Brian Freeman - The Night Bird

Frost hesitated. Part of him didn’t want to see what was inside. He slipped gloves over his hands, then bent down and threw the door open on its tracks with a loud jolt. The small interior space was dark, and he groped for a light switch. When he found it, two overhead fluorescent bars blinked to life.

He couldn’t hide his disappointment.

No one was there.

The storage unit was no more than ten feet by twenty feet in size. The metal walls were painted bright yellow. Packing crates lined the walls and took up most of the floor. Frost saw an oak desk on the back wall, with a mirror hung above it. The interior had an odd, heavy smell of tea, and when he pushed aside the lid on the nearest crate, he saw bulk Chinese tea stored inside.

He saw Frankie in the doorway. She didn’t cross the threshold. “Are you sure Darren came in here?” he asked. “There are a lot of units around this place. Maybe you got it wrong.”

“This is the one, Frost.”

He opened another crate and found more tea. He dug down as far as his arm would reach, but he found sealed plastic bags of tea all the way to the bottom. When he withdrew his arm, his wet skin smelled of cinnamon and cherry. The same was true of the next crate. And the next.

“Man likes his tea,” Jess said. Then she eyed the depth of the crates. “Hang on. Hand me those bolt cutters.”

The uniformed officer handed the bolt cutters to the lieutenant, and Jess shoved them inside the nearest crate as deep as they would go. She marked the point on the handle of the cutters with her thumb and then pulled out the bolt cutters and measured the length of the crate on the outside.

“There’s a six-inch difference. The crates have a false floor.”

Frost overturned the crate and dumped the tea on the floor. Using the blade end of the bolt cutters, he made a sharp downward thrust to the base of the crate, splitting through the wood. He repeated the motion until he’d made a jagged hole in the floor of the crate, and then he reached through the hole. He found dozens of vacuum-sealed bags under his fingers, and he pulled one out.

Six plastic bottles were locked inside the sterile bag.

“Oxycodone,” Jess said, reading the labels. “Newman is smuggling prescription pain pills.”

Frost looked around at the storage unit, as if it held more answers. He didn’t think this place was just about pills. “Did Newman load or unload anything when he came here?” he asked Frankie.

“Not that I saw. He went inside, stayed for fifteen minutes or so, and then came out.”

“So what was he doing here?” Frost asked.

No one in the room answered. Frost went to the desk at the back of the storage unit and sat down in the chair in front of it. He stared into the mirror reflecting his face. That was odd, too. A mirror. He wondered why Darren Newman felt the need to look at his reflection.

Then he thought, He wants to see if anyone comes inside behind him.

Frost studied the desktop, which had almost nothing on it, other than a bright lamp, a letter opener, and a magnifying glass. He opened the drawers and found billing orders and invoices. All of it was for tea. It still told him nothing about Lucy.

“What was Newman doing here?” he asked aloud again.

He opened the deepest drawer of the desk, which contained a series of vertical files. He scooped the entire set of files out with his hand and stared at the bottom of the desk drawer.

“Fool me once,” he said.

Using the letter opener, Frost pried at the wood panel on the bottom of the drawer, and it came up easily. Immediately underneath the panel was a manila envelope. He retrieved the envelope, opened the flap, and dumped the contents across the surface of the desk.

Behind him, Jess sucked in her breath.

“That son of a bitch,” Frost said.

Photographs.

The envelope contained dozens of photographs. Frost picked up each picture and laid them out in rows, taking up the entire surface of the desk. He spotted at least five different women among the faces. He didn’t recognize any of them, but Jess leaned over his shoulder and jabbed one of the photos with her fingernail.

“That’s Merrilyn Somers,” she said.

Newman had at least thirty photographs of his former neighbor. He’d stalked her everywhere she went. On campus at SF State, at a library computer, singing in a church choir, drinking coffee with friends on Market Street. The zoom lens he’d used captured every detail of her body and face in intimate, uncomfortable detail. Frost could see the brightness in Merrilyn’s distinctive blue eyes and the pencil-thin lines of her eyebrows, the curves of her hips in frayed jeans, and the ebony shine of her long, straight hair.

She was magnetic. And she’d attracted the wrong man.

There were more pictures of Merrilyn. After. She lay on her bed, naked. Her blue eyes were fixed, staring in death. Mouth open. Blood stained her body like red paint where the knife had violated her. Newman had recorded the murder in the same horrifying detail he’d used to stalk her.

“Do you know the other women, Jess?” Frost asked.

She didn’t answer immediately. Her eyes couldn’t let go of the photographs.

“That one there, I think that’s the girl in Green Bay who was killed when Newman was eighteen. And this other one, that’s his classmate at college in Boulder. I don’t know the rest.” She leaned closer to the array of pictures. “Wait, no, I know that girl, too. She’s local. A prostitute. She disappeared nine months ago, and a couple of the other street girls reported her missing. We never found her.”

“She doesn’t fit the pattern,” Frost said. “There are pictures of her after the murder, but not before. And he hid the body, rather than let us find her, like the others. I wonder why.”

“I know why,” Frankie murmured.

Frost turned around. Dr. Stein had crept up behind them. Her lips were pressed together in horror as she stared at the photos laid out on the desk. Rain dripped from her hair to the metal floor like music.

“He made a joke about it,” she said. “He talked about using a hooker to get a sperm sample from Leon Willis. And about how he would have had to get rid of the hooker if he did that.”

“And you didn’t think that information was worth sharing with the police?” Jess asked acidly. Her brown bangs fell in front of her eyes.

“He put it in a speculative context, not as a confession. It was all ‘what if.’ There wasn’t enough to break privilege. Even though my gut told me that he was telling the truth.”

Jess pounded out of the storage unit with loud, heavy footsteps. Frost knew she didn’t cover her anger well.

“There wasn’t anything I could do,” Frankie said to Frost. “I’m sorry.”

“What else do you see in these photographs?” he asked her. “What do they tell you? I need a read on this man, Frankie. I need to know what he’s really doing.”

“Well, for one thing, it’s pretty obvious why he stopped here that night,” Frankie told him.

“Why?”

“He was going to Berkeley to have sex with Simona. He stopped here first to look at the pictures.”

Frost was puzzled, and then he understood. “My God. This is what turns him on.”

“Yes.”

“What else? Get inside this guy’s head.”

He knew that was the last place she wanted to be, but she bent over his shoulder, until she could make out every detail in the collection of photographs. Then she turned around and studied the rest of the storage unit. The crates. The yellow walls. The tea and the pill bottles. The rain pouring across the open doorway.

“Something’s wrong,” she said.

“What?”

“I don’t know.”