Brian Freeman - The Night Bird

“No, I’m glad you told me. I don’t have any stories like that.”

“Be glad you don’t.”

“I don’t know. I want there to be something , you know. I feel like I’m not going anywhere. I think I’d rather be like you. Drive a cab, or live on a fishing boat, or work on Alcatraz, instead of selling jewelry to rich old women.”

“Nothing’s stopping you,” Frost said.

“Except myself.” Lucy checked the time on her phone. “I better go. Break’s over.”

“Sorry. One more question.”

“Sure.”

“Did Brynn tell you anything about her treatments with Dr. Stein? I’m trying to find out more about how this memory thing really works.”

“No, she didn’t talk about it, but she seemed fine afterward. Nothing was wrong, as far as I could tell.”

“She didn’t give you any details?”

“Not really, but if you want to find out more about it, I know someone who can help.”

“Who?” Frost asked.

“Me.”

“You? What do you mean?”

Lucy looked embarrassed. “I decided to talk to Dr. Stein about my gephyrophobia. It’s stupid, living in the Bay Area and freaking out about bridges. I want to know if she thinks she can help me.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea right now,” Frost said.

“Oh, I won’t do any treatments yet. I probably can’t even afford it. I just figured I’d do an initial consultation to find out what it’s all about. That’s what you want, too, isn’t it?”

“Lucy, don’t do this for me. Really.”

“But it might help you anyway, right?”

“It might,” Frost admitted.

“Well, there you go. Win-win for both of us. I have an appointment on Monday afternoon. We can talk afterward.”

Lucy didn’t give him a chance to object. She pushed herself off the step and smoothed her red dress. Frost got up, too, and their bodies accidentally bumped together in the hustle-bustle of the crowd. Lucy’s mouth puckered, as if she had an impulse to kiss him. He defused the moment by reaching out to shake her hand. She took it, and her palm had a nervous dampness.

“Bye, Frost,” she said, with a twinge of disappointment on her face.

“Good-bye, Lucy.”

She turned and skipped down the steps, dodging between the crowds. He watched her until she disappeared through the revolving door at Macy’s, and then he turned back to the park. As he climbed into the plaza, he nearly collided with a tall man who wore a white flowing robe and a bizarre mask that completely covered his face. The mask featured a red-lipped grin from ear to ear, long white fangs, and huge bug eyes. A black wig of dreadlocks hung down his head.

Frost was startled, but weirdness was the coin of the realm in San Francisco.

“Sorry,” he said.

The mask bobbed up and down, and the man replied in a singsong falsetto.

“Sorrrr-eeee,” he chanted. “Sorrrr-eeee.”

Frost continued past the man into the square. He was fifty yards away beneath the palm trees when he remembered what Lucy had told him about the man on the bridge.

The man wearing a strange mask, two cars away from Brynn Lansing.

Frost didn’t like coincidences.

He ran back to the steps of the plaza and scanned the crowd. He looked everywhere, but the man in the mask had already vanished.

Frankie spent the evening alone at Zingari. Jason texted that he was in his laboratory, and Pam still wasn’t speaking to her after their last argument. She sat at a window table beginning at six o’clock, and by the time she got to her fourth glass of wine, darkness had taken over the neighborhood outside the restaurant. She had her Kindle with her. She started the night by rereading The Myth of Repressed Memory by Elizabeth Loftus, but at the halfway point in the bottle of pinot noir, she switched to The Magus by John Fowles.

When she heard the ping on her phone, she knew her mysterious stalker was back. She opened the e-mail and saw

She needs you.

He was baiting her to write back, but instead, she forwarded the e-mail to Pell Security, and then she called the CEO of the company to see if they’d had any luck tracing the overnight message to its source. She reached him, but he didn’t have good news. The GMX account had been accessed via a generic IP address on a public Wi-Fi server and couldn’t be linked to an individual.

He also confirmed that the sender had been logged in at Zingari on Friday while she was there.

The Night Bird was definitely watching her.

Frankie hung up her phone and spent a long time examining every face in the restaurant. No one looked back at her. No one looked familiar. She realized that the stranger had what he wanted. He was playing with her head.

“Everything okay?” Virgil asked as he refilled her glass, emptying the bottle. His lavish white forelock spilled down his forehead. He was dressed in the usual black uniform, which he wore a size too small to show off his physique.

“More love letters,” Frankie said. She connected a charger to her phone to juice the battery.

“Well, aren’t you the lucky one.”

“Not so lucky. This one says he wants to watch me die.”

The dark brows over Virgil’s hawk-like eyes arched in surprise. His smirk froze as he tried to figure out whether she was joking. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Are you going to call the cops or something?”

“They won’t do anything. They’ll come if he shows up waving a gun, but short of that, I’m on my own.” She added, “He was in here last night, Virgil.”

“The hell you say.”

“My security company traced him to the Wi-Fi at the restaurant. Was anyone asking about me? Or watching me?”

“Just that tasty cop.”

“Keep an eye open, okay?” Frankie asked. “If you see somebody, let me know.”

“My eyes are always open,” Virgil said.

Frankie went back to her wine. She picked at the plate of yellowfin tuna in front of her. She gazed at Post Street to see if anyone lingered in the arched entrances of the Marriott, but no one outside the hotel paid special attention to the windows at Zingari.

She wondered if she should call the CEO at Pell Security again and ask him to provide personal protection for a few days. She’d had to do that once before, when the Darren Newman case exploded. The knifing death of the young woman, Merrilyn Somers, had put Frankie in the headlines, and she’d received anonymous threats from people who were convinced that she’d set a killer free. Legally, she was blameless, but morally, she couldn’t shake her own sense of guilt. She was relieved when Newman was cleared, but her doubts about him had never gone away.

Frankie felt surrounded by ghosts in the restaurant. Her father. Darren Newman. The Night Bird. And now Todd Ferris, too — the man at the Bay Trail with his memories of torture in a white room. She wasn’t convinced that what Todd had experienced was real. Some people made up stories that put themselves at the center of current events. It made them feel important. His descriptions also had a hallucinatory quality, maybe from drugs, maybe from dreams. Even his recollection of Brynn Lansing — if it had happened at all — could be easily explained. Brynn worked near Frankie’s building; he might well have seen her as he was going in or out of the Union Square office.

She’d urged Todd to schedule an appointment, but he declined. He still didn’t want anything in writing. And then he’d left. That was that. She wondered if she would hear from him again.

Virgil slid into the chair opposite her. He smoothed his beautiful hair. “Want company?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Oh good, because I wasn’t going to give you a choice.”