The Night Bird (Frost Easton #1)(58)

It was half an hour before anyone noticed. He spent that time trapped in a cave of white, slowly suffocating, his air leaching away breath by breath. He couldn’t move or free himself. All he could do was stare at the white snow from inside his tomb. By the time they dug him out, he was unconscious, and the doctors said another five minutes would have killed him.

He still had vivid flashbacks of that near-death experience, he told her. He didn’t cry about it, though. He softened his voice and stared into space, as if the trapped child were still inside the man. He looked at her with those magnetic eyes, which said, I need you to help me.

She was hooked.

It was also the last true story Darren told her.

He described losing his virginity to a ninth-grade math teacher, whose after-school tutoring sessions became evening seductions at her home. Looking embarrassed, he explained in explicit physical detail what she did to him and what she made him do to her. How she made him dominate her. Humiliate her. Live out her submissive fantasies. He had this way of shaking his head, as if he couldn’t really believe any of it himself. That was how I learned about women, Frankie. Is it any wonder I turned out the way I did?

Months later, she found out that Darren’s ninth-grade math teacher was a fifty-six-year-old married man, not a woman at all. There was no relationship. No virgin seduction. He’d fabricated everything. By then, it was too late.

Frankie had already given him what he wanted. She submitted an affidavit to the court that in her professional opinion, Darren would be better served by treatment for his childhood issues rather than imprisonment. The prosecution, already on shaky ground on the rape charge, accepted a plea of misdemeanor assault, rather than risk an outright loss in court. Darren did community service at a local homeless shelter, and he began therapy sessions with Frankie every week.

She blamed herself for letting him twist her around his finger. She was slow to realize that he had an answer for everything. An excuse. A reason. An explanation. His parents moved to Colorado when he was eighteen, and he went to college in Boulder. Frankie grilled him about two accusations of rape in the college dorms, and he dismissed them as the result of alcohol and morning-after regrets. She asked about cases of stalking and revenge porn, and he put the blame on his roommate. No matter what happened, he found someone else to take the fall, some way to deflect guilt away from himself. That should have been a red flag.

Despite everything he told her, despite the lies she discovered as the months wore on, she also found herself intensely attracted to him. She dressed differently on days when she knew he’d be with her. She obsessed over every detail of his face. She let herself fantasize about him. Once, in therapy, he put a hand high on her thigh, and she left it there and didn’t break away until it was obvious they were about to cross a physical line from which there was no going back.

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.