The Voice Inside

40

When Frost went back inside the Lubin house, he shared what he’d discovered with the families, and the parents began to remember. They’d all owned similar sketches of mother and daughter.

Camille Valou had given a sketch like that, of herself and Melanie in the hospital, to her in-laws during a family visit to Switzerland. She assumed they still had it at their chalet in Wengen.

Rae Hart’s parents had kept a similar sketch in a box of memorabilia in their attic. They hadn’t looked at it in years.

Shu Chan’s mother had sent her sketch to Shu’s grandmother in China.

Hazel Dixon’s father remembered the sketch, but they’d lost it and most of the other keepsakes from Hazel’s childhood in a fire several years earlier.

No one except Gilda Flores had ever hung the sketch on a wall, and that was only because she’d left Nina’s bedroom exactly as it had been years earlier. The sketch of Natasha was still on display in Robbie Lubin’s house, but he was two thousand miles away in Maple Grove, Minnesota. None of the other families had known that similar sketches existed. And neither had Jess.

He couldn’t blame her for missing it.

Even if Jess had researched where the victims were born, she wouldn’t have seen a pattern. The mothers had used three different hospitals in different parts of the city, and Frost assumed that Hope Cutter hadn’t stayed in any given job at a particular hospital for a long period of time. Hope was also an ER nurse, not an obstetrics nurse. There was no reason for her to be in the maternity ward. However, he remembered what Hope’s mother, Josephine, had told him. Hope would visit pediatrics on her breaks at the hospitals and chat with the new mothers.

And then there was Katie.

Just like every other part of her murder, Katie didn’t fit the pattern. She hadn’t been born in San Francisco at all, but had been an unexpected surprise while Janice was visiting Frost’s aunt in San Luis Obispo. His parents had no similar sketch of her. It all reinforced his belief that Katie had stumbled onto Rudy Cutter and not the other way around. She’d seen him somewhere, doing something that no one was supposed to see.

There was only one problem with the new evidence.

The parents all remembered the sketches of their babies, but none of the parents in the room remembered Hope Cutter at all. The sketches weren’t signed. There was nothing to tie her to any of them.

“The only thing I remember about the sketch,” Camille Valou told him, “was that it was a sweet little mystery. I never knew where it came from. When they release you from the hospital with a child, they send you home with all this material. It’s overwhelming, and of course, you’re already tired and anxious. It was several days before I opened this plain manila envelope that was in the packet. The sketch was inside. No explanation. No note. No signature. Just the picture. I thought it was lovely, of course, but I had no idea who had made it.”

Gilda Flores said the same thing.

So did the other mothers.

“I actually called the hospital about it,” Rae Hart’s mother recalled. “I wanted to know who had made the sketch, because I wanted to send a thank-you note. I thought maybe this was a little gift that the hospital did for all the mothers. But they didn’t know anything about it.”

“My wife called, too,” Steven Dixon told him. “No one at the hospital knew where it had come from. I remember them telling her that she wasn’t the only one who had found a sketch tucked in with their materials. Several other mothers had called about the same thing. But apparently the artist had kept it a secret, because they hadn’t found out who was doing it.”

No one knew Hope.

No one remembered Hope.

And yet Frost knew Hope Cutter had made those sketches. It was her. That was what had triggered Rudy’s rage all those years later. A sketch. A link between Nina Flores and Rudy’s wife.

A link that one of the women named Maria Lopes shared, too.

All he had to do was prove it. And find out who was next.

He knew someone who could help him.

Frost parked outside Josephine Stillman’s house near Stonestown.

Hope’s mother answered the door, and she didn’t look surprised to see him. Her face had a defiant cast. She patted her auburn hair, and then she folded her arms across her chest. “I assumed you’d be coming back here,” she said.

“And you know why, don’t you?” Frost asked.

Josephine simply opened the door and let him walk into the house. He went into the small living room, where Hope’s self-portrait stared down at him, full of quiet despair. Hope had been keeping her secret in plain sight all this time.

He showed Josephine the same photo he’d shown her the previous day.

“This sketch in the background of the picture,” Frost said. “That’s what you saw when you studied it. That’s why you reacted the way you did. Hope drew that sketch, didn’t she?”

Josephine didn’t need to look at it again. “Yes, she did.”

“You should have told me immediately.”

“After so much time, why does it matter?”

“It matters because all the victims had sketches like this done when they were babies. That’s the connection that ties them together. Did you know that Hope was doing sketches of new mothers at the hospitals where she was working? Did you ever see them?”

The old woman stared up at the portrait of her daughter. “Of course.”

“Tell me about them.”

Josephine walked over to an old-fashioned mahogany martini table. She opened the drawer and dug through a stack of letters and photographs inside. She found what she was looking for — a yellowed sheet of paper torn from a spiral notebook — and handed it to him. It was a sketch done in ballpoint pen of a mother and child, almost identical in structure to the sketches Frost had seen. This one had the artist’s signature written in script below the sketch: Hope Stillman. Even the handwriting matched the names written on the other sketches.

“I had a photograph of myself in the hospital holding Hope on the day she was born,” Josephine said. “I showed the picture to Hope when she was ten years old. A day later, she came back to me with this sketch. She did it from memory. You can see she had a gift for art even then. I was proud and sad at the same time.”

“Sad?” Frost asked.

“Look at Hope’s face in the sketch,” Josephine said.

Frost did. The face of the baby was like the face in the self-portrait over the fireplace. Unhappy. Tortured. Even at ten years old, Hope was already wrestling with demons.

“That’s the one thing she changed from the photograph,” Hope’s mother went on. “She’s smiling in the original picture. The way any innocent baby would be. But not in the sketch.”

“And what about the drawings at the hospitals?” Frost asked.

“I told you, Hope liked to visit the new mothers. I think she was looking for something that had always eluded her. She wanted to believe that a baby would complete her. She saw joy in the faces of the mothers, and it was a joy she’d never been able to find herself. After she talked to them, she would make these little sketches at home. All from memory. She made sure the original went to the mothers, but she kept copies for herself. And she made copies for me, too. She only sketched the girls, though. Hope never wanted anything for herself except a daughter. She made dozens of these portraits.”

Dozens.

Hope had visited each of the mothers. She’d probably held each child in her arms. They were all on Rudy Cutter’s list. Unless Frost could stop him, Cutter was far from done. But now, finally, they had hard evidence to tie him to every murder. They could rearrest him. If they could find him.

“Do you still have copies of those sketches?” Frost asked.

Josephine nodded. “Yes, I kept them in an album.”

“I really need to take that album with me,” he said.

A wistfulness came over Josephine’s face. “I know. I already went and retrieved it from the attic. It’s in the other room. I’ll get it for you. I was going to call you today to tell you about it. I couldn’t live with the secret. Back then, you have to believe me, I had no idea that those sketches had any importance. It never occurred to me. If I’d realized what Rudy was doing, I would have told someone.”

Frost wondered if that was true, but it didn’t matter.

What mattered was seeing the faces, names, and birthdates in those sketches.

Josephine left the room. He waited near the fireplace with Hope. He could feel her watching him. The portrait had an odd way of making her come to life. Her madness hadn’t left; it had somehow found its way from those sketches into Rudy Cutter’s mind.

Hope’s mother returned, carrying a small photo album with both hands. She handed it to Frost, who treated it delicately. The album had a musty smell, and dust was on the spine. When he opened it carefully, he saw that the album had nothing but black paper pages with rough, unfinished edges. No hooks, no plastic. On every page, Josephine had carefully taped one of Hope’s sketches. They were all the same, but they were all different. The paper and tape had become brittle; the ink was fading.

Frost turned one page after another. He saw the faces and names. Mothers and children. Many were strangers, but he also saw those he recognized. Daughters who had become victims.

Camille and Melanie.

Gilda and Nina.

Kelly and Hazel.

Weng and Shu.

This album, gathering dust in an attic, could have changed everything. Cutter would still be in prison. Some of the victims might still be alive. Katie might be alive. And Jess.

He turned another page, and he saw two names under the next sketch.

Sonja and Maria.

Maybe there were others — Maria was a common name — but he knew he’d found Maria Lopes, simply by looking at the mother’s face. The woman he’d met earlier that day in the hills of San Bruno looked just like her mother. He called up on his phone the DMV records he’d pulled for the various women named Maria Lopes in the Bay Area, and when he checked the birthday for Maria Lopes in San Bruno, he saw that it matched the birthdate written on the faded sketch.

She was the woman he was looking for.

He thought about Maria’s house, near the hills and trails of Sweeney Ridge.

He remembered the phone call from Rudy Cutter and the fierce, intermittent noise of the wind blowing in the background.

Frost knew where Cutter was. He grabbed his phone to send the police to hunt him down.