The Voice Inside

33

“Why are you stopping here?” Eden asked as Frost pulled to the curb on Haight in front of a Tibetan boutique with Asian lanterns and brass-and-turquoise jewelry in the store windows. The bright paint on the trim was the color of sunflowers. Like seemingly every other business on Haight, its neighbor was a tattoo parlor.

“Quick detour,” he replied.

They were heading for the house where Hope Cutter’s mother lived near the Stonestown mall, but he wanted to stop here first. This was the gift shop where Katie had purchased a ceramic fountain as an anniversary gift for their parents. It was probably the last place anyone would have seen her alive. And the shop was in the opposite direction of where she should have been headed with Todd Clary’s pizza.

He explained to Eden what his father had told him. She studied the storefront with a little frown on her face.

“It’s not really so strange, is it?” she said. “We’re only a block past Masonic, and you can get through the Panhandle there. She could have turned around and headed north after she stopped at the shop.”

Frost shook his head. “A U-turn? On Haight? Good luck with that. Come on, you know what the traffic is like around here. Even going around the block would probably have added ten minutes at that time of night. The next cross street that cuts through the Panhandle is Baker, and by then, she would have been half an hour away from Todd Clary’s place. Katie was a little scattered, but she was a native, like me. She wouldn’t make a mistake like that.”

Eden pointed at the boutique window. “The shop closes at eight o’clock. You said the receipt was dated right before eight, right? Maybe she remembered that she needed to get a gift for your folks just as she was heading out to make her delivery. She dashed over here to buy something before the store closed.”

“Okay, but why make a special trip? She had two more days before their anniversary. She could have gone to the shop on Friday or Saturday. The only reason to stop was if it was right on her way. And it wasn’t.”

“So what happened?” Eden asked. “What are you thinking?”

Frost tried to put himself inside his sister’s head again. He tried to picture what she was doing on that last night. What she was thinking. Where she was going. He could imagine her in her car, singing along to the radio. The smell of the pizza on the seat next to her would have made her open the windows. He was familiar with all of the evidence from that night, but the evidence didn’t help him. Katie hadn’t made or received any calls or texts after she left the pizza joint. She was on her own.

“Katie broke the pattern,” he said. “It was March, not November. She was the only victim other than Nina Flores who wasn’t murdered in November.”

“But the police ruled out a copycat, didn’t they?”

“Yes, it was definitely Cutter. Katie was wearing Hazel Dixon’s watch on her wrist when I found her. And then Katie’s watch showed up on Shu Chan in November, so we know he took it from her. This was Cutter, but somehow Katie’s murder was different from his other crimes. I want to know why.”

He got out of the Suburban and went around to the sidewalk. Eden got out, too. The street was crowded. Tourists window-shopped. A double-decker sightseeing bus passed behind them. Haight was like a museum now, an artifact of what the ’60s had been. It looked real, but it wasn’t. The hippies had been replaced by technology yuppies, who were the only ones who could afford the city anymore. The customers getting the tattoos made a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, plus stock options.

He smiled, seeing one of Herb’s three-dimensional sidewalk paintings two stores down from the boutique. Herb’s paintings filled the Haight-Ashbury area, pointing tourists to his gallery a few blocks away. This one showed a young Jerry Garcia playing guitar, and it appeared to rise off the pavement so realistically that people detoured around the painting to avoid bumping into him.

“I’ve been searching the wrong streets for years,” Frost said as he looked up and down the block. “I followed every route from the pizza joint to Clary’s place a dozen times, but I went the wrong way. I assumed that Katie headed west, which is what she should have done. Except she didn’t. I never checked the streets going this way.”

“What were you looking for?” Eden asked.

“Any place where Katie and Cutter might have intersected. I studied his life. I studied his credit-card receipts. I did the same with Shu Chan, because I figured he might have been targeting her already. There was nothing that would have put them in the same area.”

Eden shook her head. “East, west, it doesn’t really matter, does it? If you’d found a connection close to here, it would have jumped out at you. A few blocks wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“You’re right about that.”

He stared at the boutique door. It was easy to picture Katie rushing inside before they closed, with the hot pizza in her car. She’d spot the Buddha fountain immediately; maybe she’d already seen it in the window. It was the perfect gift for their mother. She would have haggled over the price, but not much. Katie wasn’t a bargainer, and she didn’t have time to negotiate. She would have scribbled down their parents’ address for the delivery, probably had to write it out again so they could read it, and then she would have dashed back to her car to head in the opposite direction to Todd Clary’s place.

It still didn’t make sense to him.

“I always assumed that Katie stumbled onto Cutter on the delivery route,” Frost told her. “She saw something she wasn’t supposed to see.”

“That makes sense,” Eden said. “So maybe Shu Chan was in the Asian boutique that night, and Cutter was watching her. If Katie saw him near Shu, that would explain everything.”

Frost nodded. “I thought about that. And you’re right, it’s probably what happened, but it doesn’t explain everything.”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t explain why Katie was in this store that night to begin with,” Frost said. “That’s what I don’t understand. She shouldn’t have been here at all.”

The owners of the Tibetan boutique didn’t recognize the photographs that Frost showed them. Katie Easton, Rudy Cutter, and Shu Chan were all strangers to them. They didn’t remember the purchase or delivery of one ceramic Buddha fountain six years earlier. It was a dead end.

Frost put it out of his mind for now and headed for Stonestown.

Hope’s mother, Josephine Stillman, was in her mideighties. She still lived in the same little white house on Eucalyptus Drive that she and her husband had purchased in the ’60s. She was one of thousands of elderly house orphans in California who enjoyed low property tax rates because of Prop 13, as long as they never sold their home. So they stayed put year after year, watching their net worth grow on paper. Josephine’s three-bedroom matchbox was probably worth two million dollars now.

She was spry for her age. When she opened the door for them, she was dressed for pickleball in a white skirt and cotton top. Her hair was colored to a delicate auburn. Her skin had the artificial tautness of someone who’d had work done. She didn’t pretend that she was happy to see them or that she welcomed the idea of talking about her daughter. Her attitude was busy and impatient.

“I really don’t have time for this,” Josephine complained, waving them into the house with a flutter of her hand. “And I don’t see how I can help you. Hope’s been gone thirty years. Honestly, I try to put all of that unpleasantness out of my head. I don’t think about it anymore.”

Frost knew that was a lie.

In reality, Hope stared down at her mother every day. There was a watercolor portrait of her over the fireplace in the living room. For Frost, it had a strange, haunting familiarity. He recognized Hope from photographs he’d seen, although the painting must have been done when she was a teenager. Even knowing what Hope would do a few years later, it was easy to see that she’d been an unhappy child. The face in the painting stared desperately into the distance. The watercolors, which blurred her features, made her look as if she had no identity at all and was in danger of disappearing into the canvas.

“Hope did that painting herself,” Josephine murmured when she saw him looking at it. “It’s the only self-portrait I have of her.”

“She was very talented.”

That was true. The craft in the painting was impressive, especially since she’d done it so young. But the girl who’d stared into the mirror as she made the self-portrait was obviously tortured.

“What is it you want?” Josephine asked. Then she rushed ahead, as if to answer their questions before they could ask them. “Back then, you know, people didn’t talk about mental illness. There was a stigma. And no one realized what postpartum depression could make a mother do. All they saw in Hope was a freak. A monster. That wasn’t her. She was sick, and no one could help her. Not her husband. Not even me.”

Frost could hear her voice quivering as she got upset.

“She wanted that baby, you know,” Josephine went on. “She did. She loved Wren. People didn’t believe that after what happened, but it’s true. She’d talked about having children for years. She was ready. She would visit pediatrics on her breaks at the hospitals and chat with the new mothers. She was over the moon when she got pregnant herself. She couldn’t wait to have a child of her own. It’s just that she had no way of knowing how it would affect her mentally.”

“We understand,” Eden reassured her. “We know Hope was sick.”

Josephine took a handkerchief and dabbed at her nose. “Well. You don’t know what we went through. The awful things people said. Jim couldn’t take it. That’s what killed him. I spent years living with the guilt myself, and finally, I decided I was going to put it behind me. What’s done is done.”

She didn’t sit down, and she didn’t invite them to sit down. She wanted to move this along.

“Did you stay in touch with Rudy Cutter?” Frost asked.

Josephine waved her hand. “No, no, no. Rudy and I never spoke again after the funerals. And mind you, that was his choice. Jim and I reached out, but he wanted nothing to do with us.”

“You know he’s been released?” Frost said.

“Oh yes.”

“Has he tried to contact you?”

“No, of course not. I can’t imagine why he would. I literally haven’t set eyes on Rudy in years.”

Frost glanced at the portrait again. He felt as if Hope were following the conversation. He had the strangest sensation that he’d met Hope before, but he didn’t know why. He didn’t know her as anything but a face in a picture, and yet he’d felt her presence with him somewhere. He couldn’t place it, but the time was recent.

“We think that Rudy’s killing spree is somehow an expression of his rage toward Hope,” Frost said.

“Don’t you blame my daughter for what he did!” Josephine snapped. “What Hope did was awful enough, but she was ill. She wasn’t in control of her mind. Rudy is the real monster. He has no excuse at all for the crimes he committed. None. Besides, I don’t know why you think there’s any connection. The things he did happened years later.”

“Those furies can stay inside a person for a long time,” Frost said.

“I won’t hear talk like that!”

Eden interrupted to calm her down. “Josephine, please, we’re not blaming Hope. This is all on Rudy and no one else.”

“That’s right,” Frost said. “We’re just trying to understand why he picked the women he did. If we can establish a connection that links the victims together, it will help us gather the evidence we need to put him back in prison. And we’re wondering whether that connection somehow involves Hope.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“I’m sure you read about the murders. You must have followed Rudy’s original trial. Was there anything about the victims that made you think of Hope? Did you know any of them or their families? Was there some physical resemblance? Some behavior? It might have been the smallest thing.”

She shook her head firmly, without even thinking about it. “Nothing at all. Now are we done? I have to go.”

“Just one more thing,” Frost said. “I’d like you to look at some pictures.”

Frost slid his phone out of his pocket. He found the photos he’d taken of the buttons that Nina Flores had worn on her birthday. He held out the phone so that Josephine could swipe through the pictures, and she took the device from him with obvious reluctance.

“The girl in these photos is Nina Flores,” he told her. “She was Rudy’s first victim. There are pictures of her family here, too. Nina was wearing these buttons the day that Rudy met her. He saw them. I want to know if something in these photographs could have brought back his anger over Hope.”

Josephine studied the pictures one by one, but she didn’t say a word. Her face was dismissive. He could see her getting ready to hand back the phone with an impatient sigh, because he’d wasted her time. And then she stopped. Her finger hovered over the screen with the tiniest quiver. Her eyes narrowed. Something about one of the images grabbed her like a magnet.

“Do you see something, Mrs. Stillman?” Frost asked.

The woman’s mouth puckered unhappily. She was silent.

“Josephine?” Eden asked.

She pushed the phone back into his hands with a decisive gesture. She was done. “I don’t know any of these people.”

And yet her face was ashen.

“They may be strangers, but if you can think of anything—” he said.

“I can’t. I told you. Now I’m late, and you really have to leave.”

The woman busied herself with her purse. Clearly, the interview was over. She wanted them gone. Frost turned his phone over and looked at the photo that had grabbed her attention.

It was the picture of Nina and Tabby.

He saw them in Nina’s bedroom. Two young women. Nina with her dark hair and round, smiling face, about to turn twenty-one. Tabby, redheaded and already sure of herself. They were dressed for the night, ready to party and dance.

He didn’t see anything in the photograph that could be a motive for murder, but Hope’s mother obviously had. He could see a strange horror hiding behind the woman’s eyes. In five seconds, she’d spotted something about Nina Flores that he and Jess had missed for years. Something that connected Nina and Hope.

She had no intention of telling him what it was.