The Voice Inside (Frost Easton Book 2)

by Brian Freeman

“By the way, Eden knows we slept together.”

  Jess didn’t look surprised. “I don’t care if people know. Do you?”

  “No. Not anymore.”

  She dug in the pocket of her jeans and extracted a pack of cigarettes. She lit one and blew smoke off the balcony. Then she stared at him from behind her bangs. “Want to do it again?”

  “Me and you? I thought we decided that was a bad idea.”

  “I’m not your boss anymore.”

  His body stirred at memories of the two of them together. With Jess, it was never about making love. It was sex, fast and furious. He could spend an hour in bed with her, and there would be no strings, and they would both be satisfied. He was tempted, but it was still a bad idea.

  She saw the rejection in his face, and she looked away and continued to suck on her cigarette. “Well, I’m having a hell of a month.”

  “Your text said you needed to see me.”

  “Did you hear about the murder on Stockton?” she asked.

  “Old guy in the wheelchair? Yeah. I’ve been seeing reports on it come through all evening.”

  “What are they saying?”

  He hesitated, not sure why she was asking. “There aren’t any leads on the perp so far. The apartment was clean. They found the body because the woman in the apartment next door came home from work and noticed a bullet hole in her wall. She called the cops. Vic’s name is Jimmy Keyes.”

  “He was shot?” Jess asked.

  “No. The gunshot went high. It looks like Keyes fired at somebody and missed. Whoever he was aiming at broke the old man’s neck. The cops found debris from a Taser in the apartment, but no sign of the Taser itself. The gun was missing, too. Why are you asking about this, Jess?”

  “Motive?” she went on, ignoring his question. The habits of being the boss died hard.

  Frost shrugged. “Robbery, probably. Keyes’s wallet was gone.”

  Jess stared at him through a cloud of smoke. “It was Cutter.”

  “What makes you think so? This isn’t Cutter’s MO.”

  “I called a tech buddy of mine,” she told him. “He ran the vic’s address through some of the local sites that weapons traders use. This guy Keyes was trying to unload a Taser.”

  “Okay, so the killer’s probably a buyer who didn’t feel like ponying up cash. That doesn’t make it Cutter.”

  “It’s him,” Jess insisted. “The sixth victim, Shu Chan, was Tasered before he grabbed her. You think that’s a coincidence?”

  Frost exhaled long and slow. He wasn’t sure if it was suspicious enough to call it more than a coincidence. Maybe Jess really believed it, or maybe she was looking for any excuse to be back in the game.

  Then again, he thought, Tick tock.

  “Look, I can call the detectives on the case. They’ll be pulling street cameras from the area around the crime scene. I can make sure they keep an eye out for Cutter.”

  “They won’t get him that way. The guy’s a ghost.”

  “Jess, you know there’s nothing I’d like better than to pin a new murder charge on Cutter—”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. I don’t think we’ll ever prove it was him behind the Keyes murder. He’s too smart. I still think he did it, and that means now he’s walking around out there with a Taser and a handgun. We both know what that means.”

  Frost frowned. “He already has a new target.”

  “Right. I know you’re focused on solving the old murders, but we may not have time. You need to find him, Frost. Fast.”

  3:42 a.m. In or out of prison, it didn’t matter. Rudy was awake.

  He slipped out of bed. His clothes were on the floor, but he didn’t put them on yet. He stared at the brunette whose naked torso extended from the blankets. He didn’t remember her name. Her apartment in the Castro was small. He knew the neighborhood well, which meant he knew the bars you went to when you didn’t want to spend the night alone. After a few drinks together, she’d invited him back to her place. The sex hadn’t been memorable after four years of prison celibacy, but the woman was too drunk to care.

  When he drew a finger down her bare spine, she didn’t stir at his touch. Her eyes were closed, and her breath whistled through her nose. He didn’t expect her to be conscious for hours.

  He was restless, so he did yoga. That was one of the tricks he’d learned to cope with prison time. He could feel his heart rate slow. He could feel his blood pressure go down. He exercised silently for an hour, and it was still dark outside when he finished and got dressed. In the kitchen, he made himself a cup of coffee using the woman’s single-cup machine. While he sipped it, he found her laptop computer and booted it up. He navigated to the cloud website he’d used to store his research materials. No one knew about it; no one had found it. It had been four years since he’d been online, but he’d purchased a long-term plan before he was arrested to make sure his account wasn’t deactivated.

  The documents were all there. The names, the jobs, the home addresses, the phone numbers, the secret photographs, the maps. The information was four years old, and much of it was probably out of date, but it gave him a place to start.

  He studied the names on his list:

  Nina Flores

  Rae Hart

  Natasha Lubin

  Hazel Dixon

  Shu Chan

  Melanie Valou

  And below them was the first name that was not crossed out:

  Maria Lopes

  He’d been part of Maria’s life during the last weeks before he was arrested. He could still picture her face. He knew where she worked, where she lived, where she ate, where she shopped. He’d been targeting her before Jess Salceda got in the way of his plans. Now he had to find her again.

  Rudy typed her name into the Google search engine:

  Maria Lopes San Francisco

  Before he could review the search results, his head snapped up as a Fall Out Boy song played loudly from the bedroom. The woman’s phone was ringing. Rudy slapped the laptop shut. The song was deafening in the silence of the apartment, but when he got up and went to the bedroom doorway, the woman in bed didn’t move. She was still unconscious and showed no sign of waking up. Even so, he didn’t want to take the risk that someone would come over to the apartment when they couldn’t reach her on the phone.

  Rudy decided it was time to go.

  He went to the sink in the woman’s small kitchen. He put a stopper in the drain and filled the basin, and then he found a large container of salt in one of the cabinets and emptied it into the water. Using his fingers, he swirled the water around. He grabbed the laptop and slid the machine into the salty bath. When a few minutes had passed, he retrieved the laptop and carefully dried it with a dish towel, so there was no evidence of tampering. He pushed the “Power” button. Nothing happened. The laptop was dead. He replaced it carefully in the exact place he’d found it, matching the rectangle of dust on the bookshelf.

  Through the apartment window, dawn crept over the city.

  He began quietly opening drawers in the bedroom where the woman slept. He found a pair of mini binoculars that he tucked into his backpack. He checked her closet and found a men’s wool cap, probably left over from a previous one-night stand. He took it. In a zippered compartment in one of the woman’s purses, he found three hundred dollars in cash. He shoved it into his pocket.

  Rudy went into the kitchen. He found the drawer where she kept her cutlery, and he selected one of the steak knives inside, with a serrated blade. She wouldn’t miss it. He held it in his hand, feeling the handle, running a finger along the dull side of the steel. It brought images into his brain. Memories. He thought about what it would feel like again, after so long.

  He wandered back into the bedroom. The woman—What was her name? Wendy?—was still asleep. She was on her side. Long hair spilled over her face. Her neck was exposed, showing off the ridges of her ligaments and the swell of her trachea. Inside, under the skin, arteries pumped blood to her brain
. He stood over her, with the knife in his hand. He lay the flat of the blade against her pretty neck as she slept. One flick of the wrist was all he needed. It was tempting, but he had to be patient. He didn’t have much longer to wait.

  The woman made a noise, almost like a moan in her dreams. He removed the knife from her skin and secured it in his backpack. As he watched, she shifted onto her back, and the sight of her body brought a twinge of arousal. He thought about waking her up and having sex again, but he couldn’t indulge himself. Not now.

  Instead, silently, he let himself out of the apartment and wandered down the steps to the street.

  He counted the hours. Tonight it would begin again.

  19

  When Frost needed to find someone in San Francisco, he turned to an unofficial network of homeless people and street performers known as Street Twitter. The way into the network was through his best friend, Herb, who was clued into everything that was happening in the city.

  Wherever Herb went, he drew a crowd. Typically, Frost found him near one of the city’s sightseeing bus stops, painting three-dimensional sidewalk illusions that had made him a tourist attraction in his own right. At seventy years old, he was Mr. San Francisco. He’d spent his youth in the pot-drenched, pill-popping ’60s, and he’d reinvented himself in every decade since then. He’d been a microbiologist. A four-term city councilman. And now a famous street artist. For the most recent Bay Area Super Bowl at Levi’s Stadium, he’d done a three-dimensional painting of Dwight Clark making “The Catch” in the 1981 NFC Championship Game. Herb had his own gallery on Haight Street and regularly held classes for aspiring artists.

  Today, as usual, a crowd gathered around Herb, but he wasn’t painting. Instead, he sat on a tall chair in the open courtyard of the Palace of the Legion of Honor, posed in front of Rodin’s The Thinker. Like the sculpture, he was hunched in meditation, and like the sculpture, he was naked, except for a discreet loincloth draped between his wiry legs. Gold glitter flocked his skin, and a rainbow of beads adorned his long gray hair. A photographer swarmed around him, taking pictures.

  “Performance art, Herb?” Frost asked, standing below him.

  Without breaking his pose, Herb replied from the chair, “Magazine photo shoot.”

  “Ah.”

  Herb’s eyes flicked to the dark sky and then to the photographer. “Are we about done here, young lady? If it rains, this glitter is going to become paste, and I’ll be scraping it out of some very awkward places. Plus, I need to teach a class at my gallery in about an hour.”

  “Yes, I have what I need,” she replied.

  “Thank heavens. Frost, toss me that robe, okay? These tourists all have cameras, and I really don’t want my bare backside showing up on Snapchat.”

  Frost chuckled and threw a black satin robe to Herb, who carefully slipped it over his tall, scrawny body and climbed down to the glistening marble floor of the courtyard. His friend limped as he stretched the kinks out of his muscles. Herb retrieved a canvas bag and slipped old-fashioned black glasses over his face. The bag also yielded an urn of coffee, and he poured himself a cup.

  “How do I look?” Herb asked.

  “Like a cross between Egyptian pyramid art and Madonna on her last tour.”

  “Exactly what I was going for.”

  As the crowd dispersed, the two of them drifted toward the white columns lining the museum courtyard. They had a bubble of privacy around them, but Frost spoke softly.

  “Rudy Cutter has gone off the radar,” he murmured.

  “So I hear.”

  “It’s urgent that we find him as soon as we can. Jess thinks he’s already targeting a new victim. Can you help?”

  “Of course, I’ll do what I can,” Herb replied. “Actually, I put out an alert to the network yesterday, because I figured you’d be looking for him. However, Cutter seems to be skilled at not being found.”

  “No sightings?”

  “Nothing at all, which is unusual.”

  “Well, if anything comes in, let me know right away.”

  “I will.” Herb added after a pause, “I’m sorry about Jess. What she did was egregious, but I don’t like seeing a smart, tough cop lose her career like this.”

  “I wasn’t crazy about being the one to turn her in.”

  “Of course. Have you talked to her?”

  “Yes, I saw her last night.”

  Herb knew all about his history with Jess. “I know you didn’t come looking for my advice, Frost, but—”

  “Don’t worry, nothing happened between us,” he said, anticipating the question.

  “Good. It’s better that way. To paraphrase what a wise young man said to me once, she’s not your Jane Doe, Frost.”

  Frost rolled his eyes because he was that wise young man, and Herb liked to tease him about it. It made him think of his college days at SF State fifteen years earlier, when he and Herb had met for the first time. Back then, Frost had been a loner trying to figure out the world and not doing a very good job of it. His one point of pride had been getting a degree without any debt, so when he wasn’t in class, he was out on the streets, driving a taxi.

  One September evening, near midnight, he’d received a call for a pickup at city hall. He arrived at the mammoth domed building on Van Ness to find a fifty-something man stretched out on his back on the steps, wearing a ’70s-era powder-blue three-piece suit. When the man staggered into the back seat of the cab, he’d brought an aroma of pot so overwhelming that Frost had been forced to open all the windows. Herb wasn’t his name, but that was the nickname he’d had for most of his life, and it was richly deserved.

  Herb had nowhere to go; he just wanted company. They’d spent the next seven hours, until dawn, driving around the city. Although Frost was a San Francisco native, Herb had given him a tour unlike anything Frost had experienced before. As they left city hall, Herb had told him about seeing Dan White on November 27, 1978, and hearing the shots that had killed Harvey Milk. He took Herb to the Haight and heard stories of flower power and the Summer of Love from someone who’d lived through it. Herb talked about Jonestown. Joe Montana. The 1989 quake. AIDS.

  Somewhere during the night, as the pot wore off, Herb had told him about a woman named Silvia. They’d met in July of 1968 and done what all young people had done that summer. Protested. Gotten high. Had sex. It was an era without promises, but back then, Herb had been convinced that he and Silvia had found something that transcended free love. Then she’d disappeared. He’d awakened alone one morning in August and never saw her or heard from her again. Since then, he told Frost, he’d never loved anyone else the same way.

  That was when Frost had offered Herb his philosophy of love, which could only come from a twenty-year-old college kid who’d never had a serious relationship in his life. Which was still true today.

  Sounds like she was your Jane Doe, Herb. You know, we all have one Jane Doe out there. That one girl who will change our lives. Some people die not knowing who she is. At least you found yours.

  Herb, in his powder-blue suit, had taken in that dubious pearl of wisdom and roared with laughter. Eventually, so did Frost. By the next morning, when he dropped Herb back at city hall, they’d become close friends, and they’d been friends ever since.

  “Mock me if you will,” Frost told him, “but Duane claims to have found his Jane Doe.”

  “Duane? Pigs must be sprouting wings.”

  “It’s true. They’ve been dating for six months. He only just told me about her. Her name’s Tabby Blaine. Redhead, pretty, thirty years old.”

  “So about ten years older than Duane’s usual girlfriends?” Herb asked with a grin.

  “Exactly.”

  “Your mother must be thrilled.”

  “No doubt. She and my dad are flying in from Arizona tonight, so I’m stopping over to see them this evening. I’m sure I’ll hear all about it.”

  “Have you met this girl Tabby?”

  Frost hesitated, which didn’t escap
e Herb’s eagle eye. “I have.”

  “And do you like her?”

  “I do. A lot.”

  Herb tried to decipher the expression on Frost’s face, as if he’d already guessed that Frost was hiding something. The old man sometimes seemed to know Frost better than he knew himself. Herb’s next question was pointed.

  “What about you? Any unidentified Jane Does dropping into your life lately?”

  “Sorry. Shack and I are confirmed bachelors.”

  “No one at all?” Herb challenged him, with the impish smile of someone who had inside information.

  “Did you have someone in mind?”

  “Oh, I hear that you’ve made the acquaintance of an attractive journalist. Eden Shay.”

  “How do you know about her, you old fox?”

  “She came to interview me yesterday,” Herb told him.

  “About the murders?”

  “No, about you. She knew we were friends.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Nothing. I simply confirmed what she already knew—that you were handsome, unattached, and a notable philosopher on love and romance.”

  “Ha.”

  “She seemed interested in you, Frost, and in more than a professional way.”

  “Don’t get carried away. What Eden wants is a good story, and she’ll do whatever it takes to be in the middle of it. That’s her thing, you know. She likes to get close to the people she’s writing about.”

  “She called you the hero of her new book,” Herb said.

  “I’m not. Just a guest star at the end.”

  Herb clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t be so sure. You’ve been a part of this particular book for some time.”

  “Longer than I want.”

  “Well, remember what they say,” Herb told him slyly. “Sooner or later, all writers fall in love with their heroes.”

  Frost grinned. “Yeah, or they get them killed.”

  20

  “I’m glad you called me,” Eden said.

  She sat in the passenger seat of Frost’s Suburban. They were parked on Silver Avenue across from the home of Gilda and Anthony Flores. Nina’s parents.