The Voice Inside

48

Frost was sitting on the sofa in the shadows when Eden Shay came down from the bedroom at the first light of dawn. She’d put on satin pajama bottoms and a spaghetti-strap top. Her black curls were a wild mess. She saw him and cocked her head in surprise.

“Well, there you are. The hero returns. What time did you get in?”

“Late.”

“I was hoping you’d join me in bed.”

“I watched you sleep,” Frost said.

“Really? There’s something sensual about that. I like it.”

Frost didn’t answer. He was done with the flirting. He was done being played.

“So Cutter’s dead,” Eden said. “It was all over the news.”

“Yes, he is. You must be relieved.”

She looked at him strangely. “Relieved?”

“You can finish your book now.”

“Oh. Sure.” She eyed the kitchen behind her. “Can I make you breakfast?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You say that now, but you haven’t tried my hot-and-spicy scrambled eggs.”

She wandered in her bare feet into the kitchen. He watched her, unable to move. She retrieved eggs from the refrigerator and frowned at the expiration date, but began to crack them into a bowl anyway. She opened his cabinets and found whatever chili spices he had — which probably dated back to Shack’s original owner — and opened the jars. She dug up a pan and swirled some oil in the bottom.

“Do you want to talk about yesterday?” she called to him. “I understand if you’re not ready. You need time.”

When he didn’t answer, she glanced over her shoulder.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

Frost got up from the sofa. He walked over and stood at the entrance to the kitchen. “Do you remember Robbie Lubin?”

Eden’s eyebrows arched curiously. “Sure. He’s Natasha’s brother.”

“I seem to recall you telling me that you visited him in Minnesota when you first started researching the case for your book.”

“You recall correctly,” Eden replied. Her voice was light but wary. “I told you, I always do my homework. Why?”

“When you visited Gilda Flores back then, she showed you Nina’s bedroom, right?”

“Of course. You know that. What’s this about?”

Frost tried to ignore the roaring in his head. He wanted to be dead inside; he wanted to feel nothing. But that was impossible. This woman had come to him, and he’d let her into his life. He’d given her everything she wanted. He was attracted to her. He’d slept with her. And all along, she’d been manipulating him. All along, she’d hidden the truth.

His instincts had told him from the beginning not to trust her. He should have listened to the voice inside.

“This is about the fact that you solved the Golden Gate Murders seven years ago,” Frost said. “You knew that Rudy Cutter was the killer before anyone else did.”

The curiosity, the playfulness, the innocence all vanished from her face, which became a mask of icy calm. He read her expression. In an instant, she realized that he’d figured it all out. She was already wondering how far he’d gone and what he could prove.

“What are you talking about, Frost?” Eden asked, giving nothing away.

“Hope’s sketches. The mothers and daughters. That’s the connection that ties all the victims together. Well, except Katie, but you already know that, don’t you? Jess never figured out Cutter’s pattern, because she never saw more than one of Hope’s sketches. I assumed that no one did, but that’s not true. You saw the sketches. You saw one on the wall in Nina’s bedroom, and you saw another one when you visited Robbie in Minnesota.”

Eden shrugged. “If I did, then obviously, I missed it. Or I didn’t appreciate the significance.”

“You? No, you wouldn’t have missed a detail like that. No way. I can only imagine the adrenaline you must have felt. How hard was it to keep the truth to yourself? To keep the excitement off your face so Robbie didn’t suspect? You saw that sketch, and you knew you had the clue that would break the whole case open.”

Eden turned off the heat on the stovetop. She rinsed her hands, and then she turned around and leaned back against the kitchen counter. Her face showed nothing at all. No secrets. No guilt.

“Frost, are you out of your mind?”

“I get it. You don’t think I can prove it. Maybe I can’t. But as smart as you are, I still think you left a trail. At first, I couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t have taken this straight to Jess. That would have been the right thing to do, but it wouldn’t have been much of a story, would it? No, the real story for a writer like you would be to find the killer yourself. And that’s what you did. I imagine you talked to people at the hospitals to track down Hope. Did you lie and say that you had a sketch of your own? Maybe your mother died recently and it would mean so much to you to find out who did that little portrait? It probably wasn’t too hard to make the connection. Did you talk to a few retired nurses? Did you bribe someone in HR to run some personnel searches for you? Someone’s going to remember you asking all those questions, Eden. Count on it. We’ll get your e-mail and phone records, too. I don’t know exactly how you made the breakthrough, but sooner or later, you found Hope’s name. And of course, once you did a little research on Hope, you found your way to Rudy Cutter. He would already have been stalking Hazel Dixon by then. And meanwhile, you started stalking him.”

Eden couldn’t hide her hostility now. He was backing her into a corner, and she didn’t like it there.

“If I’d learned Rudy Cutter’s name, I would have given it to the police,” she said.

Frost shook his head. “No. Not you. This was the ultimate opportunity for a writer like you. You could be embedded with a serial killer. You could get inside a murderer’s head while he was still committing his crimes. Even your brother had never done anything like that.”

“You should be a writer yourself,” Eden snapped. “You’re quite the storyteller.”

“I’m curious, how exactly did it work?” Frost went on, ignoring her denials. “Did you approach Rudy and tell him what you knew? Did you make a deal with him? You’d keep his secret if he let you follow along with everything he did? After all, that was the same deal you made with me. How far did it go, Eden? How far did you take it? Were you with him as he stalked Hazel Dixon? Were you actually there when he slashed her throat? Did he let you watch?”

He looked into her eyes, and he knew he was right. She’d been there. She’d been part of the crime. And from that moment forward, she could never go back. She’d become an accessory to murder.

“I think I should go,” Eden said.

“You’re not going anywhere. Not until you tell me about Katie.”

“I’m sorry, Frost. I know you’ve been under a lot of pressure lately, but you’re delusional.”

“Did I ever tell you about Katie’s handwriting?” Frost asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Her handwriting was awful. Terrible. She’d write things down, and she couldn’t even read them herself.”

“So what?”

Frost walked over to the dining room table on the other side of the kitchen. He came back with the receipt from Haight Pizza, which he’d secured in an evidence bag. “Recognize this?”

Eden did. Her eyes widened in shock but only for a split second before she regained her control.

“What is that? Where did you get it?”

“Phil Cutter paid us a little visit overnight. Apparently, Rudy decided a while ago that if he was going down, he was going to take you with him. So Phil dropped off this receipt for me. It’s the receipt Katie wrote to take a pizza to Todd Clary at 415 Parker. The trouble is, by the time the pizza was ready, she didn’t remember the address, and she misread her own handwriting. See what the address actually looks like? She didn’t go west from the restaurant to 415 Parker. She headed east on her way to 415 Baker.”

Eden said nothing. Nothing at all.

“And guess who was living at that address back then?” Frost went on. “You.”

He reached over to the counter behind her and picked up the copy of Eden’s memoir he’d retrieved earlier. He held it up and showed her the author photo on the back cover, which she knew only too well.

“This is your house on Baker, Eden. This is where you lived. If you look closely, you can even see the house number. 415. So why don’t you tell me how it happened? Was Rudy in the house with you when Katie came to deliver the pizza? Did she see both of you together? She would have recognized you. You were practically a household name at that point. You were on all the talk shows. Katie had read your book. She would have gone on and on about how excited she was to meet you. Did she ask what you were working on? Did she want to be introduced to Rudy Cutter? You must have been panicking. You couldn’t let her leave, could you? She would have told everybody about seeing you.”

Eden summoned up a fake smile. “Is this the part where I’m supposed to weep and confess?”

“You can do whatever you want. I already know the truth. I only want to know one thing. Who actually killed Katie? Who actually used the knife? Was it Rudy? Or was it you?”

Eden took a deep breath. He could see her weighing her options. Trying to figure out how to get out of the maze.

“Here’s what I want to know, Frost,” she said. “Do you think I’m stupid? I know a bluff when I hear it. A pizza receipt? A coincidence about a delivery address? Good luck with that. You don’t have any proof.”

“Actually, you already proved it yourself, Eden.”

“And just how did I do that?”

“In your new book.”

He saw her hesitate. “What do you mean?”

“I know what kind of writer you are. And I know the kind of odd little detail you can’t resist.”

“Like what?”

“Like a girl in San Francisco wearing flowers in her hair,” Frost said.

Eden couldn’t hide the concern on her face. She realized that she’d made a mistake. She just didn’t know why.

“I read the chapter you wrote about Katie to see if you mentioned the flower tiara she was wearing when she was killed,” Frost went on. “And sure enough, you did.”

“What difference does that make?” Eden asked. “I saw the crime scene photos.”

“You should have looked more closely at them. The tiara isn’t in the photos. I took Katie’s tiara with me when I found the body. I’ve had it ever since. That’s my secret. Nobody knew Katie was wearing it. Nobody except me and the two people who killed her. Rudy Cutter and you.”

Eden laughed.

It was a cruel, bitter laugh. A laugh of self-disgust. A laugh of giving up. He should have been ready for what she did next, but his emotions had overrun him. He was too consumed with his own rage and grief to stop her. She was fast, and he wasn’t fast enough. Her hand grabbed a plastic jar of chili spice on the counter, which she’d been planning to use in the eggs, and she threw the contents at him. He didn’t even have time to blink. The powder struck his open eyes like a thousand knives. He was instantly blind and in agony, and his hands flew to his face. All he felt was a searing burn as he squinted and tried to see. He staggered backward, and Eden grabbed the frying pan from the stovetop and swung it toward his head. It connected violently, causing a hot explosion that ricocheted inside his skull. She stepped forward and shoved hard on his chest with both hands, and he tumbled backward onto the floor.

He tried to get up, but his brain was a carnival ride, dizzying him, making him sick. Through his scorched eyes, Eden was a blur. She stood over him, but he couldn’t stop her body from whirling in and out of focus. She knelt on top of him, pressing her knees heavily into his chest. He swung a fist at her, but he missed. Eden bent forward. She had a kitchen knife in her hand now, and she lay the edge against his neck. She pressed it in so far that he could feel his skin tearing and the liquid warmth of blood.

“Since you’re so curious, Frost,” she told him, “it was me.”

He struggled to right his mind and clear his eyes. All he needed was a few seconds.

“Rudy said I’d never understand what it was like to kill someone until I used the knife myself, and he was right. If I was going to write about it, I couldn’t just watch. I had to do it. And you know what? It was exhilarating. Life and death was right there in the palm of my hand. The feeling was so strong it scared me. That’s why I ran back to Australia. I had to get away from what I’d done.”

Frost kept blinking, and the fire in his eyes eased as tears worked their way down his face. The spinning world began to drift to a stop. He could feel pain popping like fireworks inside his head, but he could see Eden clearly now, leaning over him. Her curls draped forward. The scar on her neck wriggled as she talked. She had one hand propped on the floor and one holding the blade to his throat.

“It’s a shame I can’t write about this part,” Eden went on. “Because this is a hell of an ending.”

He saw the muscles in her hand squeezing tightly around the handle of the knife. Their eyes met, lover to lover, killer to victim. This woman was about to cut his throat and watch him die.

And then something happened.

Frost heard a noise unlike anything he’d heard in his life. An animal noise, primal and savage, enough to run gooseflesh up a human’s skin, the noise you would hear from a leopard preying in the nighttime jungle. Eden heard it, too, and she froze in confusion. Frost heard thunder on the floor. He saw a lightning flash of motion in black and white.

It was Shack.

The cat flew across the room. He leaped, landing squarely on Eden’s head, his front paws on her cheekbones. With claws fully extended almost an inch deep, he ripped eight deep gashes up her face and sliced through her eyeballs. Eden reared back with a guttural wail of anguish. Blood sprayed. The knife vanished from Frost’s neck as her arms flailed. With a wild lunge of her torso, Eden dislodged Shack like a rodeo rider, but simultaneously, Frost slammed a fist into her head and knocked her sideways. He was free.

He tried to stand, but the room spun, and his knees buckled beneath him. He crashed down again. Eden slashed at him with the knife, and the blade cut a deep, red laceration across the bare skin of his calf. His foot shot out; his heel booted her chin and kicked her backward. She toppled against a pedestal lamp, which fell, and the knife spilled from her hand.

Frost half crawled, half dragged himself across the room. The dining room table was a few feet away. His gun was on the table.

Behind him, Eden was on her feet again.

She had the knife.

He groped around the smooth wooden surface of the table. Papers flew. His laptop skidded off and dropped. Then he felt it. The metal barrel. His fingers spun the gun around until the grip nestled in his palm. He scooped it up and cocked it; then he collapsed onto his back and pointed the gun across the room.

“Stop!”

Eden charged with the knife high over her head. Her face was streaked with ribbons of skin; her eyes dripped blood like the ruby eyes of a devil. Frost aimed straight up at the ceiling and fired once, cascading plaster dust over the room.

“Eden, stop!” he shouted again.

But she came and came.

He heard the voice of Rudy Cutter.

If I gave you the chance right now, would you put a bullet in the head of the person who cut your sister’s throat?

Eden jumped. Her arm swung down; the knife hurtled toward his chest. He rolled away from the blade, but as he did, he fired twice more at point-blank range at the body cascading toward him.

One shot passed through her neck. The other shot drilled into her forehead.

She was dead as she hit the ground.