s who you heard.”
She was awake now, and she could feel him close to her. His breath was loud and scented with something sweet. She kept her eyes closed, because she didn’t want to see him, but he plucked one eyelid between his fingers and lifted it open like he was peering under a window shade.
“Peek-a-boo, I see you!”
His face was nothing but a mask, leaning over her, inches away. The mask had a grotesque plastic smile, with bloodred lips stretching to his ears. Ghost-white skin. Huge eyes—the eyes of a bug. Not eyes at all. The mask grinned at her, and behind it, the voice sang.
“It won’t be long,” he warbled. “Time for the song!”
Christie wanted to shut her eyes, but he used gray sticky tape to seal her eyelid to her lash. First one, then the other. The moisture in her eyes dried immediately, and her eyeballs felt as if they would come loose and roll away. Pain grew in a circle in her sockets. She needed to blink; all she could think about was how much she needed to blink, but she couldn’t. She could only stare at the bug eyes and hideous grin of the mask.
Not the song, she wanted to say. Please not the song.
She remembered now. The song opened the door. The song sent her to the devil and the darkness. She wanted to scream at him and plead with him, but something was in her mouth—cloth filling every space, shutting out air and sound. All she could do was squeal in protest through her nose, making a whimpering noise. The mask giggled at her, like a child playing with an ant.
“The song is here,” he sang. “See what you fear!”
Christie screamed, not out loud, but from inside her brain. It did nothing to stop what was happening to her. The song began. The music was smooth, gentle, not scary at all, but as the lyrics played, the empty whiteness changed. Things appeared on the walls and ceiling and floor, and at first, she couldn’t see what they were, but then the room seemed to shrink inch by inch, and she realized the room was lined with needles.
Thousands and thousands of needles, glinting sharp and silver. Jutting out. Three-dimensional. Sleek and long.
Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. Anything but needles.
The walls moved. The ceiling moved. Or that was how it felt to her. The needles grew in her vision. Christie saw other things now. Eyeballs appeared and floated in the air—dozens of individual blue eyes with long lashes, just like hers—and as the walls ground closer, the needles punctured each eyeball, oozing blood and vitreous gel, gathering them up like meat on a skewer. She screamed and screamed and screamed and didn’t make a sound.
A face took shape among the needles. Not a face. The mask. Its grinning mouth opened and sang the song. The music became the soundtrack to a horror film as the bloody needles zeroed in on her body. Her skin. Her face. They grew larger and larger as they came closer.
The voice sang in her ear, “Chris-tie, Chris-tie.”
And then a command: “Run.”
Over and over: “Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run.”
She tried. She could feel her arms pumping, her legs racing, her heart hammering in her chest as she went faster and faster, but she couldn’t outrun the needles. Patiently, inexorably, they came for her. To stab her. To puncture her. To slit her through and through with a thousand wounds.
“Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run.”
Christie’s open eyes saw the needles. Her soundless screams became an unending wail for help, but there was no help. The glistening points of the needles filled her sight, so close she could feel the metal points pushing on the damp surface of her cornea, pricking their way inside. Her entire world became nothing but needles. There was a needle for every pore on her skin.
Her mind broke.
Her mind fell through a window and shattered into pieces. She wasn’t even aware of the real, tiny stab of a needle in her arm, or of the terror receding as her consciousness slipped away into blackness again.
12
Frost stared at the three wooden planks fixed to the side of a sheer cliff face, making a walkway barely eighteen inches wide. There was no railing, just swags of chain nailed to the rock like Christmas tinsel. On the open side of the planks, the cliff descended straight down into a thousand feet of air. Gnarled, wind-swept trees sprouted from its rocky crevices. Misty mountains filled the distance.
As he examined the weathered beams mounted on the rock, a five-year-old with a vanilla ice cream cone ran through the open canyon to her mother. The tourists crowded around the painting in Ghirardelli Square laughed nervously. It was just a three-dimensional sidewalk illusion, but it was so real that Lucy, with her vertigo, would have fainted.
Frost sat down next to the artist on the stone steps of the plaza’s mermaid fountain. Water gurgled and splashed over brass turtles and bare breasts. The morning sun cast shadows across their faces. The iconic chocolate factory sign loomed above them, and he could smell sweetness in the air.
“Impressive, Herb,” Frost said. “Please tell me that’s not a real place.”
“It is, actually. That’s the famous plank walk on Hua Shan mountain in China.”
“Have you done it?”
“I have.”
Frost wasn’t surprised. Herb was the kind of man who’d lived ten lifetimes in almost seventy years. “And why would anyone do something like that?” he asked.
“A Buddhist would probably say to gain enlightenment,” Herb replied, “but honestly, I was stoned out of my mind.”
Frost laughed. The omnipresent aroma of pot from Herb’s paint-stained flannel shirt was enough to intoxicate anyone who spent too much time with him. He had leathery white skin, dark eyes, and black glasses with tiny magnifiers for close-up work. He was skinny and tall, and he limped because of the time he spent painting on his knees. Shack sat in the artist’s lap, and the black-and-white cat batted at the multicolored beads strung into Herb’s long gray hair.
They’d been friends for fifteen years. Even in a melting pot city like San Francisco, Herb was one of a kind. He knew everybody. Hippies. Fishermen. Gays. Radicals. Yuppies. Techies. He’d spent four terms on the city council in the ’80s, but for as long as Frost could remember, he’d simply painted elaborate sidewalk illusions around the city. He’d been featured on The Tonight Show and Good Morning America and had appeared in a dozen San Francisco–based movies.
“I was at your brother’s food truck a couple days ago,” Herb said, tickling Shack’s chin. “Looks like he’s doing well.”
“He is. Duane loves it. It’s a big change from the brick-and-mortar kitchens.”
“And your parents? How are they?”
“Enjoying Arizona. They bought a golf cart, which I find truly horrifying.”
“Well, I have a pretty high threshold for horrifying.” Herb chuckled. “You’re talking to someone who once got a ticket for riding a Segway on 101. Anyway, it must be lonely not having them around.”
“I get why they moved,” Frost said. “Too many memories.”
Frost thought about Francesca Stein and realized that everything in life came down to memories. The good. The bad. The real. The imagined. Put them all together, and that was the person you were. Would you ever want to change that? He wondered if his parents would choose to erase that night six years ago if they could. The night he had to tell them about Katie.
“So what’s up, Frost?” Herb asked. “You don’t usually brave the tourist crowds on Saturday morning. I assume that means you need my help.”
“I do,” Frost said.
He often consulted with Herb, because his friend had a pipeline into prominent people around the city and knew most of the street dwellers, too. Herb heard rumors and sucked up secrets like a private detective. He wrote a daily blog about San Francisco life that was required reading for journalists and politicians.
“Dr. Francesca Stein,” Frost went on. “Do you know her?”
“Oh, yes. The master of memory.”
“That’s her.”
“What do you want to know?” Herb asked. “She’s lovely, but there’s steel behind those eyes.”
“Is she legit? The whole memory game sounds like a con to me. Can you really erase a memory from someone’s head? Or create a memory of something that never happened?”
“You think it’s something out of a Michael Crichton novel?”
“Honestly? Yeah.”
“I don’t think so, Frost. The older I get, the more I realize that memory is like one of my sidewalk illusions. It can look very real and be nothing but a fantasy. I remember things that I know are false, and I forget things that I know really happened. I talked to someone who went to Dr. Stein for her memory treatment. One of our esteemed city politicians, actually. He killed a pedestrian as a teenage driver, and it began giving him nightmares years after it happened. Dr. Stein worked with him. He still remembers that the accident happened, but he doesn’t remember it happening. Is that a good thing? I don’t know, but it’s real. And his nightmares are gone.”
“Nobody could make me forget finding Katie’s body.”
“You would think that’s true,” Herb said, “but don’t be so sure. The fact that it’s possible to alter memories is why so many scientists are adamant about our not doing it. They accuse Dr. Stein of opening Pandora’s box. I tend to agree with them, even if I had a fairly fluid sense of reality back in the nineteen sixties.”
Herb turned his attention to a child standing in front of them on the bottom step of the fountain. The boy was about six years old, with messy blond hair.
“How may I help you, young man?” Herb asked in a booming voice. He was good with kids.
“Is that real?” the boy asked, gesturing at the three-dimensional painting of Hua Shan mountain in the plaza.
“Does it look real?” Herb asked him.
“Yeah.”
“Then I guess it is.”
The boy thought about this. He looked over his shoulder at the painting. “I don’t think it’s real. I think it’s fake.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Herb said. “You have to walk the plank, young man.”
The boy folded his arms and marched back to the edge of the painting using big steps, but he kept eyeing Herb behind him, as if to figure out whether he was kidding. He put a foot out and drew it back, and then, with a last glance at Herb, he jumped into the center of the painting. When his feet landed on cement, he looked back with a huge grin. Herb winked at him.
“So why are you asking about this, Frost?” Herb went on. “You’re not thinking of going to Dr. Stein, are you? Because of Katie?”
“No.”
“Then why? Did something happen?”
“Two of Dr. Stein’s patients killed themselves in odd circumstances.”
Herb’s face darkened. “The girl on the bridge?”
Frost nodded. He found himself whistling a song under his breath. “She was one.”
“Are you trying to hold Dr. Stein criminally responsible?” Herb asked. “I wish you luck, but that’s a stretch. I can’t see the DA taking that case.”
“I just want to find out what really happened.”
“Well, I have to confess, I’m biased about Dr. Stein, and not in a good way.”
“Oh? Why is that?”
“Do you remember last summer? The SF State student who was murdered in her apartment near Balboa Park? Her name was Merrilyn Somers. She was stabbed seven times.”
Frost’s brow wrinkled. “I remember, but Jess Salceda led that case, not me.”
“How about the name Darren Newman?” Herb asked.
“Newman was a suspect in the murder, but he was never charged. Jess got a DNA match on someone else in the building, and the guy pled out. He claimed to have been so drunk he didn’t remember anything that happened that night.”
Herb nodded. Shack nudged the old man’s hand impatiently, and when Herb didn’t respond by petting him, the cat got up and relocated to Frost’s shoulder. He lifted his face to smell a waft of sea air.
“You know I’m on the board for a women’s antiviolence coalition, right?” Herb asked.
“Sure.”
“Darren Newman has been on our radar for several years,” Herb said. “Women started complaining about him shortly after he and his parents moved to the Bay Area from Colorado. Bullying. Abuse. Assault. I met him once, just to see who this man was. He’s a sociopath. Slick, charming, and absolutely amoral.”
“I recall Newman having some kind of criminal record, but he’d never done time,” Frost said.
“Yes, his parents are venture capital billionaires. They paid off victims. Nobody filed charges. Then about eighteen months ago, Newman dated the niece of one of our board members, and he raped her. The parents tried to buy her off, but she didn’t want money. She wanted him in jail. She was willing to go to trial and take her chances persuading a jury, but the parents pulled a new maneuver. They paid a psychiatrist to offer evidence to the judge.”
Frost could see where this was going. “Dr. Stein,” he said.
“That’s right. Stein talked about traumatic incidents in Newman’s childhood and suggested treatment, rather than incarceration. Newman copped to a misdemeanor. No jail time. Court-ordered therapy with Stein. Nobody was happy.”
“And Merrilyn Somers—?”
“She got stabbed three months later. She lived two doors down from Darren Newman. Look, Frost, I know what the DNA test showed, and I know Jess Salceda did a thorough investigation before going after that other man in the building. But I have to tell you, everyone in our coalition believed that Darren Newman was guilty. He raped and killed that girl, and he managed to pin it on someone else. What’s even worse is that he never would have been on the street at all if it weren’t for Dr. Francesca Stein.”
13
Frankie parked by the Promenade Trail on the bay.
The Golden Gate Bridge loomed immediately to the west, but the bridge was enveloped in a ridge of fog and almost invisible. San Francisco near the Presidio was often like a different city. Even when it was sunny and warm downtown, the temperature could be twenty degrees colder close to the ocean, where a damp cloud laid its chilly fingers across the coast.
She stretched in the parking lot, finished the morning coffee she’d brought with her, and took off running toward Crissy Field and the bridge. She liked to push herself hard on her Saturday-morning workouts. Jason ran more often than she did, but when she ran, she ran fast and easily outpaced him. It annoyed him, and as a result, they no longer ran together. She felt good running again, because she’d missed the last two weekends. She let her long legs stretch out on the dirt path, passing most of the other runners, ignoring the cold bay wind that whistled into her face. Her arms pumped. Her cheeks pinked up, and sweat gathered under her headband.
Normally, she cleared her head when she ran, but the overnight threat lingered in her brain.
I’m going to watch you die.
She’d hardly slept. She kept telling herself that the e-mail was no more than a variation on the same kind of hate mail she received every day. Sometimes the work she did made her enemies. She’d forwarded the e-mail to a private security firm she’d used in the past and asked them to look into it. End of story.
Even so, thinking about it made her shiver.
Frankie ran full speed with the beach beside her. Whitecaps broke on the surface of the bay. She tasted salt on her tongue. At Torpedo Wharf, she continued around the bluff, following the paved road all the way to Fort Point below the bridge. She could see the webbed red metal of the Golden Gate here, behind the ghosts of fog. At the fort, she stopped long enough to catch her breath. She bent over, with her hands on her knees. She always thought of Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo in this spot, rescuing Kim Novak from a fake suicide attempt in the frigid bay waters. She’d watched the movie over and over as a teenager, trying to understand Stewart’s dangerous obsession. That was when she’d begun to think of mental health as a career.
She remembered telling her father about her plans to be a psychiatrist. He was appalled. To him, psychiatry wasn’t science. It was nothing more than astrology with a prescription pad. For years, she’d endured his nasty jokes.
What’s the difference between physics and psychiatry?
One’s full of quarks, and the other’s full of quacks.
And then he’d laughed. He had the meanest laugh of anyone she’d ever met. If he were still alive, he’d be laughing at her now. Blaming her for what happened to Brynn and Monica. “Psychiatrists are like children pushing buttons on a machine they don’t understand,” he would say. “And now look at what you’ve done. These women trusted you, and you killed them.”
Except it wasn’t Marvin’s voice in her head, blaming her for what happened. It was her own.
Frankie started running back toward the city skyline. She ran even faster, so that the noise of her breathing blocked out other sounds. If she couldn’t hear, she couldn’t think, and she didn’t want to think right now. She focused on the domed roof of the Palace of Fine Arts, and beyond it, the hilltop skyscrapers, including the pyramid of the Transamerica building. Beside her, the beach sand was wet and brown, and the morning was gray. She wove through the Saturday crowd, trying not to slow down.
She ran so fast that she sprinted right by the man on the bench.
