The Voice Inside

18

When Frost rang the bell at Jess’s apartment, she answered the door with a knife in her hand. He put up his arms in mock surrender. After she saw that he was alone, she opened the door wider and put the knife down on a table by the entry. He nudged past her.

“Taking no chances?” he asked.

“No.”

“Well, that’s smart.”

Jess locked the door behind him. He’d been to her apartment many times before. It wasn’t fancy; she didn’t waste time or money on frills. She could eat, sleep, watch TV, and work on a computer here, but not much else. The white walls were mostly empty. She’d lived in this apartment since she and Captain Hayden had divorced almost two years earlier, but it wasn’t really a home. The only home Jess had was at work. He didn’t know how she was going to adjust to the idea of not being a cop.

“Did anyone see you?” she asked.

“No. If Hayden was watching you, he’s pulled his surveillance. And the media gets bored easily.”

“Guess I’m already old news,” Jess said.

Without asking, Jess went to the kitchen to get him a beer. Frost let himself out onto her second-floor balcony. It was small, and she hadn’t decorated it with ferns or flowers like the other apartments near her. She had two uncomfortable chairs, and he sat in one of them and put his feet on the railing. The apartment looked out on the alley at the back of the building and the green cliff leading up to Chestnut Street.

Jess joined him, handing him a bottle. She leaned her strong arms on the railing and stared into the darkness.

“Did you talk to your lawyer?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“What did she say?”

“She says perjury is a serious felony,” Jess said.

“No kidding.”

“Yeah. She’s trying to do a plea bargain. A judge could give me four years, but she thinks we can get it down to a year. It depends on whether the DA wants to make an example of me. ‘We won’t tolerate bad behavior by the cops.’ That sort of thing. He probably has to have his political people do a poll first.”

“Nobody wants them to come down hard on you, Jess. Inside or outside the department.”

“We’ll see.”

He got out of the chair and stood beside her. He took a drink of his beer and then put the bottle on the concrete next to him.

“I picked up the research materials from Eden Shay,” he told her. “I’m starting to review them. She talked to a lot of people. I’m hoping there may be something in her notes.”

“You want me to look at them, too? Off the record?”

“No, I can handle it,” Frost said.

“Okay. Whatever.”

“By the way, Eden knows we slept together.”

Jess didn’t look surprised. “I don’t care if people know. Do you?”

“No. Not anymore.”

She dug in the pocket of her jeans and extracted a pack of cigarettes. She lit one and blew smoke off the balcony. Then she stared at him from behind her bangs. “Want to do it again?”

“Me and you? I thought we decided that was a bad idea.”

“I’m not your boss anymore.”

His body stirred at memories of the two of them together. With Jess, it was never about making love. It was sex, fast and furious. He could spend an hour in bed with her, and there would be no strings, and they would both be satisfied. He was tempted, but it was still a bad idea.

She saw the rejection in his face, and she looked away and continued to suck on her cigarette. “Well, I’m having a hell of a month.”

“Your text said you needed to see me.”

“Did you hear about the murder on Stockton?” she asked.

“Old guy in the wheelchair? Yeah. I’ve been seeing reports on it come through all evening.”

“What are they saying?”

He hesitated, not sure why she was asking. “There aren’t any leads on the perp so far. The apartment was clean. They found the body because the woman in the apartment next door came home from work and noticed a bullet hole in her wall. She called the cops. Vic’s name is Jimmy Keyes.”

“He was shot?” Jess asked.

“No. The gunshot went high. It looks like Keyes fired at somebody and missed. Whoever he was aiming at broke the old man’s neck. The cops found debris from a Taser in the apartment, but no sign of the Taser itself. The gun was missing, too. Why are you asking about this, Jess?”

“Motive?” she went on, ignoring his question. The habits of being the boss died hard.

Frost shrugged. “Robbery, probably. Keyes’s wallet was gone.”

Jess stared at him through a cloud of smoke. “It was Cutter.”

“What makes you think so? This isn’t Cutter’s MO.”

“I called a tech buddy of mine,” she told him. “He ran the vic’s address through some of the local sites that weapons traders use. This guy Keyes was trying to unload a Taser.”

“Okay, so the killer’s probably a buyer who didn’t feel like ponying up cash. That doesn’t make it Cutter.”

“It’s him,” Jess insisted. “The sixth victim, Shu Chan, was Tasered before he grabbed her. You think that’s a coincidence?”

Frost exhaled long and slow. He wasn’t sure if it was suspicious enough to call it more than a coincidence. Maybe Jess really believed it, or maybe she was looking for any excuse to be back in the game.

Then again, he thought, Tick tock.

“Look, I can call the detectives on the case. They’ll be pulling street cameras from the area around the crime scene. I can make sure they keep an eye out for Cutter.”

“They won’t get him that way. The guy’s a ghost.”

“Jess, you know there’s nothing I’d like better than to pin a new murder charge on Cutter—”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. I don’t think we’ll ever prove it was him behind the Keyes murder. He’s too smart. I still think he did it, and that means now he’s walking around out there with a Taser and a handgun. We both know what that means.”

Frost frowned. “He already has a new target.”

“Right. I know you’re focused on solving the old murders, but we may not have time. You need to find him, Frost. Fast.”

3:42 a.m. In or out of prison, it didn’t matter. Rudy was awake.

He slipped out of bed. His clothes were on the floor, but he didn’t put them on yet. He stared at the brunette whose naked torso extended from the blankets. He didn’t remember her name. Her apartment in the Castro was small. He knew the neighborhood well, which meant he knew the bars you went to when you didn’t want to spend the night alone. After a few drinks together, she’d invited him back to her place. The sex hadn’t been memorable after four years of prison celibacy, but the woman was too drunk to care.

When he drew a finger down her bare spine, she didn’t stir at his touch. Her eyes were closed, and her breath whistled through her nose. He didn’t expect her to be conscious for hours.

He was restless, so he did yoga. That was one of the tricks he’d learned to cope with prison time. He could feel his heart rate slow. He could feel his blood pressure go down. He exercised silently for an hour, and it was still dark outside when he finished and got dressed. In the kitchen, he made himself a cup of coffee using the woman’s single-cup machine. While he sipped it, he found her laptop computer and booted it up. He navigated to the cloud website he’d used to store his research materials. No one knew about it; no one had found it. It had been four years since he’d been online, but he’d purchased a long-term plan before he was arrested to make sure his account wasn’t deactivated.

The documents were all there. The names, the jobs, the home addresses, the phone numbers, the secret photographs, the maps. The information was four years old, and much of it was probably out of date, but it gave him a place to start.

He studied the names on his list:

And below them was the first name that was not crossed out:

He’d been part of Maria’s life during the last weeks before he was arrested. He could still picture her face. He knew where she worked, where she lived, where she ate, where she shopped. He’d been targeting her before Jess Salceda got in the way of his plans. Now he had to find her again.

Rudy typed her name into the Google search engine:

Before he could review the search results, his head snapped up as a Fall Out Boy song played loudly from the bedroom. The woman’s phone was ringing. Rudy slapped the laptop shut. The song was deafening in the silence of the apartment, but when he got up and went to the bedroom doorway, the woman in bed didn’t move. She was still unconscious and showed no sign of waking up. Even so, he didn’t want to take the risk that someone would come over to the apartment when they couldn’t reach her on the phone.

Rudy decided it was time to go.

He went to the sink in the woman’s small kitchen. He put a stopper in the drain and filled the basin, and then he found a large container of salt in one of the cabinets and emptied it into the water. Using his fingers, he swirled the water around. He grabbed the laptop and slid the machine into the salty bath. When a few minutes had passed, he retrieved the laptop and carefully dried it with a dish towel, so there was no evidence of tampering. He pushed the “Power” button. Nothing happened. The laptop was dead. He replaced it carefully in the exact place he’d found it, matching the rectangle of dust on the bookshelf.

Through the apartment window, dawn crept over the city.

He began quietly opening drawers in the bedroom where the woman slept. He found a pair of mini binoculars that he tucked into his backpack. He checked her closet and found a men’s wool cap, probably left over from a previous one-night stand. He took it. In a zippered compartment in one of the woman’s purses, he found three hundred dollars in cash. He shoved it into his pocket.

Rudy went into the kitchen. He found the drawer where she kept her cutlery, and he selected one of the steak knives inside, with a serrated blade. She wouldn’t miss it. He held it in his hand, feeling the handle, running a finger along the dull side of the steel. It brought images into his brain. Memories. He thought about what it would feel like again, after so long.

He wandered back into the bedroom. The woman — What was her name? Wendy? — was still asleep. She was on her side. Long hair spilled over her face. Her neck was exposed, showing off the ridges of her ligaments and the swell of her trachea. Inside, under the skin, arteries pumped blood to her brain. He stood over her, with the knife in his hand. He lay the flat of the blade against her pretty neck as she slept. One flick of the wrist was all he needed. It was tempting, but he had to be patient. He didn’t have much longer to wait.

The woman made a noise, almost like a moan in her dreams. He removed the knife from her skin and secured it in his backpack. As he watched, she shifted onto her back, and the sight of her body brought a twinge of arousal. He thought about waking her up and having sex again, but he couldn’t indulge himself. Not now.

Instead, silently, he let himself out of the apartment and wandered down the steps to the street.

He counted the hours. Tonight it would begin again.