The Voice Inside

1

Frost Easton felt a shiver in the house, which jolted him from a deep sleep. He assumed it was the beginning of an earthquake.

His eyes shot open, blue and wide. In an instant, he was off the sofa, where he typically slept, and on his feet in the chill of his Russian Hill home. His black-and-white cat, Shack, sensed the disturbance, too. Frost saw Shack frozen on the coffee table, with his back arched and his tail puffed like the bloom of a bottlebrush tree. He waited for the ground beneath them to shudder like a fun-house ride.

This was San Francisco. Tremors routinely shook the city with a rumble of subterranean thunder. Most came and went without doing damage, but he’d lived through the deadly Loma Prieta quake when he was only eight years old. You never knew when the next Big One was coming. However, Frost saw none of the telltale signs of a temblor this time. His sister’s blue angel figurine, which was hung from a hook above the bay window, didn’t sway. The empty Sierra Nevada beer bottle he’d left on the coffee table hadn’t walked itself to the edge and tipped over onto the carpet.

This wasn’t an earthquake. This was something else.

He realized that the disturbance was man-made. A bitter breath of cigarette smoke lingered in the house, the way it did when a smoker passed you on the street. Shack, who was normally an oasis of calm, tensed his entire feline body and emitted a throaty growl, as if to say an intruder had been here. When Frost glanced at the glass door leading to the patio, he noticed that it was six inches open, letting in the night air.

He hadn’t left it that way. Someone had been inside the house.

He crossed to the patio door and stepped outside. It was the middle of Saturday night, it was Halloween, and the coastal air was cold and damp. The city fell off sharply below the railing, leading down over flat rooftops toward the blackness of the bay. Frost wore sweats and a T-shirt with a caricature of Mark Twain on the front. His feet were bare; his slicked-back brown hair was messy. He grabbed the patio railing and listened, but he heard no evidence of someone escaping nearby. No car engine on the street. No movement in the dense foliage on the hillside below him.

It felt like a dream, but it wasn’t.

Shack scampered outside to join him. Using his claws, the tiny cat did his best King Kong imitation by wrapping his paws around Frost’s leg and climbing up to his shoulder, as if it were the summit of the Empire State Building.

“I’ve mentioned that those claws of yours hurt, right?” Frost said, grimacing at the pinpricks in his skin. Shack purred and ignored him, as if all were right with the world again. The cat’s tail swished against Frost’s beard, and his paws batted at the bed-head tufts sticking up from Frost’s hair.

The two of them went back inside. Frost closed the door, and Shack made a graceful leap to the sofa. In the darkness, Frost crossed through the living room past the kitchen to the formal dining room, which doubled as his office, and looked out through the tall windows. Below him, Green Street was deserted. No one loitered in the doorways of the apartment building on the other side of the dead end.

He dug inside the pocket of his black sport coat, which was draped over one of the chairs. His badge was untouched. His pistol was still in its holster. Frost retrieved it, and with the gun in his hand, he checked the upstairs rooms one by one. He was alone in the house. And yet something wasn’t right. The smell of smoke told the story. Someone had broken in, but whoever it was had taken nothing and left nothing behind.

Why?

“What about you, Shack?” Frost murmured as he came back downstairs, where the cat waited for him. “Did you see who it was?”

Shack simply turned and made a beeline for his empty food bowl. Frost followed him into the kitchen and filled it. He opened the refrigerator and grabbed a plastic bottle of orange juice. The juice bottle was lonely on the shelf. There wasn’t much else inside. Unless his brother, who was a chef, rescued him with a care package, he typically ate his meals out.

The Russian Hill house was lit only by the glow of the city. In the living room, he pushed aside the fleece blanket and sat down on the tweed sofa near the bay window. He took a swig of orange juice and resealed the bottle. He was wide awake now. He thought about reading — he was halfway through a Stephen Ambrose book about the Lewis and Clark expedition — but he didn’t think he’d be able to concentrate.

Then a shrill alarm filled the room, startling him.

It came from the bar near the kitchen, where his phone was charging. He recognized the wake-up buzzer, which was as harsh and loud as the shout of a drill sergeant. He always set an alarm for six o’clock in the morning, but it wasn’t even close to that time yet.

Before he could get up to turn it off, a second alarm blared from upstairs. The clock in the master bedroom wailed like a fire signal, demanding attention. There was no reason for that alarm to go off. He never slept up there, and he’d never set that alarm as long as he’d been living in the house.

And then another clock. Another alarm, in one of the guest bedrooms upstairs.

And another alarm, in the third bedroom.

Then the radio in the kitchen turned on, broadcasting KSFO talk radio at top volume.

Frost sprang to his feet. “What the hell?”

Finally, one more alarm clanged, like the warning bells of a railroad crossing. This one came from the dining room. Frost didn’t even own a clock that made a noise like that. He stood there, surrounded by a deafening chorus of bells, buzzers, radios, and alarms, and he watched Shack stampede like a madman up and down the stairs in confusion.

Frost went to shut down the alarms one by one, but when he picked up his phone, he noticed the time staring back at him in bright digital numbers.

3:42 a.m.

The sight of those numbers stopped him cold. He was paralyzed by his memories. Another minute passed before he broke out of his trance long enough to switch off the alarm. Then he ran upstairs and yanked out the plugs for the clocks in the bedrooms, and he turned off the radio in the kitchen. Finally, he went to find the strange clock in the dining room.

A double-bell Halloween clock sat on the table.

He hadn’t even noticed it in the darkness. The clock didn’t belong to him. Its face was orange and black, like a grinning jack-o’-lantern, and black bat wings jutted from the sides, waving up and down with the noise of the alarm. The intruder had left the clock for him.

Trick or treat.

The clapper hammered back and forth between two bells, making a noise louder than any of the others. He didn’t know how to stop it. He shook it; he pushed buttons; he twisted knobs. Nothing worked. Finally, with his head pounding, he took the clock to the sink and smashed it with a hammer from the utility drawer. The bells finally went silent, but his ears rang with the echo of the alarms.

3:42 a.m.

This wasn’t an accident or a Halloween prank.

It was a reminder. A taunt.

Someone knew exactly what that time meant to Frost and knew that he would understand its importance. It didn’t matter how much time had gone by. Five years had passed since the last victim was discovered. Four years since Rudy Cutter was found guilty of murder and sent away for life. Even so, Frost never forgot.

3:42 a.m.

That was the time set on the broken watches that had been left on the wrist of every victim. The watches — each one different, each one belonging to the previous victim — were a bloody chain tying together the seven women who had died during Rudy Cutter’s killing spree.

Including Frost’s sister, Katie.

This wasn’t just a sick game. Something else was going on.

Frost realized he was still cold. He felt a draft, and when he listened, he heard the wind whistling like a ghost. The glass patio door was closed, and so were the windows, but when he made his way to the house’s white-tiled foyer, he saw that the front door was ajar. It opened and closed, opened and closed, as currents of air dragged it back and forth an inch at a time.

He crossed the foyer and ripped open the door.

One of Frost’s long-bladed kitchen knives — exactly like the knives Rudy Cutter had used in all his murders — had been impaled deep in the chambered walnut of the door. Metal chopping wood. Was that what he’d heard? Was that the heavy thump that had awakened him?

The knife held a small postcard in place. It was something you’d buy at one of the dozens of souvenir shops at Fisherman’s Wharf. On the front of the postcard was a black-and-white ’20s-era photograph, which showed the famous Cliff House restaurant overlooking the Pacific surf. Frost didn’t miss the significance of the location.

Cliff House rose above the sand and rocks of Ocean Beach. He’d found Katie there in the back seat of her blue Chevy Malibu.

Frost retrieved a latex glove from inside the house so that he could carefully remove the knife from the door. He didn’t want to disturb any fingerprints, although he doubted that he’d find any. He took hold of a corner of the postcard with his gloved hand and turned it over. His name was scribbled on the address block of the postcard, but the street address written below his name wasn’t for the house on Russian Hill. Instead, it was for a location somewhere in the Mission District.

Somebody wanted him to take a drive.

The postcard had a message for him, too. One sentence.

Can you live with a lie?

Less than an hour later, at four thirty in the morning, Frost parked his SFPD Chevy Suburban under the Highway 101 overpass. He had Duboce Avenue mostly to himself. Even in a city that never slept, this was a dead time. The night was over, but the day hadn’t begun yet.

Frost got out of the Suburban. His eyes scoured the neighborhood under the streetlights. Painted murals adorned the massive columns of the freeway overpass. A gust of wind tumbled an empty paper cup down the street. Behind a metal fence, he saw the concrete ramps of a skateboard park, but in the overnight hours, there was no rattle and bang of kids doing acrobatics with their boards.

He knew this area well. His older brother, Duane, ran a food truck in the SoMa market only a few blocks away.

The address on the postcard was located on Mission Street behind him, but Frost walked the other way, toward a cobblestoned alley that led past a deserted parking lot under the freeway. Just like the time on the alarm clocks in his house, the choice of location was no accident. He’d been here before, when he was one of dozens of police officers canvassing the neighborhood, searching for any sign of a young woman named Melanie Valou.

Victim number seven.

Melanie was twenty-six years old, half-French, half-Algerian. Her parents had money, but Melanie, who was a San Francisco native like Frost, lived a Bohemian life, singing for tips in clubs and experimenting with bath salts and other new-age drugs. She had long, mussed black hair against ivory-white skin. Her lips were pale, and her eyes were dark and sunken. When she’d disappeared on November 17 five years earlier, she wore a wrinkled beige blouse and a knee-length garage-sale jean skirt. She’d been spotted on an ATM camera near Market and Van Ness, but that was the last time anyone saw her alive.

Everyone assumed Melanie had gone south from the bank to head home to her Mission District apartment. Police officers, including Frost, had fanned out across the area with her photo, knocking on doors, asking questions at homeless camps, and peering into the parked cars. Back then, Frost had gone up and down this alley a dozen times, trying to find a witness, but no one had seen Melanie.

No one except Rudy Cutter.

They’d finally found her body on Thanksgiving Day, in the trunk of a Honda Accord near Garfield Square.

Frost remembered the panic that had choked the city back then. Seven victims in four years. Seven women wearing macabre blood necklaces, where their throats had been slashed. They were all twenty-something in age, but beyond that, the victims had nothing in common. That was what made the killing spree so difficult to solve and why the fear had reached into every neighborhood. They were white, black, Hispanic, Chinese. They were tall and short. Heavy and thin. Rich and poor. They lived in different parts of the city, from Stonestown to South Beach to the Presidio. They had names like Nina. Natasha. Shu.

Katie.

When his sister had been killed — the fifth victim — Frost wasn’t a cop. He was a lawyer who’d never practiced law. A former taxi driver. A former captain of a charter fishing boat on the bay. An Alcatraz tour guide. He was restless, tall, good-looking, unattached. To the frustration of his parents, he had no idea where his life was going, but Katie had changed all that. Her death had given him a purpose. Now, six years after finding her body at Ocean Beach, Frost was a homicide inspector.

He left the alley and headed for Mission Street, where the postcard on his door had led him. In his dark imagination, he knew what he expected to find at the address that had been scrawled under his name. Another body. An eighth victim. And yet he knew that was impossible. The killings were over. Rudy Cutter was in San Quentin, and he was never getting out.

Power wires for the MUNI bus line made a web over his head. There were plenty of places to hide in the nighttime shadows of Mission Street. Frost wondered if his overnight intruder had come here, expecting him to follow, and was spying on his progress. He checked doorways as he hurried down the street and kept an eye on the homeless men, asleep under ratty blankets. The handful of cars parked at the meters looked empty. The building windows around him were dark. He didn’t feel watched, but that didn’t mean someone wasn’t following him.

The address from the postcard was three blocks down. It wasn’t what he expected.

He found a one-story building that looked as if it belonged in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The front wall was covered in swirls of psychedelic paint, dominated by two huge, staring blue eyes above the door. The chambered glass-block windows didn’t allow him to look inside. A sign over the painted eyes advertised palm readings, incense, herbal medicines, and erotic gifts.

The neon sign above the windows glowed with the word open. Frost knew there was no way this store would be open in the middle of the night. Someone was waiting for him.

He pushed open the black front door, went inside, and closed it behind him. Dozens of flickering candles lit the dim interior. The shop smelled of vanilla. An odd assortment of merchandise shelves filled nearly every square foot, forcing him to squeeze past ceramic Buddhas, strings of lights shaped like red peppers, Mardi Gras plastic beads, origami-style paper fans, and lifelike mannequins dressed in peekaboo lingerie. He saw a narrow desk for the cash register, and behind it, a tiger-striped curtain led to a back room.

Frost called out, “Hello?”

He waited. No one answered.

He tried again, louder. “Hello? Is anyone here?”

Finally, the curtain swished, but he didn’t see anyone walk into the shop. Then a voice at the level of his knees surprised him. “You must be the cop.”

Frost looked down. A little man stood beside the register desk, barely four feet tall and at least seventy years old. He was completely bald, with a head as brown as saddle leather and gray muttonchops worthy of a nineteenth-century politician. He wore a royal-blue silk kimono, embroidered with a gold dragon, and red slippers with a beaded floral design.

This was San Francisco. Absolutely nothing surprised Frost anymore.

“He said you’d come,” the man announced. He ducked behind the desk and scrambled onto a high stool and leaned forward with his elbows on the top of the cash register. They were eye to eye now.

“Who said that?” Frost asked.

“The guy who paid me two hundred dollars to open up tonight.”

“And who are you?” Frost asked.

“My name’s Copernicus,” the man replied.

“Like the astronomer?”

“I am the astronomer. That was me in a past life.” As Frost’s lips bent into a smile, the man added, “I realize there are plenty of nonbelievers.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Frost replied. “Who were you after Copernicus? Shakespeare?”

“Actually, I was a Chinese concubine in the city of Dadu during the Ming dynasty.”

“No kidding? You’d think the whole earth-revolves-around-the-sun thing would have gotten you a better gig the next time around.”

“Don’t mock what you don’t understand,” the man said.

“Fair enough. You’re Copernicus. So who paid you two hundred dollars to be open in the middle of the night?”

“I didn’t ask his name,” Copernicus replied. “He paid cash. That was good enough for me.”

“What did he look like?”

“Tall. And yes, don’t joke, I know everyone is tall to me. He wore a Giants cap and big sunglasses, so I didn’t see much of his face. He wore a bulky coat. I don’t know if he was heavy or skinny or what.”

“And what exactly did he want you to do?” Frost asked.

“He said I should open up the store at four in the morning and wait for a detective who looked like Justin Timberlake to show up,” Copernicus said.

“Funny.”

“Honestly, I don’t know who the hell that is, but I assume he meant you.”

“Well, I’m here,” Frost said. “Now what?”

“Now I’m supposed to give you this.”

Copernicus opened a cherrywood music box on the desk, which started playing a plink-plink version of the waltz from Carousel. Hidden inside was a woman’s watch, which the man grabbed and dangled by its clasp from his tiny hand. He held it out to Frost at the end of his arm. Before taking it, Frost slid on a pair of gloves, and then he pinched the edge of the band and examined it.

The watch was expensive and very distinctive. The face was teardrop shaped, surrounded by diamonds, and the silver band was encrusted with ruby and topaz stones. Frost recognized the design. Like everything else about this night, it was meant to evoke a memory of events that had happened five years earlier.

This was an exact replica of the watch owned by Melanie Valou. She’d been wearing it on the day she disappeared; it had been visible on her wrist, shiny and dazzling, on the ATM camera from Market and Van Ness. But the watch hadn’t been on her wrist when Melanie’s body was found. Instead, everyone knew that the watch would eventually be found on the wrist of the next victim. Just like all the others.

His lieutenant, Jess Salceda, had made it her mission in life to find where Rudy Cutter had hidden Melanie’s watch. After several searches of Cutter’s home that turned up nothing, she’d finally outsmarted him. His hiding place was ingenious, just a utility hole in the ceiling above a hardwired smoke detector, but Jess had spotted a small flake of plaster dust in the carpet that roused her suspicions. When she’d rooted about inside the hole with her finger, she’d discovered Melanie’s watch.

Finding it was the break that had finally put Rudy Cutter in jail for life. It was the break that had brought the murder spree to an end.

“Am I supposed to be impressed?” Frost asked. “I get it. This is a copy of Melanie Valou’s watch. Why should I care?”

Copernicus laughed. His muttonchops danced, and his teeth were tea stained.

“This isn’t funny,” Frost told him.

“No, it’s not that. Look, I don’t know whose watch this is or what the hell it means. The guy said give it to you, so I gave it to you. But he told me what you’d say, and he was right. That’s why I’m laughing. He said you’d call it a copy of this girl’s watch.”

“So what?” Frost asked.

“So he said I should tell you it’s not a copy. He says the other watch — the one you guys found — was the fake. The cops planted it.”