Brian Freeman - The Night Bird

Frankie shut down the car and got out. Todd stayed where he was, so she walked toward the beach. His feet were in the sand. The black water rolled in behind him. His thin brown hair was wet.

“Dr. Stein,” he said, so softly that she could barely hear him. “I thought that was you.”

“I rang the bell at your apartment, but there was no answer,” she said.

“I was walking on the beach. What are you doing here?”

She listened to his voice before answering. She tried to decide if the strange whisper could have come from him, but it was impossible to be sure. She didn’t even know if she’d really heard it.

“We need to talk, Todd.”

He shrugged and wandered along the boardwalk beside the beach, and she walked beside him. He wore a sweatshirt and shorts and sneakers with no socks. He stared at the ground, with his mouth turned downward in a frown. When they reached a bench, he sat down and put his hands on his knobby knees.

Frankie sat down, too. “I tried calling,” she said. “You put the wrong number on your patient form.”

“What number was it?”

She checked her phone and read it off to him. He shook his head.

“No, sorry. I swapped two of the digits. I do that sometimes. It’s a kind of dyslexia.”

She noticed that he didn’t correct the number for her, and she doubted that he’d made an innocent mistake.

“Where are you working? At the same gaming company?”

“No, I couldn’t take the boss anymore. I do freelance tech work now. There’s a start-up company launched by a couple SF State alums. It’s kind of an Uber for nerds. I go all over the city doing tech support for various businesses. I like it. I get to set my own schedule.”

“Good for you,” she said.

A wave crashed against the rocks and sent up a fountain of spray that slapped both of their faces.

“So what do you want, Dr. Stein?” Todd asked.

“I want to talk about those memories you’ve been having.”

“I thought you didn’t believe me,” he said.

“Things have happened.”

His head swiveled. In the darkness, she couldn’t make out his eyes. “I know. I saw the news. I saw what they said about you. Another woman died last night, and she was one of your patients. Like all the others.” He added, after a long pause, “Like me.”

She nodded. “That’s right.”

“Of course, this couldn’t be about what you did to me. You were sure about that.” His soft voice was thick with sarcasm.

“I didn’t do anything to you, Todd.”

“Then why is this happening to me?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

“Ask me the question,” he said. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You want to know if I saw this latest woman. The one on the news. You want to know if I remember her, too.”

“Do you?”

Todd lay his head back and stared at the sky. She could see the profile of his long nose and jutting chin. “Yes.”

“What do you remember?”

“Needles,” he said.

Frankie felt a little shock of electricity in her body. “What?”

“The woman was terrified of needles.”

“How do you know that?”

He looked at her again. “I remember it.”

“Tell me more. What else do you remember?”

Todd was silent. He stood up from the bench. Nervously, he looked up and down the dark boardwalk. “No, I have to go. I need to get out of here. This shit is going to get me in trouble.”

She reached up and held his arm. “Please, Todd. I can’t say anything to anyone about what you saw. Whatever you tell me is bound by privilege.”

“Not if you think I’m dangerous.”

“Are you?”

Todd didn’t answer immediately. He sat down again. “I’m losing time, Dr. Stein. I’m missing days. I wake up, and I don’t know where I’ve been or how I got there. Hours will be gone. Sometimes the whole day. It’s happened twice this week. All I know is that when I wake up, I have these memories stuck in my head.”

“The white room,” Frankie said.

“Yes. And the women being tortured.”

“When did this last happen?”

“I woke up Saturday morning. Early. It was five in the morning. I was under a blanket like some homeless guy on the steps of an industrial building in Dogpatch. I have absolutely no idea how I got there. That was when I decided to track you down. I drove to the place by the bridge where you said you liked to run, and I waited to see if you showed up.”

“How much time did you miss? What’s the last thing you remember?”

He closed his eyes. His face twisted into a grimace. “I was at a bar near City College on Thursday night. Really late. I was pretty drunk. I don’t remember if I blacked out or what. Next thing I knew, it was Saturday. When I went back, I found my car still parked near the bar.”

“And you don’t remember anything in between?” Frankie asked.

“Just that woman’s face. The one who died. I don’t know where I was, but I’m sure I was with her.”

“Had you ever seen her before?”

Todd shook his head. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

He dug in his pocket and removed something small and plastic, which he rubbed between his fingers. “Yeah, I’m sure. I’ve been watching for these women. To see if they showed up anywhere.”

“What do you mean?”

“The first time this happened was a couple months ago. The woman I saw — I knew she died. I saw it online a few days later. She went crazy at a wedding and shot herself. I didn’t know her, but I remembered her, and that scared the hell out of me. I began to get paranoid. I didn’t know what was happening to me. So ever since then, I’ve been keeping records.”

“What kind of records?” she asked.

“Wherever I go, I shoot a video of the people in the room.” He held up the plastic object, which was a small USB flash drive. “I figured, if this happened again, I could go back and see if I’d met this woman somewhere. You know, like at a bar or diner or wherever. I went through the videos today. As far as I can tell, I never crossed paths with any of these women. But somehow I know them, and they’re all dead.”

Frankie was silent. Then she said, “May I take the flash drive and look at it myself?”

His fist closed over it. “I don’t know.”

“I won’t show anyone else. I won’t tell the police.”

He shrugged, and his fingers uncurled. She took the flash drive from his palm.

“Thank you, Todd.”

“You won’t find them,” he said. “The women aren’t in there.”

“It’s okay, I believe you.” She added, “There’s a phrase I’d like to say out loud. I want to know if it means anything to you. Or if you’ve heard it before.”

“What is it?”

Frankie didn’t know if she should go on. She wondered how he would react. “The Night Bird,” she said.

He turned and stared at her. He didn’t say anything. She couldn’t read his eyes.

“Todd?” she continued. “Does anything pop into your head when I mention the Night Bird? Any kind of memory?”

“No,” he said softly, but his voice quavered.

“Nothing at all?”

“No. Why?”

She hesitated, because she didn’t think he was being honest. The Night Bird did mean something to Todd. He looked unsettled, as if he wanted to run. “I think a psychopath is deliberately killing these women. Somehow he’s programming their minds for extreme, self-destructive behavior. He calls himself the Night Bird. Do you have any idea who that could be?”

He leaned closer to her. She was conscious of the fact that they were on a lonely beach with no one else around. If he wanted to do something to her, he could.

“You think it’s me, don’t you?” he asked. “You think I’m the Night Bird.”