Brian Freeman - The Night Bird

“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.”

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.

Among the blur of faces, someone was watching her. By the time she passed him, she realized that his face was familiar. It took her brain a moment to catch up, and then she knew who it was. She stopped and reversed her tracks, walking back toward the bench, breathing hard. He waited for her.

Frankie put on a neutral smile. “Todd.”

“Hello, Dr. Stein.”

She was going to comment on what a surprise this was, but she didn’t think it was a surprise. You could always run into someone you knew in San Francisco, but she saw in his face that he’d been expecting her. She felt paranoid, but it was only because of the strange e-mails she’d received. Looking at Todd, she couldn’t remember now whether he was one of the patients with whom she’d shared her personal e-mail address.