Brian Freeman - The Night Bird

Up the block, she heard the rusted squeak of wheels on the far end of the alley, near Laguna. The noise was familiar, but something about it bothered her. Looking up, she glimpsed a man pushing a shopping cart across the intersection, and she recognized Dante, with his copper skin and pronounced limp. Her brain stuttered, trying to make sense of it. Just as she realized that something was wrong — that Dante couldn’t be in two places at once — footsteps hammered behind her.

Lucy turned. Her body twisted.

She saw a man looming over her; she saw the hideous mask grinning at her. She had time for one scream that filled the alley. “Help!”

His arm clamped around her throat, choking off her cry. He jerked her off the ground as her body flailed. She kicked viciously backward, but his arm held her tight. His other fist shoved her head sideways in his grip, and she thought her neck would snap. A sharp prick punctured her skin. A beautiful kind of warmth flowed through her brain like a river and washed over her limbs. She went limp with a strange, formless joy. She realized she could breathe again. He’d let go. She was standing, but she was weightless. She saw the garbage at her feet and the empty street, and she knew she was free. She spun around as if to run, but she lost her balance. The terrible mask swam in circles in her face, as if a hundred masks were laughing at her. She tried to follow them, but the gyrations made her dizzy.

Lucy collapsed forward, and he caught her as she fell.

She was only vaguely aware of being lifted into the air. She could see the sky above her. The clouds looked like islands on an indigo sea that rose and fell with the waves in her mind.

They were moving. He carried her across the alley toward the parked Taurus with the open trunk. Fear suddenly made her twitch. It was like staring into an open mouth that would clamp shut and swallow her down. Weakly, she fought, and protests whimpered from her tongue, but he simply rolled her into the maw of the shark. Then her world was dark, and she drifted down until she was far away.

Everyone in Todd Ferris’s videos had cell phones.

That was the first thing that Frankie noticed. It didn’t matter where he went — Golden Gate Park, a bar, the BART train, a diner, a bus — he took videos of the people around him, and they clung to their phones like umbilical cords connecting them to the rest of the world.

Frankie stared at her own phone on the coffee table in front of her. It felt like the enemy now. Her security consultant had confirmed Frost’s suspicions. She’d been hacked. For months, her phone had been a two-way street, exposing her entire life to the Night Bird. She had a new phone now, but that didn’t change the horror she felt. The violation.

He knew everything about her. Every person she’d met. Every e-mail or message she’d sent or received. He’d been listening as she took every patient down into their deepest fears and then back up into the sunlight. He’d been a spy on the most private conversations anyone could have.

How could she tell them?

She burned with shame. He’d spied on her personal life, as well as her professional life. She thought about the time in February when she and Jason had reconnected after months of remoteness. Pam had been away. The apartment was theirs. He’d made love to her with a ferocity they hadn’t experienced in years, and she’d found herself losing control in his arms. The connection hadn’t lasted. They were like strangers again, but they still had that one intimate night together.

Except now, she knew, it hadn’t been just the two of them in the bedroom. He’d been there, too. He’d heard the fights. The arguments. The confessions. The grief. The loneliness. Nothing had been private.

Frankie tried to put it out of her head. She couldn’t think about it now. She concentrated on the videos that Todd had given her. Everywhere he’d gone, he’d captured the faces. She’d watched two hours already, and she still had hours more to review. He’d told her that he hadn’t seen any of the women who’d died. Their paths hadn’t crossed. And yet Frankie had other reasons to watch.

Todd was missing time. Just like Christie Parke and Brynn Lansing. He claimed to have had visions of torture and then to have awakened on the streets in the industrial area known as Dogpatch. The most likely explanation was that he’d been abducted and drugged, like the women. If that was true, then somewhere in his travels around the city, Todd must have met the Night Bird.

Unless he was the Night Bird himself.

On her television screen, Todd ate late-night breakfast at a diner. It was a favorite spot; the same restaurant had shown up in his videos at least three other times. He sat at a window table, and he kept his phone near his lap as he recorded the comings and goings. The diner looked like a vintage greasy spoon, with red upholstery in the booths and a counter filled by overnight regulars who traded jokes with a long-bearded waiter. She caught a glimpse out the window of a MUNI bus stop, a Chevron station, and a wide avenue that looked like Market Street. Todd’s camera went from face to face, and she saw giggling teenagers, middle-aged nurses in scrubs, coffee-swilling businessmen, and flamboyant gays who looked like refugees from Beach Blanket Babylon . Every coffee shop was a microcosm of San Francisco.

But the people were all strangers to her.

She pressed “Pause” and took her wine glass from the table. She refilled it from the bottle, and she drank. When she started the video again, she found herself in a performance space, watching young people singing, like an episode of Glee . It was some kind of choral competition, and the arena was crowded. Todd zeroed in on each face around him and each of the young vocalists.

Strangers.

The front door to the apartment rattled, and Pam and Jason came inside. Monday night was meeting night for Pam’s drug rehab. She took off her long leather jacket and hung it up in the closet, and Jason did the same with his suede coat. Frankie felt him in the room like cold air blowing off ice. They hadn’t spoken since their argument in her office the previous day. He ignored her and took the stairs up to their bedroom.

Pam joined her in the living room. She was dressed in jeans and an untucked purple silk blouse. She looked good, as she usually did, and her hair was mussed. She picked up the wine bottle, which was mostly empty, and rolled her eyes.

“Maybe you should go to meetings,” Pam said.

“I really don’t need sarcasm right now.”

“I wasn’t being sarcastic.”

Pam kicked off her heels and sat down. Frankie started the video again. The venue shifted to the grassy hills of Lafayette Park. Todd lay on a blanket, with a laptop in front of him, and she could see southwest toward Sutro Tower in the distance. It was obviously a weekend afternoon. The park was busy, but Todd used his phone to zoom in on each group, close enough that she could see their faces.

One by one.

All strangers.

“Is this some kind of odd foreign film?” Pam asked. “Most people watch Jennifer Lawrence or Eddie Redmayne or something like that.”

“A patient took this video,” Frankie explained. “I’m looking for someone.”

“Who?”

“The person who’s killing my patients.”

Pam stared at her. “And what makes you think he’d be somewhere in this video?”

“I can’t say anything about that.”

“Of course not,” Pam said.

“I’m not hiding things,” Frankie told her. “It’s privileged.”

“Would it matter if it wasn’t? You don’t want help from anyone else. Frankie’s island has a population of one.”