The Voice Inside

43

Frost led them into the valley. The only noise was the clap of their boots on the trail. There was almost no wind. After a hundred yards, they reached the first fork, where one path descended toward the lake and the other climbed sharply to the top of the ridge. He sent one of the uniformed officers straight ahead, and the two others stayed with him on the route up the hill.

He locked his knees as he pushed higher with each step. The fog thickened. The handful of trees clinging to the slope became silhouettes against a gray wall. It was a mile from the valley to the summit, and as they reached each lower peak, the trail descended into the next seam and then rose again. The tight switchbacks were like horseshoes. He stopped regularly, hoping to hear the thump of Maria’s footsteps descending toward them, but they were three solitary ghosts on the hillside.

Far below, the wail of sirens rose from the city. Reinforcements were on their way. He called Captain Hayden from the slope and asked him to coordinate with the police in San Bruno and Pacifica to place men at the obvious trail outlets. Even so, he knew their best chance of catching Cutter was here on the ridge. The reach of the hills was vast, spilling down into neighborhoods in the west and east. In the fog and the growing darkness, Cutter could easily slip away.

Frost dialed Maria’s phone again. As before, she didn’t answer.

He shouted for her: “Maria!”

His voice sounded loud, but he didn’t know how well it carried. A crow, disturbed by the noise, ascended with a mocking cry from the brush nearby. They waited for Maria to call back, but stillness hung over the trail. There was nothing for them to do but keep climbing.

As they neared the high peak of the ridge, the wind revived and slapped their faces like a wet hand. Pockets of clear air wormed into the fog. With one step, the path would be invisible; with the next, they’d momentarily see a snapshot of the low foliage around them. Telephone poles crowned the hillside. Where the paved trail curved northward, he spotted a smaller, unpaved cross trail leading south. At the intersection of paths, he saw a small stone restroom with an angled tin roof.

Frost crossed the stretch of dirt and took out a small flashlight from his pocket. He yanked open the restroom door and examined the tiny interior with the light. The sewage smell was strong. No one was inside.

“What now?” one of the cops asked.

The trails followed the up-and-down peaks of the ridge. Frost shined a light along the path in both directions, but the fog threw the light back in his eyes. There were no footprints on the dry ground. He cupped his hands around his mouth and called for Maria again. She didn’t answer.

“The two of you head south,” he told the other cops. “The trail splits past the discovery monument, so you can each take one. I’ll go north. If you find anything, shout.”

They split up. Frost watched the fog envelop the officers as they headed down the path. He turned around and made his way back to the paved trail, which continued higher at a shallow climb. He marched, completely alone, through a milky bubble. The damp air got into his bones.

His flashlight swept the ground at his feet as he walked. Near the next peak, amid the sea of gray, he spotted a tiny flash of color. When he reached it, he found a red sneaker tipped over forlornly on the trail. It was an expensive shoe, a Nike Flyknit, and it looked almost new. No one would have voluntarily left it behind. He crouched down and slid a finger inside, and the interior of the shoe felt warm and wet.

Frost cast his flashlight around the dense brush. Not far away, a dead-end spur off the main trail led to an old weather station. He jogged that way, keeping an eye on the gravel for other clues that Maria may have left behind. The hilltop was cold. The wind roared, making music on the steel instruments tower. He felt as if he were on the summit of the world up here.

A squat white storage tank dominated the open ground. The dirt was lined with rutted tire tracks, but they weren’t recent. He made a circuit around the building, finding nothing. This was the highest spot on the ridge, and from where he was, the land flattened. The fog thinned slightly, but the light of the day was mostly gone. He shouted Maria’s name again. He could barely hear himself.

Frost tramped through the brush back to the main trail. He continued north. Two hundred feet along the ridge line, he squinted as he saw another flash of color in the light of his flashlight. It was a second shoe, a matching red Nike. The shoes were like breadcrumbs left by Maria. She’d been taken up here; she’d been dragged this way. She couldn’t be far.

Less than a quarter mile away were the ruins of an old missile complex that had been built in the ’50s to protect the Bay Area from a Soviet air assault that never came. The remote buildings had long since been abandoned to decay, but every Sweeney Ridge hiker knew about them. Frost ran. Through the fog, he saw the first of the lonely missile buildings take shape ahead of him, with its commanding view over the Pacific, where soldiers could monitor the skies. The cinder-block walls were painted over with wild graffiti. The doors and windows were long gone, leaving empty shells for birds to nest and animals to take shelter. It was a Cold War ghost town.

“Maria!”

This time, he heard something. Muffled. Not far away. A woman screamed. The voice rose in a shrill wail and then cut off sharply. The eddies of the wind made it impossible to tell where it had come from.

Frost drew his gun into his hand. He crept forward into the missile complex. Weeds sprouted through the cracks in the stone and trembled in the breeze. The cement platforms, like the buildings, were covered in graffiti. He saw drawings of alien heads. Peace signs. A beatnik with black, empty eyes. Long ago, someone had painted a warning on the ground in bold capital letters:

That was exactly how Frost felt.

He climbed the cracked steps into the first building. Most of the roof was gone. The interior was dark, and when he cast his light around the space, he saw fallen rubble and the remnants of people who had come here to party in the ruins. Broken bottles. Needles. Moldy food picked apart by birds.

But no one was here.

He returned into the growing darkness. There wasn’t much time.

“Cutter!” he shouted into the wind. “Give it up! I know you’re here. I know about Hope and the sketches. I know everything. You’re done. It’s over. Don’t make it worse.”

He made a slow circle, trying to peer through the fog. Nothing moved, other than the fragile weeds. He felt mist on his face. Leading the way with his gun, he crossed the trail onto a circular cement platform in the middle of a spiderweb of dirt trails. Whatever had been housed here was gone. There was more graffiti. More loose stone. The bushes grew taller here, partially blocking his view of the next building in the missile complex, which was fifty feet away. Behind the waving branches, as the fog blew in and out, he saw rusted vent grills on top of the cinder-block wall and wild red-and-orange graffiti letters spelling out the word RIOT.

He could see the shell of a doorway, too.

And there was Rudy Cutter. Alone.

Frost saw no sign of Maria Lopes. For a long, frozen moment, he stared at Cutter, and Cutter stared back at him. The man’s face was a mask, a mystery, without any happiness or sadness. As Frost’s gaze followed the line of the man’s body, he saw something else, too, secured in the man’s hand.

A knife.

Red blood dripped from the blade to the dirt.

Frost leaped forward through the tangle of vines rooted in the ground. The brush trapped him, making it almost impossible to move. As he ran, he couldn’t see. The weeds were as tall as he was. He dragged himself through a sharp, tight web that scratched his face, and then he finally burst out onto the cracked pavement in front of the building. Cutter was already gone. The darkness had swallowed him up. Frost lit up the walls and the hillside behind the missile complex, but there was no sign of him.

He sprinted for the building and threw himself inside. His flashlight reflected a shiny spattered blood trail across the debris on the stone floor. It led him under the rotting wooden timbers in the ceiling and toward a huge open window frame that was bordered with peeling green paint. In the next abandoned room, he saw a plastic mannequin, its body crusted with dirt, its head cut off, its arm pointed straight ahead, as if it were beckoning him.

He ran to the window frame and climbed through to the other side.

At the feet of the mannequin was Maria Lopes.

Seeing her, Frost felt his heart seize. Her blood was everywhere. Her blood made a lake. Rudy Cutter had slashed her throat deeply and ruthlessly. Frost ran to her and held her, but her eyes were closed, and each breath she drew was labored and long. He called 911; he alerted the paramedics and police; but he knew he was already too late. The hillside was too remote. There wasn’t enough time. He ripped the sleeve off his coat and wrapped her neck and applied pressure, but he was holding back a heart pumping its life into the cold air with each beat.

This woman, this lovely woman, had been alive when he met her hours earlier. A mother. A wife. And then, like the others, she’d crossed paths with Cutter, and he’d stolen all of it away from her.

It made Frost want to scream. It made him want to cry. He’d been too late for Katie. Too late for Jess. And now too late for Maria, too. Cutter had won again. He always won.

Frost murmured lies into Maria’s ears as the two of them waited in the dark ruins. It’s okay, hang on, help is coming, you’re going to be fine. But she wasn’t going to be fine. Her eyes never opened. All the while, her ragged breaths came further and further apart, until only a few minutes later, they stopped altogether. A breath went out; nothing came back in. The silence was awful as she died in his arms.