The night bird, p.4
The Night Bird, page 4
Then she relaxed and grinned. Her freckles danced.
“Wow, yeah, thanks. I’m really thirsty.”
Jillian picked up the glass and drank the whole thing.
5
“I can’t believe Brynn’s gone,” Gabriel Tejada murmured, not for the first time.
Frost stood next to the Sausalito attorney at the end of Johnson Street, where the sailboats bobbed in the town’s yacht harbor. Beyond the waters of the small inlet, he could see the brown hills of Tiburon. This little stretch of paradise north of the Golden Gate Bridge was where you lived if you had more money than God. Even God couldn’t afford the views here.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Frost told him. He hated saying that. It sounded so trite, but there was nothing else to say.
“Do Brynn’s parents know?”
“Yes, I talked to them last night.”
There was no worse task in the world than waking up parents in the middle of the night to tell them that their daughter was dead. Frost knew that only too well. Brynn Lansing’s mother and father went to pieces, the way parents always did. He had no explanations for them. Nothing that made any sense. One moment, your daughter was fine, and the next moment, she was plummeting from the Bay Bridge.
“I was in love with her,” Tejada said. “I hadn’t told her that yet, but I was.”
Brynn’s boyfriend leaned against the wooden railing and stared into the water. Waves slurped against the pier. The mild breeze turned the boat riggings into a constant, clanging music.
Tejada was a big man. Frost wasn’t small at five foot eleven, but Tejada dwarfed him by four inches. He wore a three-piece suit, which was unusual in California, even for a lawyer. His copper skin glowed under the bright sun. He had a prominent nose and jet-black brilliantine hair. His build was broad but athletic. He hadn’t reacted with tears to the news of Brynn’s death, but Frost could see the man’s face tighten with grief.
“How long had you known Brynn?” Frost asked.
“About four months. I met her shortly before Christmas. There was an instant chemistry between us. I’d never felt anything like it before. You never know how a relationship will turn out, but I thought we had a future. I simply can’t believe that Brynn committed suicide. Not her.”
“This doesn’t appear to be a straightforward suicide,” Frost told him. “This was a psychotic breakdown of some kind.”
Tejada shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense. Brynn had a zest for life. I never saw any kind of secret, deep-seated depression. You couldn’t find a more level-headed woman.”
“When did you last see Brynn?” Frost asked.
Tejada turned around to face the main street of the seaside town, which was crowded with tourists. He shoved his hands in his pants pockets, and his brow creased. “Four days ago. She stayed over.”
“Did you talk to her after that?”
“Not for a couple days. She didn’t answer her phone or reply to my texts. Actually, I thought she was shutting me out. I’d floated the idea of her moving in with me, and I was worried that she wasn’t ready for a step like that. Then she texted me back yesterday and said everything was fine. We were planning to go away for the weekend.”
“Did she say that anything unusual was going on in her life? Did she mention any problems?”
“No. Nothing at all.”
“Her roommate, Lucy Hagen, said that she and Brynn went to a party in Alameda last night. Do you know anything about that?”
“Yes, I was supposed to be there, too. I had a client emergency. The host was a law-school classmate of mine who’s an in-house counsel at Oracle.” Tejada noticed Frost’s smile and added, “A lawyer’s party isn’t as stuffy as it sounds, Inspector, when you have that kind of money. I think he flew in Iggy Azalea to perform. This was all young, pretty people. Like Brynn.”
Frost didn’t want to admit that he had no idea who Iggy Azalea was.
As young as he was, Frost took pride in being unhip. He knew the wild side of San Francisco, but rarely joined the crowd. He was single and had made his peace with staying that way. His brother, Duane, periodically tried to fix him up, and Frost got a lot of offers because he gave off a Justin Timberlake vibe that women found attractive. More often than not, he said no. When he went on dates, they typically didn’t lead to relationships. It wasn’t that he was uninterested. He simply enjoyed his solitude. If he had a free evening, he usually spent it reading history books in a hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant two blocks down from the Russian Hill house where he lived. The owner let him bring Shack in a carrier.
“Was Brynn uncomfortable going to the party without you?” Frost asked.
“Brynn was never uncomfortable. She fit in everywhere. The one who was probably uncomfortable at the party was Lucy. She’s sort of a fragile flower. If there was anyone who would go nuts and have some kind of breakdown, I would have put money on her, not Brynn.”
“Your lawyer friend, does he throw parties where drugs are available?”
Tejada shrugged. “Pot? Maybe. Anything harder? Doubtful. And Brynn had no time for drugs of any kind. It wasn’t her scene.”
“That’s what Lucy said, too. And Brynn’s parents.”
“Well, they’re right,” Tejada told him. “I can’t explain what happened to her, but you can rule out drugs.”
Frost wasn’t so sure. People were good at keeping secrets from those close to them, whether it was about affairs, alcohol, or addictions.
“There was a similar incident a couple months ago,” Frost told Tejada. “A woman had a psychotic episode at a wedding reception. She shot herself. Like Brynn, the behavior seemed to come out of nowhere. I’ve been trying to find some overlap in their lives, to see if they had a connection that might explain what happened to both of them. So far, I’ve come up empty.”
Tejada nodded. “I remember that incident from the news. Brynn and I talked about it.”
“What did she say?”
“Just that it was scary and bizarre. We both assumed what you did, that it must be drugs.”
“And did she mention anything that might suggest a connection between the two of them?”
“I’m sorry. No.”
“The thing is, Mr. Tejada, this behavior usually has an explanation, but friends and family often miss the clues. Then they look back and remember little things that seem important in the wake of what happened. Was there anything like that with Brynn?”
Tejada was silent for a long time. He crossed his arms and stared at his shoes. Lawyers didn’t give flip answers. Frost knew that because he had a law degree himself. He’d also worked with a lot of lawyers in his years with the police, and if there was one thing he liked about them (among the many things he didn’t), it was that they never answered a question without thinking about it.
Finally, Tejada said one word, but it was something that Frost didn’t expect.
“Cats,” he said.
Frost cocked his head. “What?”
“Do you like cats, Inspector?”
“I do, in fact,” Frost replied.
“So do I. I have four cats.”
“Okay,” Frost said, not understanding.
“Brynn was scared to death of cats,” Tejada went on. “When I first met her, she couldn’t spend five minutes in my condo. She hated cats, couldn’t stand being around them. People who don’t grow up around cats often don’t understand them, but this was a deeper phobia with Brynn. When I asked her about it, she told me that she’d had a bad experience with a feral cat as a teenager. She was bitten multiple times. She had to undergo a painful round of rabies shots.”
“I don’t understand the connection,” Frost said.
“You wanted clues, Inspector. You wanted something unusual. This is the only unusual thing I can think of.”
“That Brynn was scared of cats?”
Tejada shook his head. “No, here’s the strange thing. The two of us typically met at restaurants, not at my place, because of my cats. If we wanted to be together overnight, I’d get us a hotel room. And then, last month, she showed up at my place on a Saturday afternoon. I went to open some wine for us, and when I came back, I found her sprawled on the living room floor, playing with my cats and letting them walk all over her. Since that time, she hasn’t had any issues with my cats at all.”
“Did you ask her about it?”
“Of course. She said she didn’t want my cats to be a problem between us, so she’d been seeing a psychiatrist to help with her fears.”
“Apparently, it worked,” Frost said.
“Yes, I guess it did. I was glad she felt strongly enough about our relationship to do something like that. But there was one peculiar thing. Last week, I made some kind of joking reference to the time when the feral cat had bitten her. She seemed genuinely puzzled—she said nothing like that had ever happened to her. I began rattling off the details of the story, but she got upset and said I was wrong and told me to drop it.”
“Did you?”
Tejada frowned. “Sure, I did. I was glad she’d become a cat lover. But I wasn’t wrong, Inspector. The cat attack really happened to her. At first, I assumed she didn’t want to think about it anymore, but it was more than that. It was as if the whole episode had been completely erased from her memory.”
6
Frankie kept one sympathy card on her desk from the death of her father. She’d filed away all of the others weeks ago. It wasn’t even a card from a close friend, because Frankie didn’t have many people that she considered friends. The woman who sent it was a colleague from a nonprofit board. Frankie kept the card because it was a reminder of how wrong people could be.
Inside, the woman had written
My father was the greatest hero in my life. I know what you’re going through.
If only that were true. People assumed that when you lost a parent, you felt nothing but pure grief. They didn’t account for complex relationships. And the relationship between Marvin Stein and his daughters was nothing if not complex.
She kept a photo of her father on her desk. When she picked it up, she could hear his cold voice in her head, passionless and demanding. The photo showed him in his physics lab at UC Berkeley, in his white lab coat. Like her, he was tall and thin. He had wiry gray hair and a neat mustache. He didn’t smile, and his eyes were impatient. Her father never liked to bother with emotional frills like photographs. When Frankie took the picture with her phone, he’d said, “Get on with it, get on with it.”
Her mother had died of cancer when Frankie was five, just a year after her sister, Pam, was born. Since then, their family had been just the three of them. Marvin Stein, physicist, was not meant to be a single father. He dealt with numbers, theories, and formulas, not children. And definitely not girls.
It was hard enough when they were young, but it got worse during high school and college. Their father demanded perfection. Anything but straight As and top test scores was a failure. Because he was a success himself, he pushed his daughters to do more and achieve more. Nothing was ever good enough. Frankie responded by setting crazy expectations for herself that might win his praise. Pam responded by defying him altogether and throwing her failures in his face.
And now he was gone. More than three months later, he still haunted her.
“Are you thinking about Marvin again?” Jason asked.
Her husband stood in the doorway of her office. He was dressed in running clothes, and his hands were on his hips. Sweat glowed on his narrow face.
“Yes, I keep thinking about that last camping trip,” she said, toying with the photograph of her father with her fingertips.
“Dwelling on it won’t change what happened,” Jason told her.
“Oh, I know.”
Jason sat in the comfortable chair in front of her desk. He worked in the headquarters of a large pharmaceutical company a few blocks away on Post Street, but he often went running through the city midway through the afternoon and showed up at her office while she was on a break between appointments. Her own office was located on the top floor of a ten-story building on the east side of Union Square, looking out on the palm trees of the park.
“It’s also not going to change what a son of a bitch Marvin was,” Jason added.
Frankie’s lips bent into a sad smile. “I know that, too.”
“So how do you feel?” He asked it in a clinical way. They were both scientists. Sometimes it was hard to remember they were husband and wife, too. She expected him to take out a yellow pad and start taking notes while they talked.
“I feel off,” she said.
“Can you be more specific?”
“Not really. Something’s not right with me, Jason, but I don’t know what it is.”
“I think it’s called grief.”
He was right, but that didn’t make her feel better. Another husband might have come out of his chair and hugged her, but that wasn’t Jason, and that wasn’t the kind of relationship they had. They weren’t touchy-feely.
She’d met him seven years ago at a conference in Barcelona. He was British. They were both in their early thirties. She’d noticed when she met him that he was handsome, although their interactions were purely professional in the beginning. He had an athletic build and close-cropped black hair. His dark eyes missed nothing, and he had an expressive mouth that could shift from humor to disdain with a twitch of his lips. His face was full of sharp angles, and so was his personality. She liked that. She hated men who tried to woo her.
They’d stayed in touch after the conference because they both specialized in memory. He worked on the neurological side, focused on brain chemistry. She worked on the therapeutic side. Nine months later, he took a research position with a pharmaceutical company in San Francisco, and their meetings evolved slowly from professional to personal. A year after that, they married, to the amusement of her sister, Pam, who’d assumed that Frankie would never leave her clinical office long enough to meet a man.
She’d found a husband who was a carbon copy of herself. Smart. Demanding. Unemotional. Or maybe—she occasionally whispered to herself—she’d done what so many other women did and married her father.
“After he died, you told me you felt some closure with him,” Jason reminded her.
“I know. I still do.”
“Do you remember why?”
Frankie did. The camping trip snapped like a photograph into her mind. It was something that she, Pam, and their father had done annually since they were children. On New Year’s Eve, they would travel to a state park around Northern California and spend two nights there. They’d stayed as close as Angel Island in the bay and traveled as far afield as Redwood National Park north of Eureka. It was a family tradition, but their father had a way of turning the outings into intellectual exercises. He selected a discussion theme. He assigned reading and quizzed them like a professor. The topics had ranged over the years from politics to science to economics. Minimum-wage policy. Extraplanetary life. Addiction. Alaskan glaciers.
This year’s topic had been a strange departure. It was risk. Which turned out to be a tragically ironic subject in the wake of what happened to him.
“He was different with me that last evening,” Frankie said. “Maybe it’s because it was just the two of us this year. He relaxed. We talked about Mom. Before we went to sleep, he told me he was proud of me. I’d been waiting my whole life to hear something like that from him.”
“So you got what you wanted,” Jason said.
Frankie stared out her office window. She could see the crowds in Union Square ten stories below her. “Yes, he could have told me he loved me, and it wouldn’t have meant as much as him being proud of me.”
He heard her hesitation. “So what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. I just—I don’t know.”
“It hasn’t even been four months, Frankie. That’s not long when you lose a parent. Don’t rush yourself.”
“You’re right.” Frankie shook her head and added, “Pam missed out.”
“If she’d been there, it wouldn’t have been the same,” Jason reminded her. “Marvin treated her differently.”
“I know.”
“Maybe you got the closure you needed because it was just the two of you,” he pointed out.
“I’ve thought about that, but it makes me feel guilty.”
“You had no way of knowing what was going to happen.”
“No.”
On New Year’s Day, her father had awakened early, at sunrise, which was typical. He made coffee and took a hike along the bluff trails of Point Reyes. He told Frankie to stay behind, which was a surprise. Normally, he made her and Pam get up and join him on his early walks. It didn’t matter how late they’d been up the night before. He hiked north of Arch Rock where the cliffs dropped sharply to the rocks and beach. It had rained overnight. The earth of the headlands was soft and yielding.
Hours later, when he still hadn’t returned, Frankie alerted the rangers. They found Marvin Stein’s body at the base of the cliff.
Jason checked his watch. “I have to get back to work. Are you and Pam going to Zingari tonight?”
“Probably. Do you want us to wait for you for dinner?”
“No, I might be late.”
“Okay.”
Her husband got up, and his sharp eyes examined her face. “Are you still feeling off?”
“Yes, I don’t know exactly what it is.” She stared out the window again, and without looking at Jason, she said, “Do you think that he—?”
Jason waited, but Frankie didn’t go on. He answered her question without her asking it, because she couldn’t form the words.
“No, I don’t think that Marvin killed himself,” Jason said. “He’s not the kind of man who would take his own life. It was an accident. The cliffs are dangerous. He fell.”
