The Night Bird (Frost Easton #1)(85)

43


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.”

“You wrote that down on the note I found in your office, too. Something’s wrong. What did you mean by that?”

“Just that I can’t make all the pieces of the puzzle fit. I mean, most of them do, but there’s one piece that feels like it comes from a different puzzle. I’m sorry, I know that’s not helpful.”

“Right now, I don’t care what doesn’t fit,” Frost told her. “What does fit?”

Frankie hesitated. “The knife.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s consistent. Newman uses a knife on these women.”

“So?”

“Todd talked about seeing a knife. He remembered seeing a knife the last time he was taken.”

“The last time,” Frost said. “You mean, when the Night Bird took Lucy?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“What does that mean?” Frost asked.

“I’m not sure, Frost, but he says the game’s almost done, and now there’s a knife in the mix. He always uses a knife. It tells me we need to find Lucy soon. Before something happens to her.”

Frost got out of the chair. He took a long, hard look at the women pictured on the desk. Their faces. Their smiles. And then their bodies, riddled by knife wounds. He had a brief, grotesque image of Lucy in the same position. He thought about Darren Newman standing over her with a camera. After. His anger consumed him, and he felt powerless.