Brian Freeman - The Night Bird

“Shut up,” she finally said.

“But you don’t really miss him, do you? I remember how you talked about him. You’re glad he’s dead.”

“Shut up.”

“How exactly did it happen, Frankie? The accident sounded so odd and tragic.”

She knew that he wanted her to boil over. He was manipulating her. Playing with her head. Nothing had changed. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and let coldness flow through her again.

“Where do you take them, Darren?” she asked. She pointed at the locked door behind him. “Is it there? Is that where you torture them?”

“Do you want to see?”

“Yes.”

He dug keys out of his pocket, then beckoned Frankie closer with one finger. She kept a safe distance. He shoved the key in the lock and twisted, and he pushed the door inward.

“Go on,” he told her, standing in the doorway. “Take a look.”

“Get away from the door.”

Darren laughed. He strolled toward his car and waved her to the hidden space. Frankie kept an eye on him as she approached the doorway, and then she took a quick glance inside. Beyond the wall, the warehouse looked no different from the rest of the space. More containers. More Chinese characters stamped on the wood. There was no white room. No torture chamber.

“Satisfied?” Darren whispered.

He was right behind her, his hands on her waist. She slapped them off.

“This doesn’t change anything,” she told him. “If it’s not here, then you have a space somewhere else. I know you’re the Night Bird.”

“I have a special name, too? Nice touch. That’s so Edgar Allan Poe.”

“You won’t win,” Frankie said.

“I’ve already won. You’re here.”

He fixed her with another smile; then he tightened the knot on his Jerry Garcia tie and tugged his peach shirt cuffs an inch beyond the sleeves of his sport coat. He smoothed the lapels.

“It was great seeing you, Frankie,” he told her, “but unless you want to admit what you really want from me, you should go. I have work to do, and then I have a special evening planned.”

“Special?”

“ Crazy special,” Darren said.

He pushed a button on the wall, and the garage door beside them cranked open on its tracks. Light from outside flooded the space. “No need to walk all the way back. Warehouses are dangerous places. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

Frankie started toward the sloped driveway that led to the street, but as she squeezed past Darren, she noticed the shiny glint of buttons on his sport coat. They were brass buttons, just like Frost had showed her. And one of them was missing.

Twenty-four hours.

Lucy had been gone for an entire day, and Frost was no closer to finding her. The frustration of the search left him angry, and he focused his anger on Francesca Stein. He was certain she knew more than she was telling him, but he couldn’t reach her to demand answers. He’d already called her home phone. Her cell phone. Her office. She didn’t call back.

Frost stood in Union Square, wrestling with himself over what to do next. He was about to cross a line. He knew plenty of cops who bent rules and broke rules, but he’d never been one of them. Jess Salceda called him a Boy Scout and told him real cops couldn’t be Boy Scouts if they wanted to solve a case. He’d never believed her.

Until now. He didn’t care about the consequences.

He crossed the street to the dark office building and went through the revolving door. He left his sunglasses on. Inside the lobby, he spotted the building security guard, who was in his fifties and sat behind a check-in desk near the elevators. The large man had his suit jacket draped on a chair behind him and drank Diet Coke straight out of the can. He had the Chronicle puzzle page open on the desk, with half the crossword completed in pencil.

Frost put his badge in front of the man’s face and introduced himself.

“Is there a problem, Inspector?”

Frost showed him a photograph of Lucy. “Have you seen this woman? She’s missing and at risk. We need to find her.”

The man squinted at the picture through his reading glasses. “I don’t think so. Not while I’ve been here.”

“One of the street performers in the square told me he saw this woman enter the building,” Frost snapped. He used his cop’s don’t-screw-with-me tone of voice. “He was dead sure it was her, and she never came out.”

“Well, I don’t know. I guess I could be wrong.”

“The woman is a patient of Dr. Francesca Stein,” Frost said.

“Oh. Sure. Her office is on the top floor.”

“Then let’s get up there. Now.”

The guard eyed the phone in front of him. “I should probably call somebody.”

“Call whoever you want after you let me in there. This woman is in imminent danger.”

Frost marched to the elevator bank without waiting for an answer. He heard the guard’s chair scraping on the marble floor and then the tap, tap of the man’s leather shoes as he ran to catch up to him. The guard breathed heavily and stabbed the elevator button. The two of them got inside the car and rode in silence. When the doors opened at the top of the building, he let the man lead the way to the far end of the hallway. Double wooden doors led to Francesca Stein’s office, and her name was on a brass plate on the wall.

The guard swiped a passkey against the lock. As he reached for the door handle, Frost stepped in front of him.

“You can go back downstairs now,” Frost said.

“The rules say I need to go in with you.”

“I can’t be responsible for your safety.”

The guard studied Frost’s eyes, which were hidden behind sunglasses. He looked as if he might gin up the courage to question him, but Frost slid his service pistol from the holster inside his jacket as he inched the door open. Seeing the gun, the man beat a quick retreat back to the elevators.

Frost slipped inside and closed the office door. He reholstered his gun. He found the light switch for the office suite and turned on the lights in the waiting room. The door to Dr. Stein’s private office was directly in front of him, and he headed quickly across the carpet and let himself inside.

Like most scientists, Stein was obsessively organized. That was unfortunate. When he’d been here before, she’d kept patient files on her large oak desk, but she’d refiled them in two locked cabinets on the wall. He sat down in her chair and booted up her computer, but the hard drive required a password to access her files. He shut it down again and frowned.

Stein kept a yellow manila pad on the desk for notes, but the pages were blank. He turned on her desk light and held the pad near the bulb to see if there were visible indentations of the notes she’d made. He found nothing. Then he pulled a garbage can from under her desk and saw two wadded balls of paper inside. He removed them and flattened them on the surface of the desk.

On one page, he saw a handwritten address. The location was near the city’s container ship piers. That was one advantage of his past life as a taxi driver; he knew every street location around San Francisco. He folded the page and shoved it in his pocket.

He checked the other note. Stein had written,

White room. Where? Near Dogpatch?

Owns warehouses.

TF. Fall guy. Same as before.

And then a little lower on the page,

Something not right! What?

Frost tried to make sense of the notes, but he didn’t have enough information. He reached forward and pulled the office phone closer to him. He navigated the menu to the list of recent calls, and he punched redial on the last call she’d made, which was several hours earlier.