The Voice Inside

31

Eden Shay was waiting on Frost’s front steps when he arrived back at his Russian Hill house. She had her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped tightly together in her lap. She wore no makeup today. Her black curls looked flat. He grabbed Shack, who was sleeping on the front seat of the Suburban, and sat down next to Eden on the steps. She inched away from him.

“You heard about Jess?” Frost asked.

She nodded without looking back. “Sorry. I know she meant a lot to you.”

He didn’t reply. He noticed the way Eden kept space between them now. She was the opposite of Tabby. She didn’t reach out, take his hand, or hug him.

“Do you want to come inside?” he asked her.

“Sure.”

Frost led her up the steps. Inside, he put Shack down, and the cat scampered away and disappeared. Normally, Shack stayed close whenever someone was in the house, as if he needed to be part of the conversation, but not today. Frost heard him thunder up the stairs to find his favorite spot in the closet.

Eden wandered to the bay window. She was subdued. She opened the door and went out to the patio, and she stood at the railing, where the hillside fell off below her and the city stretched down toward the waters of the bay.

He came up beside her. “What’s wrong?”

“I think you should quit what you’re doing. Don’t go after Cutter. Let the other detectives do it.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s dangerous,” she said. “Doesn’t what happened to Jess prove that to you?”

He didn’t think this had anything to do with Jess. “What’s going on, Eden?”

“Cutter found me.”

He reached out for her shoulder, but she drew away. It was as if she were back in the basement in Iowa, recoiling from any touch, suspicious of every man. “Are you okay?”

“No. I’m not.”

“Did he threaten you?” Frost asked.

“He didn’t need to. He knew how to find me. He knew where I was living. I got the message. If I didn’t help him, I’d be next.”

“What did he want?”

Eden’s head turned, and she stared at him now. “He wanted to know about you.”

“Me? What about me?”

“Everything. What I’d found out about you. What you knew about him and this case. He wanted to know if you’re getting close.”

“It doesn’t feel that way,” Frost said.

“Well, maybe you’re closer than you think. The point is, you’re getting in his way, and he doesn’t like it. Jess got in his way, and you saw what he did to her. That’s why you should stop.”

“I’m not going to stop.”

She shrugged. “No, I didn’t think you would.”

“What did you tell Cutter about me?”

“I told him to go to hell,” Eden replied.

He wondered if that was the truth. Eden was complicated. She’d built relationships with the men on both sides of this case. Him and Rudy Cutter. It was impossible to know where her loyalties lay, other than with herself. Her book came first. He also realized that he needed to keep her close to him so he could watch what she was doing.

“Do you think he’d come after you again?” he asked her.

“I live in a security building. He can’t get close to me.”

“He already did,” Frost said. Then he made a risky decision. “Do you want to stay here with me for a few days?”

There was curiosity in her eyes. “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you do that?”

“One, to keep you safe. Two, to get your help. If Cutter thinks we’re close to the truth, then maybe we can figure it out together.”

He didn’t add, Three, to keep an eye on you.

“It’s sweet of you to offer,” she said, although he was sure that she suspected he had ulterior motives.

“So stay. Your notes are already here. You can work when you want. I have plenty of room. I don’t use the master bedroom, so you can take it for yourself.”

Her eyes were calculating again. “If I do this, I can’t stop being a writer. It doesn’t work that way.”

“I get it.”

“Anything that happens is fair game for the book. Including anything between us.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“Okay then,” Eden said. “You and Shack have a roommate. I can pick up some things from my place later.”

“Good.”

He wondered how quickly he would regret his offer, and he didn’t have to wait long. As he turned to go back inside the house, Eden grabbed his arm. This time, she stood very close to him. “Frost, wait. There’s something else.”

“What is it?”

“I’ve been keeping a secret from you,” she said. “Cutter was trying to hold it over my head. I should have told you before, but I didn’t know how you’d react.”

“So tell me now.”

“It was me,” Eden said. “I was the one who found the watch.”

Frost’s jaw hardened. He understood immediately what she meant. “Of course you did. I should have known right away. I knew it wasn’t Phil.”

“Cutter told me in prison that he’d been framed. I thought it was crazy, but he laid out this whole scheme of what must have happened. He wouldn’t agree to any of my interviews if I didn’t help him look for the watch. So I did. I never expected to find anything, but Cutter was telling the truth. I found out about the muggings in the Mission District. Lamar Rhodes. His sister. I saw her wearing the watch. It didn’t take long to figure out what Jess had done.”

Frost shook his head. “And you told Cutter all about it.”

“Yeah.”

“So I guess you had to listen to the voice inside, too. Not just me.”

“You’re right, I did,” Eden said. “And I made the same call you did, Frost. I couldn’t cover it up.”

“What about Phil and the games he played with me? Breaking into my house? Leading me on a treasure hunt?”

“That was all Cutter. I didn’t know what he was going to do. I figured he’d simply call his attorney, but he can never do things the easy way.”

Frost wanted to be mad at her. He wanted to be furious. Eden had been the one who put the entire plan in motion. Because of her, Cutter was free, and Jess was dead. But that was a lie. She was right. They’d both seen the same facts, and they’d both made the same decision. He couldn’t blame her for it.

Eden watched the emotions play across his face. “Do you want to rescind your invitation?”

“No.”

“I don’t have to stay here. I understand if you think I betrayed you.”

“This doesn’t change anything,” he told her, although he couldn’t keep the coolness out of his tone. “I made the offer because I think it’s safer for you to be here with me. Now let’s get started.”

She looked relieved. “Started at what?”

“Figuring out what Cutter is going to do next.”

Frost went back inside the house, and Eden followed him. He put the watch out of his head. He went to the boxes that he’d stacked in the foyer, and he grabbed one off the top and brought it back to the inlaid coffee table in front of the sofa.

“When I talked to Phil today,” Frost said, “he gave me an idea. Jess was originally focused on finding a connection among the victims to Cutter’s daughter. Nina turned twenty-one the same year that Wren would have turned twenty-one. That kind of thing.”

“Sounds right,” Eden said.

“Yes, but if the victims reminded him of Wren, I don’t think Cutter would have been able to kill them. I wonder if we have it backward. Maybe, somehow, the victims reminded him of Hope. She’s the one who took everything from him.”

Eden sat down on the sofa. “I don’t know, Frost. I didn’t find anything that Nina and Hope had in common. They were about as different as two people could be. I still think Jess was right. Nina must have reminded him of Wren. Somehow the others did, too.”

“Yes, but Cutter loved Wren. Whereas he still hates Hope like this all happened yesterday.”

“True. So what do you want?”

Frost pointed at the box of notes. “Is there anything in there about Hope?”

“Quite a lot.”

“Okay. Tell me about her. Help me get inside her head.”

“I wish I could,” Eden replied. “She may be even more of a mystery than Rudy is. I mean, how does a mother murder her own child? The docs all talked about PPD, but that’s the clinical explanation, not the emotional explanation. Most people I talked to just called her a monster.”

“You don’t believe that,” Frost said.

“No. You’re right. When you say someone is bad to the bone, it lets them off the hook. Hope wasn’t evil. That’s why it’s hard to understand her doing something so terrible. And it’s not like she didn’t do good things in her life, too. She was an ER nurse, which is as tough as it gets. Nobody remembers that now, because it doesn’t balance the scale.”

“Was Rudy abusive to her?”

Eden shook her head. “The opposite, in fact. He put up with a lot.”

“What about her childhood?”

“Pretty normal middle-class stuff. It sounds like Hope was a troubled kid going way back, though. I talked to her mom, Josephine. She feels guilty. You would, too, if you spent all those years raising a girl who grew up to kill her own daughter.”

“There has to be more. You said Hope was troubled. In what way?”

“Depression. Mood swings. That was the bipolar part of her. If you’re looking for connections to Nina, that’s not it. Nina was a happy kid. No sign of mental illness.”

Frost frowned. He didn’t see any connections, either. Even so, he was beginning to believe that he was on the right track. If you wanted to catch a killer, you had to follow the anger. And Cutter’s anger was all about Hope.

“Rudy was dead inside for years,” Frost said. “That’s the part I don’t get. What woke him up?”

“What do you mean?”

“Phil said that everything stopped for Rudy after Wren died. He didn’t talk about him being angry. It sounded like he was numb.”

Eden nodded. “A few of Rudy’s coworkers said the same thing. Losing Wren drained all the emotion out of him.”

“But then his anger flooded back when he met Nina,” Frost said. “I want to know why. There must have been something about Nina that reminded him of Hope and what she did. You said you interviewed Hope’s mother. Is she still local? Where does she live?”

“She’s in the same house in Stonestown where Hope grew up.”

“Let’s go talk to her,” Frost said.