The Voice Inside

44

One of the other detectives at police headquarters gave Frost a new shirt to wear. He changed in the bathroom. His own shirt was soaked in Maria’s blood, and when he took it off, he saw that blood had seeped through onto his arms and chest. He cleaned himself at the sink as best as he could, but when he was done, he still saw remnants in the seams of his skin and under his fingernails. When he looked in the mirror, he saw gruesome red highlights in his hair.

It was already past midnight. The hunt was on. The police had converged on the missile complex at Sweeney Ridge, but Cutter was nowhere to be found. He’d disappeared into the sprawling hills. There were police helicopters overhead, shining spotlights on the trails, but he was either hidden in the forest or he’d escaped back to the city. Every cop in the Bay Area was looking for him.

Frost waited for Pruitt Hayden in the captain’s office. He’d already been waiting a long time. He hadn’t realized how tired he was until he sat down. The room was warm, and his head swam. He found his eyes blinking shut, and without realizing it, he drifted to sleep. In his dreams, he saw ten long, jewel-encrusted daggers dangling from his living room ceiling at home, tethered by silver threads, all of them dripping blood. He saw identical gleaming platinum watches on both of his arms, five on the left, five on the right, all of them set to 3:42 a.m.

A woman stood directly below each knife. All the victims. Nina, Rae, Natasha, Hazel, Shu, and Melanie. And now Maria, too — and Jess — and Katie. They seemed unaware of the lethal danger just over their heads. Slowly, one by one, as he shouted to warn them, the knives fell, burrowing into their skulls and vanishing. One by one, the women calmly lay down on his living room floor. With each victim, a watch disappeared from his wrist and appeared on the wrist of the woman at his feet. There was no rush. It was leisurely and horrible and silent. A knife fell. A victim died. His watch became her watch.

One, two, three, four, on and on. He couldn’t stop it.

Soon it was Maria’s turn. Maria in her red sneakers. He called out, but his voice didn’t make a sound. The knife fell, and she was gone. Then Jess. His deep track. She stared at him in the moody and intense way she always did, but she didn’t say anything. The knife penetrated her skull, like all the others. She sank to her knees, and she toppled sideways, and she lay still.

He had two watches left on his wrist, but there was only one victim left in the room. Katie.

His sister grinned at him. She held a pizza box and stared around with wide blue eyes at the Russian Hill house. She called out to him, in the familiar Katie voice he hadn’t heard in years.

“Hey, did you order this pizza? Because I think I’m in the wrong place.”

Frost tried to answer. He tried to scream at her: Go, go, go, go, go. But he was too late. He was always too late. He was too late for every one of them; they were all gone; they were all dead. The thread broke, and the knife fell. His pretty, sunny sister put down the pizza box carefully on the floor and then stretched out beside it, as if she were no more than a child taking a nap.

There was one watch left on his wrist. One knife dangling from the ceiling. But no victim. There was no one else in the room. It was supposed to be over, but he knew it wasn’t over yet. A voice whispered in his ear. He was alone in the room with the victims, but Rudy Cutter’s voice was in his head: You think you’ve seen it all, but horror can always get worse.

Frost started awake as he heard the rattle of the handle on the door behind him. He checked the clock on the wall. Nearly two hours had passed. Pruitt Hayden rumbled inside, as huge and threatening as a grizzly bear. The captain dropped heavily into his office chair and leaned forward.

“Sorry to keep you stuck in here for so long. I just got back to the office. How are you, Easton?”

“Fine, sir,” Frost replied, which wasn’t true. The bad dream clung to him and refused to go away. “Have we found Cutter?”

“No, but the man can only hide for so long. Someone will spot him.”

Frost didn’t share Hayden’s optimism. Cutter was smart, and he’d already proven that he could stay below the radar for days at a time. If he wanted to disappear, he could. If he wanted to strike again, he could.

Hayden read the skepticism in Frost’s face. “Cutter may not be back in prison yet, but he will be soon. That’s thanks to you.”

“It’s too late for Maria Lopes,” Frost said.

“I know that. I know you’re going to take that hard for a long time, but it’s not your fault. It wasn’t your fault with Jess, either.”

“It doesn’t matter whether it was my fault. If I can’t stop things like this, what the hell am I doing here?”

The captain sighed. He hauled his bulk out of the chair and went over to the window. Reflections of the city lights glowed on his mottled skin.

“You don’t think Jess said the same thing to me with every one of Cutter’s victims?” the captain said. “He was always one step ahead of her, and he finally broke her. She was a good cop who became a bad cop to get him behind bars. You played by the rules. That’s what we have to do, even when we lose people because of it.”

“I’ll feel better when we have Cutter in custody,” Frost said.

“Well, then let the rest of us do our jobs and find him. Go home.”

“Yes, sir.”

Frost left the office and headed straight to the elevators. There was nothing more to do here. He emerged outside the Mission Bay headquarters building into a cold, driving rain. He made no attempt to cover himself, and the rain soaked down over his hair and clothes. He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked two blocks to his Suburban. There were almost no other cars on the street. When he opened the driver’s door, he saw that the seat was covered in Maria’s blood. He stood there, staring at it, as the rain poured inside.

Finally, he got in and closed the door. The gusts of wind made the truck shiver. He listened to the hammering on the roof. The nightmare was still vivid in his brain, and he actually checked his wrist to see if the last platinum watch was still there. But it wasn’t. This was the real world. In the real world, victims didn’t simply lie down and go to sleep the way they did in his dream. They died slowly, choking, gasping, as you whispered to them and held them in your arms.

Now he knew how Jess died.

Now he knew how Katie died.

It was almost as if Rudy Cutter was teaching him a lesson. You already saw death up close. You need to see the dying, too.

Frost reached into the back seat and grabbed the photo album of Hope’s sketches. In the aftermath of Maria’s murder, he’d neglected to bag it and bring it inside to be logged as evidence. He thought about going back to the building now, but he couldn’t drag himself out of the truck in the rain. It could wait until morning.

He flipped through the early pages. He knew what he was looking for. The sketch of Maria Lopes as a baby, held by her mother, was a third of the way into the album. He stared into Maria’s innocent eyes. She was a baby on her first day of life. Welcome to the world. Thirty-two years later, she would bleed out in the abandoned shell of a missile station. It was a good thing she didn’t know her fate back then, because fate was a jerk. Fate was a son of a bitch.

Go home.

He was still tired, but he wasn’t ready to go home yet. He wondered if Eden was in the house. Waiting for him. Sleeping in his bed. She was a lover, but she was also a writer, and he wasn’t ready to talk to a writer yet. He didn’t want to have his thoughts taken down so that he could read about them in a book someday. He’d avoided reading the part of Eden’s manuscript that dealt with Katie, because he didn’t want to see the reality of her murder in black and white. He didn’t want to know how Eden dealt with it, how she described it, and what she’d said about him. The brother who found the body. The brother who became a cop. The brother who let the killer go and then hunted him down. He was no hero.

Frost drove aimlessly through the city. He didn’t have a destination in mind. It was as if he had to search every street corner for Rudy Cutter, as if he could cover every inch of San Francisco on his own. Eventually, he realized how pointless it was. His hands turned the wheel block by block and chose a new destination for him without engaging his brain. He found himself on 280 heading south through the pouring rain, at a time of night when the freeway was mostly empty. He got off near Balboa Park and wound through the jumble of city streets to the neighborhood where Phil Cutter lived.

The house was dark, but he didn’t think Phil was asleep.

There was a squad car on the street, just in case Rudy showed up here. Frost showed his badge to the cop in the car, and he knew that he looked like a sight. The borrowed shirt didn’t really fit. The back of it was soaked with blood because of the blood in his car. He was wet to the bone. Even so, the cop didn’t ask any questions. He probably figured Frost was planning to beat the hell out of Phil to get answers about his brother.

Phil obviously thought so, too. When Frost rang the bell, Rudy’s brother kept the chain on the door and didn’t invite Frost inside.

“It’s the middle of the night!” Phil barked. “What the hell do you want? I already told the other cops I don’t know where Rudy is. I haven’t seen him. You think he’s stupid enough to come here? This is the last place he’d go.”

“Do you know what happened tonight, Phil?” Frost asked quietly.

“I don’t care what happened. It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“Your brother killed another woman,” Frost snapped. “Can you live with that?”

Frost couldn’t help remembering how this had all started. Phil had left him an anonymous note. Can you live with a lie?

“Quit hassling me, man. What Rudy does has nothing to do with me.”

“If you helped him, we’ll put you in jail, too.”

“I didn’t do a damn thing,” Phil replied.

“Then why were you following me?”

“I wasn’t following you,” the man replied.

“I saw your Cadillac, Phil. You were outside the restaurant on the Embarcadero last night. You took off when I started across the street.”

“So what?” Phil asked. “Is that a crime? You going to arrest me for making an illegal U-turn?”

“What did Rudy want to know about me? What did you tell him?”

“Nothing.”

Frost shook his head. “Where were you this evening?”

“Home. Alone.”

“Did Rudy call you? Did you help him get away?”

“I was here,” Phil rasped, his voice cracking. “I told you. I didn’t go nowhere.”

A rattling cough bubbled out of Phil’s throat. His eyes looked sunken and gray. He was a skeleton, dressed in black shorts and a black tank top. Alcohol breathed like fire from his mouth, along with the same bitter cigarette smoke that Frost had smelled whenever he crossed paths with Phil. Frost realized that the man was telling the truth. He hadn’t gone anywhere tonight. He’d been home. Smoking. Drinking himself into a stupor.

Frost looked at the empty street, then at the garage. Last time he’d been here, the garage door had been open, and the inside was a dumping ground for years of broken equipment and debris. There was no room for a car.

“Where’s your Cadillac, Phil?”

The man shrugged. “In the shop.”

“Yeah? Which one?”

“Somewhere over on Mission.”

Frost leaned into the crack of the door. He was inches from Phil’s face. “Rudy’s got it, right? You met him somewhere, and you let him take the car. That’s how he got to San Bruno.”

Phil didn’t say a word, but the squint of fear in the man’s eyes was enough to convince Frost that he was right. Rudy was in the Cadillac. He grabbed his phone to call in an update on the search, and he started down the steps. He was done here. He was done with Phil turning a blind eye to what his brother had done.

But as he turned away from the front door, he heard Phil mutter something behind him, in a burst of shock and surprise.

“Holy hell.”

Frost turned back. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Phil replied quickly, but the man swallowed hard and stared down at the cracked concrete on the porch.

Frost realized that the back of the white shirt he’d borrowed was covered in Maria’s blood. Phil couldn’t handle seeing it. It was one thing to know that your brother was a murderer. It was another thing to see the victim’s blood, only hours after she’d died.

“Yeah, that’s what he does,” Frost said softly. “He cuts their throats. You can’t believe how much blood there is.”

Phil’s left eye twitched. He breathed loudly through his nose.

“Is there anything you want to tell me?” Frost asked him.

Phil opened his mouth, but then he clamped it shut. Frost waited, wondering if the man would break, but Phil stayed stubbornly silent. Eventually, Frost hissed in frustration and went back down the steps. He had the door of the Suburban open when Phil finally shouted at him through the sheets of rain.

“Hey.”

Frost looked up. Phil had come out of the house onto the porch. His hands were on his hips. Wind buffeted his tall, skinny frame.

“Hey, I wasn’t lying, man,” Phil called. “I wasn’t following you.”

Before Frost could ask any questions, Phil turned around and stormed back inside and slammed the door shut. Frost got into the Suburban and sat in the darkness of the truck, with the rain pounding on the windshield. He replayed what Phil had said in his head, and he heard the emphasis on that last word.

I wasn’t following you.

Frost felt a sickness in his soul that he hadn’t felt since that day at Ocean Beach. A crushing fear. A wild despair.

He knew. He knew.

He heard another voice in his memory. This one was the voice of Gilda Flores, Nina’s mother.

Tabby and Nina were inseparable. Much like me and her mother. We were pregnant at the same time, and Nina and Tabby were first babies for both of us, so we went through it all together.

Frost snatched up the album of Hope’s sketches again. He wanted to be wrong. There was no way that Rudy Cutter could know the truth, no way he could realize that Frost had a vulnerability so deep that he could barely even acknowledge it to himself. He wanted to believe it wasn’t possible, but he was reminded again that fate was a jerk. Fate was a son of a bitch.

Don’t make this personal between us, Inspector.

Too late.

He flipped the fragile pages of the album. He saw the names inscribed at the bottom of each sketch. Dozens of names, spread out over several years. Mothers and babies. Mothers and daughters. Mothers and victims.

And there they were.

Catherine and Tabitha.

Cutter was going after Tabby.