He knew exactly the effect he had on her, and he played her accordingly.
Then came Merrilyn Somers.
Smart, pretty, nerdy, artsy Merrilyn Somers.
She was an SF State junior, originally from Reno, where she’d been her high school valedictorian and a singer in the state champion choir. She was a computer science major and gamer and had already done two summer internships in Silicon Valley. Sony and Samsung were competing to recruit her after graduation. She was engaged to her high school sweetheart, and her academic scholarships meant she was debt-free. She had her whole future lined up like a row of dominoes.
Merrilyn lived with three college girlfriends in a Balboa Park apartment. Her neighbor two doors down was Darren Newman.
Frankie had seen Merrilyn’s picture in the newspaper. She was black, with straight dark hair parted in the middle and arresting, luminous blue eyes. You could see intelligence in a person’s face, and Merrilyn was smart. Her confident smile didn’t need to prove anything to anyone, regardless of her young age. Her left arm sported a Jesus tattoo, and she wore a cross around her neck. Her body was slim and tall.
Nine months ago, on a Friday night when her roommates went to a party in Menlo Park an hour away, Merrilyn stayed home to code a gaming app she’d built from scratch. When her friends arrived back at their apartment at four in the morning, they found Merrilyn naked on her bed, gagged, tied, dead of multiple stab wounds. The coroner confirmed sexual assault. The perpetrator used a condom, but he’d made a mistake in removing it, because the CSI team found a small amount of semen on the bed sheet near Merrilyn’s body.
Suspicion landed immediately on Darren Newman. He asserted his innocence to Frankie, the police, and the media — but the evidence pointed his way from the first day of the investigation. Merrilyn’s roommates told police that Darren had stalked her for months. That she’d fended off passes from him since she moved into the building. His history of assault and date-rape charges made the headlines. So did Frankie’s affidavit that had kept Darren out of jail.
Everyone knew he was guilty. The police and prosecutors were simply waiting for the DNA results to come back to prove it.
Except, when the results did come back, the DNA found at the murder scene of Merrilyn Somers didn’t match Darren Newman. Instead, it matched another man living in the same apartment building. Leon Willis’s DNA was in the California state database because of a felony conviction for mail fraud four years earlier, for which he’d served six months in prison. He had no alibi for the night of Merrilyn’s murder and no memory of the night at all. He claimed that he’d been drinking and passed out.
Faced with the DNA evidence, Leon Willis took a plea. He was serving the first year of a twenty-year sentence. Darren Newman received a public exoneration and an apology from the San Francisco Police.
Frankie remembered seeing Darren not long after he was vindicated. She expected him to be angry about his ordeal. Instead, she saw a twisted triumph hiding in his smile. She knew the truth. He was guilty. He’d raped and murdered Merrilyn Somers. And somehow, he’d gotten away with it by framing another man.
She didn’t tell him what she thought, but he had a way of reading her mind.
“You still think I did it, don’t you?” Darren asked as he was leaving her office that last time. “That’s just crazy, Frankie. I mean, think about it. For me to be guilty, you’d have to assume that I knew that Leon’s DNA was in the state database. Not much point planting evidence on a guy who will never be found, right? Of course, maybe the guy who owns the apartment building is a college buddy of mine. So I guess I could have scoped out the background checks on new tenants and found somebody with a criminal record. Then I’d need to make sure that whoever it was didn’t have an alibi on the night of the murder. That’s even tougher. Well, unless I stopped by for a drink with Leon that night and spiked his beer with Rohypnol. I guess I could have poured out a couple dozen cans while he was sleeping it off, so he’d come out of his blackout thinking he drank himself into a coma. Do you think that would work? Maybe it would. But wow, Frankie, the semen they found on Merrilyn’s bed. No way I could pull that off. I mean, what are you suggesting? That I paid a hooker to come on to him and give him a hand job in the men’s room at some bar? And then she gave me a sample of his swimmers that I could plant near Merrilyn’s body? You must think I’m some kind of evil genius to do something like that. Besides, do you think I wouldn’t freak out knowing that this hooker might spot my face in the paper and go to the cops? I’d probably have to get rid of her, too, Frankie. Of course, that would be the easiest part of the plan. Nobody misses hookers.”
He laughed. His face had the look of the devil.
“Anyway, that’s what you’d have to believe to think I’m really guilty, Frankie. See how crazy that sounds?”
She knew that Darren was right.
It was crazy.
What chilled Frankie to the bone was knowing that he had told her exactly what he’d really done.
30
Frost found Herb painting on his hands and knees on a sidewalk at the base of Coit Tower. Twenty people crowded behind him, watching his three-dimensional portrait take shape. A grizzly bear with wet, matted fur rose out of the flat ground. The animal, its mouth open and teeth bared, stood at the top of a surging waterfall as Herb put the final touches on a spawning salmon that was about to become the bear’s lunch.
His friend rocked back on his knees. The beads in his long gray hair knocked together like an abacus. He flipped up the magnifying lenses he wore and reached for his coffee urn. As he drank, he spotted Frost among the crowd.
“Taking a little break here, folks,” Herb announced. “Don’t get too close to the bear. He’s hungry.”
He emptied the top hat where he kept his tips and shoved the money into the pockets of his blue-jean coveralls, which were smeared with a rainbow of paint. He limped over to Frost, who held Shack in the crook of one arm. The two men walked around the perimeter of the parking lot, with the city and the bay spread out in the valley. They stopped in the shadow of the tower, across from a statue of Christopher Columbus.
“I got your message,” Herb said. “You said a girl is missing? Another one of Dr. Stein’s patients?”
“There’s a connection, yes.”
Herb took Shack from Frost’s arms. He dangled a rope of his gray hair, and Shack swiped at it. “I was disturbed to hear that someone is abducting and brainwashing these women.”
“He calls himself the Night Bird,” Frost said.
“Do you have any idea what that means?”
“Not yet.”
“If it’s someone with a grudge against Dr. Stein, then he’s part of a long list,” Herb said.
“I know that.”
“What about the girl? How long has she been gone?”
“Since last night. Jess and I interviewed the neighbors. One of them heard a scream but didn’t report it.”
“Do you have any leads?” Herb asked.
“Nothing that will help us find her. Lucy’s phone is off, so we can’t get any pings. No one saw a car in the alley where she was taken.”
“What about the person who’s doing this?”
Frost showed Herb the photograph of the mask he’d found online. “I talked to a homeless man who hangs out near Lucy’s building. Someone wearing a mask like this gave him fifty bucks to clear out for the day. The same thing happened the previous week. I think that’s when this guy took Lucy’s roommate.”
“Didn’t the man think this was odd? Money from some stranger in a mask?”
“For fifty bucks, I don’t think he asked a lot of questions. He couldn’t give us any kind of useful description. Tall. Lean. That’s it.” Frost added, “What about you, Herb? Have you spotted anyone hanging around in a mask like this among your crowds?”