The Voice Inside (Frost Easton Book 2)

by Brian Freeman

  He left the alley and headed for Mission Street, where the postcard on his door had led him. In his dark imagination, he knew what he expected to find at the address that had been scrawled under his name. Another body. An eighth victim. And yet he knew that was impossible. The killings were over. Rudy Cutter was in San Quentin, and he was never getting out.

  Power wires for the MUNI bus line made a web over his head. There were plenty of places to hide in the nighttime shadows of Mission Street. Frost wondered if his overnight intruder had come here, expecting him to follow, and was spying on his progress. He checked doorways as he hurried down the street and kept an eye on the homeless men, asleep under ratty blankets. The handful of cars parked at the meters looked empty. The building windows around him were dark. He didn’t feel watched, but that didn’t mean someone wasn’t following him.

  The address from the postcard was three blocks down. It wasn’t what he expected.

  He found a one-story building that looked as if it belonged in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The front wall was covered in swirls of psychedelic paint, dominated by two huge, staring blue eyes above the door. The chambered glass-block windows didn’t allow him to look inside. A sign over the painted eyes advertised palm readings, incense, herbal medicines, and erotic gifts.

  The neon sign above the windows glowed with the word open. Frost knew there was no way this store would be open in the middle of the night. Someone was waiting for him.

  He pushed open the black front door, went inside, and closed it behind him. Dozens of flickering candles lit the dim interior. The shop smelled of vanilla. An odd assortment of merchandise shelves filled nearly every square foot, forcing him to squeeze past ceramic Buddhas, strings of lights shaped like red peppers, Mardi Gras plastic beads, origami-style paper fans, and lifelike mannequins dressed in peekaboo lingerie. He saw a narrow desk for the cash register, and behind it, a tiger-striped curtain led to a back room.

  Frost called out, “Hello?”

  He waited. No one answered.

  He tried again, louder. “Hello? Is anyone here?”

  Finally, the curtain swished, but he didn’t see anyone walk into the shop. Then a voice at the level of his knees surprised him. “You must be the cop.”

  Frost looked down. A little man stood beside the register desk, barely four feet tall and at least seventy years old. He was completely bald, with a head as brown as saddle leather and gray muttonchops worthy of a nineteenth-century politician. He wore a royal-blue silk kimono, embroidered with a gold dragon, and red slippers with a beaded floral design.

  This was San Francisco. Absolutely nothing surprised Frost anymore.

  “He said you’d come,” the man announced. He ducked behind the desk and scrambled onto a high stool and leaned forward with his elbows on the top of the cash register. They were eye to eye now.

  “Who said that?” Frost asked.

  “The guy who paid me two hundred dollars to open up tonight.”

  “And who are you?” Frost asked.

  “My name’s Copernicus,” the man replied.

  “Like the astronomer?”

  “I am the astronomer. That was me in a past life.” As Frost’s lips bent into a smile, the man added, “I realize there are plenty of nonbelievers.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Frost replied. “Who were you after Copernicus? Shakespeare?”

  “Actually, I was a Chinese concubine in the city of Dadu during the Ming dynasty.”

  “No kidding? You’d think the whole earth-revolves-around-the-sun thing would have gotten you a better gig the next time around.”

  “Don’t mock what you don’t understand,” the man said.

  “Fair enough. You’re Copernicus. So who paid you two hundred dollars to be open in the middle of the night?”

  “I didn’t ask his name,” Copernicus replied. “He paid cash. That was good enough for me.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Tall. And yes, don’t joke, I know everyone is tall to me. He wore a Giants cap and big sunglasses, so I didn’t see much of his face. He wore a bulky coat. I don’t know if he was heavy or skinny or what.”

  “And what exactly did he want you to do?” Frost asked.

  “He said I should open up the store at four in the morning and wait for a detective who looked like Justin Timberlake to show up,” Copernicus said.

  “Funny.”

  “Honestly, I don’t know who the hell that is, but I assume he meant you.”

  “Well, I’m here,” Frost said. “Now what?”

  “Now I’m supposed to give you this.”

  Copernicus opened a cherrywood music box on the desk, which started playing a plink-plink version of the waltz from Carousel. Hidden inside was a woman’s watch, which the man grabbed and dangled by its clasp from his tiny hand. He held it out to Frost at the end of his arm. Before taking it, Frost slid on a pair of gloves, and then he pinched the edge of the band and examined it.

  The watch was expensive and very distinctive. The face was teardrop shaped, surrounded by diamonds, and the silver band was encrusted with ruby and topaz stones. Frost recognized the design. Like everything else about this night, it was meant to evoke a memory of events that had happened five years earlier.

  This was an exact replica of the watch owned by Melanie Valou. She’d been wearing it on the day she disappeared; it had been visible on her wrist, shiny and dazzling, on the ATM camera from Market and Van Ness. But the watch hadn’t been on her wrist when Melanie’s body was found. Instead, everyone knew that the watch would eventually be found on the wrist of the next victim. Just like all the others.

  His lieutenant, Jess Salceda, had made it her mission in life to find where Rudy Cutter had hidden Melanie’s watch. After several searches of Cutter’s home that turned up nothing, she’d finally outsmarted him. His hiding place was ingenious, just a utility hole in the ceiling above a hardwired smoke detector, but Jess had spotted a small flake of plaster dust in the carpet that roused her suspicions. When she’d rooted about inside the hole with her finger, she’d discovered Melanie’s watch.

  Finding it was the break that had finally put Rudy Cutter in jail for life. It was the break that had brought the murder spree to an end.

  “Am I supposed to be impressed?” Frost asked. “I get it. This is a copy of Melanie Valou’s watch. Why should I care?”

  Copernicus laughed. His muttonchops danced, and his teeth were tea stained.

  “This isn’t funny,” Frost told him.

  “No, it’s not that. Look, I don’t know whose watch this is or what the hell it means. The guy said give it to you, so I gave it to you. But he told me what you’d say, and he was right. That’s why I’m laughing. He said you’d call it a copy of this girl’s watch.”

  “So what?” Frost asked.

  “So he said I should tell you it’s not a copy. He says the other watch—the one you guys found—was the fake. The cops planted it.”

  2

  Frost didn’t go home.

  He drove through mostly quiet streets to the far corner of the city. Dawn was still a long, dark hour away. He parked his police Suburban in the empty lot where buses normally unloaded tourists to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. Ocean gusts buffeted the vehicle. Above the waters of the bay, gauzy lights outlined the bridge deck, and fog shrouded the tops of the red towers. He watched the headlights of crazy-early commuters head south toward the city.

  For tourists, this was the symbol of San Francisco. For the locals, it was just a bridge. It meant tolls and traffic jams. Frost had lived here his whole life, and he knew it was easy to become jaded about the beauty of this place. Sometimes, he forced himself to stop and stare and see his home through the eyes of strangers. He had to remind himself that he was lucky to be here, because there were days when he couldn’t see past the darkness of being a cop. Today was one of those days.

  Melanie’s watch was in his gloved hand.

  It had the heaviness of r
eal silver and the shine of real jewels. It felt authentic, exactly the kind of watch that a rich woman like Camille Valou would have bought for her daughter in a boutique jewelry shop in Switzerland. But even if it was real, even if it was an exact match for the watch Melanie had worn, it had to be a replica. Jess Salceda had found Melanie’s watch in Rudy Cutter’s ceiling. Melanie’s mother, Camille, had identified it in court. There was no mistake.

  He turned the watch over in his hand. Squinting, he made out a tiny inscription in French etched into the metal. La rêveuse.

  The dreamer.

  The original watch, which Jess had discovered, had no such inscription on the back. That was something Camille would certainly have noticed when Jess showed it to her. And yet the coincidence of an inscription in French—Camille had been born in Lyon—bothered Frost.

  The watch was stopped. The mechanism had wound down, and the time was frozen in place.

  3:42 a.m.

  He told himself that someone was manipulating him. Playing with his head. He knew who it was. From inside the walls of San Quentin, Rudy Cutter had found a way to make all of this happen. Cutter was a smart, methodical man, who’d patiently stalked and killed seven women, who’d outsmarted Jess and the rest of the San Francisco Police for years. This mystery had his fingerprints all over it.

  Rudy Cutter.

  Jess and Cutter had played a game of cat and mouse before Melanie’s death. He was her prime suspect in what the press had dubbed the Golden Gate Murders. They’d called it that because the first victim, Nina Flores, had been found right here where Frost was parked, in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  The clue that had helped Jess pinpoint Cutter came from a combination of luck and shoe leather. After one of the victims had been found in a hotel parking lot near the Cannery, a tourist had sent the police a series of videos taken in that area during her weekend vacation, which overlapped with the victim’s disappearance. Jess studied the videos and ran the license plates of every vehicle she saw parked near the Cannery. One car, one name, raised a red flag with her. The owner of the car—a forty-eight-year-old data entry clerk named Rudy Cutter—had come up in her investigation before. He’d used a credit card at the coffee shop where Nina Flores had worked. Jess had talked to him three years earlier, but back then, she’d had no reason to consider Cutter a suspect. He was just one of dozens of coffee shop customers she’d interviewed after Nina’s murder.

  But the same man parking his car near the site where another victim had been abducted and killed? Jess didn’t believe in coincidences.

  For a year, she’d hunted for evidence tying Cutter to the murders. For a year, she’d followed him, hoping to catch him stalking his next victim. And still Melanie Valou died. Even with the police breathing down his neck, Cutter had managed to kill again and leave no physical evidence behind to connect him to the crime.

  Not until Jess found Melanie’s watch hidden in Cutter’s ceiling.

  Frost dangled the watch in front of his eyes the way a hypnotist would. He thought about the message Copernicus had given him.

  This is Melanie Valou’s watch.

  Frost didn’t want to believe it. He didn’t want to think about what it would mean if that was true. This was only a ruse. A game. The Golden Gate Murders had been put to bed four years earlier with Cutter’s conviction. The victims and their families had justice. Katie had justice. No one would thank him for raising questions now. All he would do was bring back the pain for everyone.

  And yet.

  It was the watch that had put Cutter behind bars. Without Jess finding the watch, Cutter would never have been arrested, never been found guilty.

  The other watch—the one you guys found—was the fake.

  The cops planted it.

  If that was true, then Jess was the one who had planted it.

  Frost climbed out of the Suburban and slipped the watch inside his pocket. He felt mist on his face. His black jacket offered little protection against the roaring wind. He crossed an empty plaza past the welcome center and followed a ramp that led him toward the bridge deck. He walked quickly, with long strides. Traffic streamed from the Marin Headlands, emerging like ghosts out of the fog. As he reached the bridge itself, the bay water opened into a dark expanse two hundred feet below him. The gusts intensified, blown through the narrow passage from the Pacific. Pinpoint lights swept the city skyline and the East Bay, and the brighter lights over the railings threw his shadow at his feet.

  He was alone on the crossing. He wondered if the drivers who spotted him thought, Jumper. Dozens of unhappy souls went over the edge to their deaths every year. The bridge was a magnet for the lonely and the desperate.

  Beside him, the mammoth main suspender cable rose toward the first tower. He continued until he was over deep water and stopped midway between the lights, where he was mostly invisible. He leaned on the railing and looked down. His brown hair, which was normally slicked back over his head, blew into his face. His skin felt raw.

  He dug inside his pocket and cupped the watch in the palm of his hand.

  All he had to do was let the watch slide down between his open fingers. No one would see. No one would know. Seconds later, the watch would strike the bay. It would sink slowly, like a dead leaf in the wind, settling toward the bottom. The deepest area of the bay was here, more than three hundred feet from surface to sand. The watch would never be found, never raise ugly doubts about the evidence in Rudy Cutter’s trial. The mystery would drown with it.

  Frost wasn’t the only one who knew about the duplicate watch. Obviously, someone else had already found it and led him to it. Whoever that was might raise questions about how the second watch had gone missing, and he’d have to offer excuses. He’d lost it. It was stolen. Someone might suspect there was more to the story, but without the watch itself, no one would ever be able to prove that the watch Jess had found in Cutter’s house was a fake. The story of the Golden Gate Murders would end here, atop the Golden Gate Bridge. There was a satisfying irony in that.

  He felt the watch in his hand. In the darkness, he could barely see it. It was featherlight, weighing almost nothing. Let it go. Let it fall. One meaningless speck in the sea. A minute passed, and he still held it, his hand outstretched, nothing but water below him. Then two minutes. Then ten. Over the eastern hills, the sky flushed as dawn inched closer. He was running out of time.

  Frost shook his head. Jess had always called him a Boy Scout. The cop who played by the rules. It wasn’t a compliment. On his first day, she’d told him about “the line.” The line between going by the book and taking shortcuts. It was a line that every cop faced sooner or later, when he had to decide if the end justified the means. Sometimes doing the right thing meant a criminal going free. Sometimes doing the wrong thing saved lives.

  He remembered how Jess had described it to him: The line’s not one color, not easy to see, no way to know which side of it you’re on. If a lawyer or politician thinks you’re wrong, you might end up out of a job, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t cross it when you have to. If all you want is your fricking pension, go be a bus driver or something.

  For Frost, this was the line.

  The easy thing, the smart thing, was to drop Melanie Valou’s watch into the deep water. Standing there, numb with cold, hearing Jess’s voice in his memory, he realized that he couldn’t do it.

  Can you live with a lie?

  That was the question, and the answer was no.

  He closed his fingers around the watch and returned it to his pocket. Like a jumper who’d thought better of it, he walked back off the bridge.

  3

  “Ms. Valou?” Frost asked.

  The raven-haired woman at the restaurant Zazie looked up from her organic granola and her copy of the New York Times. The morning was cold enough to see your breath, but she sat outside with only a lightweight jacket and an espresso to warm her. Her legs were bare below her knee-length skir
t.

  “Yes?” she replied, her accent thick and French. “May I help you?”

  “My name is Frost Easton. I’m a homicide inspector with the San Francisco Police. The doorman at your building said I could probably find you here. I was hoping we could talk for a couple minutes. It’s about Melanie.”

  Camille Valou’s face showed a hint of anxiety. Five years had passed since her daughter’s murder, but five years was nothing. Her dark eyes had a permanent sadness. Her pale-pink lips made a thin, emotionless line. “Sit,” she told him.

  Frost took a chair opposite her as Camille neatly folded her newspaper. She nodded at a waitress through the window, who appeared in a flash to take Frost’s order. He shook his head, but Camille was having none of that.

  “You must have something,” she said. “Please, it’s my treat.”

  “Coffee,” Frost said.

  “Oh, that is not breakfast. You’re a busy, important man. You need to eat. Bring him the Avignon scrambled eggs, Suzy.”

  “That’s really not necessary,” Frost said.

  Camille shrugged. “Life is about more than what’s necessary. And more espresso for me, Suzy, please.”

  The waitress smiled and disappeared.

  Camille still had espresso left in her cup, and she took the last sip and dabbed at her mouth with a napkin. She was intelligent. He could see it in her stare as she watched him, making calculations about his intentions. He’d seen many photographs of Melanie Valou, and he could see the resemblance between mother and daughter. Camille was in her midfifties, matchstick thin, with sharp, bony lines outlining her white face. She was pretty and elegant. Well dressed. Manicured nails. Her black hair, a little too black for her age, was cut short in a deliberately messy style. Her appearance didn’t scream of money, but people with money didn’t need to advertise it.

  “So,” she said. “You look familiar to me, Inspector. Do we know each other? Did you work on Melanie’s case?”

  “I did, but that’s not where we met,” Frost replied. “Some of the families of the victims got together a few years ago. It was sort of a support group to help each other. I went with my parents. We met there.”