The Voice Inside (Frost Easton Book 2)

by Brian Freeman

  “That’s a sweet thing to say. You’re sweet.” Her tongue licked the wet rim of her martini glass, and she took a swallow of her drink, which was pink with a layer of white foam.

  “Do you come to this place a lot?” he asked.

  “First time.”

  “Me, too. What brings you here, Magnolia?”

  “I never leave my apartment. I work all the time, and I’m sick of it. Tonight, I promised myself I would go out and have fun.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I code. I’m a programmer.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. You know, so my fingers are really, really nimble.”

  Magnolia blinked seductively, but she had some trouble focusing. He suspected the bartender had concocted strong drinks for her. Her big eyes were blue, and she wore matching eyeshadow that was a little too dark and applied a little too thickly. In the scarlet glow of the bar, she was pretty, but her lips kept squeezing into an embarrassed smile. She tossed her long hair nervously out of her face.

  “So whatcha eating, Rudy?”

  He had two pieces of sushi left. “A volcano roll. Want some?”

  “Okay.”

  He picked up a piece of sushi, dipped it into a bowl of soy sauce mixed with wasabi, and slid it into her open mouth. She smiled and chewed at the same time in a failed attempt at sexiness. When she swallowed, he leaned over with his napkin and wiped away a little drop of soy sauce that had dribbled from her lip.

  “Mmm. Spicy.”

  “Do you like it?” he asked.

  “Sure. Spicy is good.”

  He smiled and watched her stare intently at him as she drained the last of her martini. Her eyes squinted, as if she’d begun to realize he looked like someone she’d seen before. This was the delicate moment, wondering whether she would put two and two together. The face on the news. The face in the bar, hiding behind sunglasses. Sometimes people could recognize a photograph come to life, and sometimes they couldn’t.

  She didn’t make the connection.

  “I hear you have tickets to Japandroids at the Fillmore,” Magnolia said.

  “I do.”

  “I love them.”

  “Well, maybe you’d like to go to the concert with me.”

  “Well, maybe I would.” She squirmed on the chair; she wasn’t good at this. “You got dumped, huh? That’s what the bartender said.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Getting dumped sucks. I got dumped last month.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. I didn’t really like him. Screw both of them, right? We don’t need them.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “Do you smoke?” Magnolia asked.

  “No.”

  “Good. I don’t like smokers. They stink. Smoking will kill you, you know.”

  “I’ve heard that,” Rudy said.

  “When’s the concert?”

  “Pretty soon.”

  “Guess we should go,” she said.

  “I guess.”

  He climbed off the bar stool, and he held out an elbow for her. She giggled, stumbled a bit as she disentangled herself from the chair, and held on tightly as he pointed her toward the stairs. She had trouble climbing back to the street, and she grabbed the railing in a death grip for support. Outside, it was a little wet, and he took the fedora he was wearing and dropped it on her head.

  She grabbed the brim with both hands and smoothed it. She tilted the hat far forward on her face. “Cool. Bet I look cool with this.”

  “You do.” Rudy patted the pockets of his jacket. “Hey, I forgot something at the bar. Wait right here, okay? I won’t be thirty seconds.”

  Magnolia put her head back against the glass door, which had a greenish glow from the lights on the stairs. She closed her eyes, and she shivered. “Hurry back.”

  Rudy steadied her shoulders to make sure she didn’t fall, and then he jogged back down the steps into the bar. He waved over the bartender, who approached him with a grin on his delicate lips.

  “How’d I do?” the man asked. “She what you were looking for? I made sure those martinis packed a punch.”

  “Perfect.” Rudy slid another fifty-dollar bill from his jacket, and then he took out a notepad and wrote a phone number on a piece of paper. He handed both of them across the bar. “Do me a favor, okay? Call this number. Tell the woman who answers that Rudy says hi.”

  “Sure thing. Is she your ex-girlfriend? You want to rub it in her face?”

  “That’s exactly right,” Rudy said. “And be sure to tell her that I’m leaving with a pretty girl.”

  22

  Frost’s old neighborhood hadn’t changed.

  He parked at the southern end of Forty-Fifth Avenue, where the side-by-side houses looked like rows of multicolored Legos. He was a block from the zoo and two blocks from the ocean. Memories chased him in the darkness as he got out of the Suburban. Most of the memories were about him and Katie, stalking this area like pirates when they were children.

  Frost made the mistake of walking up the stairs to his old house. Force of habit. His parents had sold the family house a year earlier, when they moved to Tucson, but their long-time neighbors, the Holtzmans, were still here. The Easton and Holtzman houses had shared a wall for decades. One was brown stucco; one was aquamarine stucco. Both showed their age.

  He corrected himself and knocked on the Holtzman door, and his mother, Janice, answered. She smiled at him, but most of her smiles had a sad quality in recent years.

  “It’s good to see you, Frost,” she murmured. “It’s been way too long.”

  Parents had a way of channeling guilt into the most innocent of greetings. He knew he hadn’t been down to visit them in Arizona, and he vowed inwardly to schedule a trip soon.

  His mother was almost as tall as he was. She had a soft beauty in her face, and her mannerisms were slow and precise. She never hurried. Her brown hair took a lot of work to keep perfect. She wore a blouse and skirt, not expensive, but carefully selected. She had a quietness about her that she’d passed on to her middle child. They were both the introverts of the family.

  Janice looked over his shoulder, as if, one of these times, he would bring a girlfriend with him, instead of arriving alone. She gave a tiny sigh of disappointment.

  “How are you?” Frost asked.

  It wasn’t a throw-away question. There were no simple questions between him and his mother. They’d struggled for years about Frost’s choices in life. She’d wanted him to be a lawyer, not a cop. She’d wanted him to be married by now, not single. When it came to her own life, however, she didn’t usually share her feelings.

  “This situation is challenging,” Janice acknowledged in her understated way. “That’s why the support group decided to get together again.”

  “Sorry.”

  “We don’t blame you for what’s happened, Frost. Duane said you were worried about that. Don’t be. Whatever you did, I’m sure you felt you had no choice.”

  “Many of the families don’t see it that way,” Frost said.

  “Well, they’ll get over it. We’ll talk to them. I hope you’ll join us this weekend.”

  He hesitated, thinking about the support group. The gathering of families in one place was potentially a valuable source of information to help him identify the missing link among Cutter’s victims. On the other hand, he was the last person they would want in the room, asking personal questions. He also had no interest in sharing his own grief with people he didn’t know.

  “It would mean a lot to us, Frost,” his mother added pointedly when he didn’t reply. “I’d like you to be there.”

  Zing. She was like a mafia don, making an offer he couldn’t refuse. He wanted to say no, but instead he said, “I’ll try to make it.”

  Janice led them into the living room, where the Holtzmans sat with his father. The house and its dark furniture hadn’t changed since Frost was a boy, and seemingly, neither had the Holtzmans. They always looke
d and acted the same. They’d never had children, and their mission in life was to be parents to the rest of the world. They were good at it. Mr. Holtzman—Frost could never call them by their first names, even now—jumped to his feet to get him a beer. Mrs. Holtzman said she had some things to do upstairs, which was a discreet way to give the Easton family time to reconnect.

  His father, Ned, got to his feet and wrapped Frost in a bear hug. He was warm where Janice was cool. His parents were the textbook case of opposites attracting each other.

  “Frost, we have missed you so much!” Ned told him.

  “You too, Dad.”

  “How’s Shack? Did you bring him along? I love that cat!”

  “Sorry, no. He was sleeping in my laundry basket and looking pretty pleased with himself. I didn’t want to disturb him.”

  “Well, I want to see him before we go home,” his father said.

  “Ned, it’s just a cat,” his mother said wearily from across the room.

  “Ignore her,” Ned said, winking.

  Mr. Holtzman arrived with two Torpedo ales for Frost and Ned—like father, like son—but then he headed upstairs to be with his wife and left the three of them alone.

  As usual, his mother didn’t know what to say, and his father didn’t know when to stop. Janice hid her pain; Ned used light conversation to pretend his pain wasn’t there. Emotionally, Frost was more like his mother, but over the years, he’d always been closer to his father, even if it was only to talk about history and sports. They also shared a love of San Francisco. Ned had been a convention planner at the Moscone Center for most of his career, and even in retirement, he talked up the city as if he’d never left it behind. If it had been up to Ned, they’d still be living in the house next door, but Janice couldn’t stay there with Katie’s ghost in all the rooms.

  His father was like a shorter, squatter version of Frost. In his late sixties, he kept a bushy head of brown-and-gray hair and a trimmed beard, and he had the same laser-like blue eyes he’d given to his children.

  “How about that Duane, huh?” Ned asked, swigging his beer. “Have you met Tabby? Isn’t she great?”

  “She is,” Frost agreed.

  “I love her. We both do. Cute, smart, way too classy for that boy.”

  “I thought the same thing,” Frost said, smiling.

  “As soon as we met her, we thought she’d be perfect for Duane,” his father went on. “Janice was on top of that fix-up from minute one. Every time we saw her, she’d be pushing her to call Duane.”

  “Because she’s a chef,” his mother pointed out from across the room. There was an apology in her tone, as if she had to explain why they’d chosen to fix up Duane and not Frost.

  “I get it,” Frost said.

  “Of course, it took them forever,” Ned said. “And we all know Duane’s reputation for going from girl to girl. Your mother told him right from the get-go that he was not going to see Tabby unless he was looking for something more. I guess he was finally ready.”

  “I hope that’s true,” Frost said.

  He waited for his mother to grill him about his own relationship status, but her silence was eloquent. She didn’t need to say a word to make him realize that he’d disappointed her again.

  His father, on the other hand, had never met a pause he didn’t need to fill, and he recognized some of the tension between Frost and his mother. “I want to stretch my legs,” Ned said. “I’m all cramped up after the flight. Frost, how about taking a walk around the old neighborhood with me? That okay?”

  Frost glanced at his mother. He sensed an ulterior motive. “Sure, Dad.”

  “Great.”

  His father grabbed a jacket as they left the house, and he zipped it up as they made their way to the sidewalk. The evening didn’t feel cold to Frost, but Arizona life had already thinned Ned’s blood. His father walked fast on his short legs, but Frost’s long strides kept pace with him. He noticed his father eyeing their old home in the glow of a streetlight.

  “Do you miss it?” Frost asked.

  “Every damn day,” Ned said. “I miss the house, the city, you and your brother. But it is what it is. Janice likes Tucson. She says she’s free there.”

  “How are you two doing?”

  “Better. I won’t say perfect, but better.”

  When his parents had taken the first steps toward reconciling after their split, Janice had made it clear that she needed a fresh start somewhere else if they were going to put their relationship back together. That meant leaving San Francisco. So Ned retired. They sold the house and moved.

  “You could come back more often,” Frost pointed out. “Even if Mom doesn’t want to. You could stay with me and Shack. There’s a ton of room in the house.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Ned said, but Frost knew it was never going to happen. His parents always let him down easy about things they didn’t want to do, by telling him they’d keep it in mind. Or they’d run it by the committee. Or they’d put it on the to-do list. Those were the places that ideas went to die.

  “Where’s the family gathering this weekend?” Frost asked.

  “Natasha Lubin’s parents are hosting it at their house. They have a place near Stern Grove. I know it would mean a lot to your mother if you could join us at this one, Frost.”

  “So she said.”

  “Look, you know Duane. He never has time. Tabby can’t get out of her shift at the restaurant. So we’ll be on our own, and that’s not good for Janice. This will be a big gathering. A lot of family members from out of town are coming in.”

  “I already told her I’ll be there if I can.”

  “Good. I appreciate it.”

  They kept walking at the same fast pace, and they reached the end of the avenue at the gates of the zoo. The street was quiet. Down the block to their right, invisible in the darkness, was the Pacific, but he could taste it in the strong wind. Mist was in the breeze, too, dampening their faces. His father sucked in a chestful of air, as if he needed to fill himself up with the city again. Ned looked at home here.

  “I remember when you and Katie sneaked into the zoo at night that time,” his father reminded him. “You were what? Eleven years old? I still don’t know how you guys got the ladder down here from the garage. Then security caught you, and the cops called us. Jeez, the two of you could be trouble.”

  “The scary thing is, it was Katie’s idea,” Frost said. “And she was only seven.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me in the least. Nothing ever fazed that girl. She could talk to a stranger for two minutes and know their whole life history.”

  “Yes, she could.”

  His father jammed his hands in his pants pockets. The ocean breeze rustled his hair, and his face was full of shadows. “Hey, listen, Frost, I want to talk to you about something. That’s why I suggested we take a walk. I didn’t want your mother to hear this. She’s got enough on her mind right now without me adding anything more.”

  “What’s up?” Frost asked.

  “It’s about Katie. I don’t know if it’s important or not, but with everything happening—”

  “Tell me,” Frost said.

  “Okay. Look, you remember, three days after we found her—after you found her—it was our anniversary.”

  “I remember.”

  “You know me. Gift giving has never been my thing. And your mother is not exactly the easiest person to shop for. So the week before, I asked Katie for help. I gave her a hundred bucks and told her to find something nice. Naturally, she picked the perfect thing, like always. A beautiful Tibetan Buddha water fountain. It was delivered on our anniversary. At any other time, Janice would have loved it, but of course, getting it then, she went to pieces. So I put the fountain in a box, stored it in the garage, and we never looked at it again.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following you, Dad,” Frost said. “What is this about?”

  “Well, the thing is, the box went to Arizona with us. We didn’t really take the
time to downsize. Janice wanted to get out of the city as fast as we could. It wasn’t until earlier this year that I started going through a lot of the boxes that were still sitting in storage that we didn’t have room for and had never bothered to unpack. And I found the box with the fountain in it.”

  Ned slid an envelope out of the inner pocket of his jacket.

  “The receipt from the store was inside with the fountain. I had never even opened it. See, I had given Katie the money a week earlier, so I assumed she’d bought the fountain the next day. She was always efficient. But for some reason, she must have waited, because when I looked at the receipt, I realized that she’d gone to the shop to get the fountain on the day she died.”

  His father extended the envelope to him, and Frost took it. He opened the flap and slid out what was inside, and he used the glow of his phone to light it up. It was a handwritten packing slip describing the Tibetan fountain, and stapled to it was a cash register receipt. He read through the details and saw not just the date printed on the receipt, but the time.

  March 10. 7:57 p.m.

  “Dad, do you realize when she stopped at this store?” Frost asked. “This was after Todd Clary placed his order. She must have stopped there while she was making her last delivery.”

  “Yeah, that’s what it looked like to me, too.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

  “Cutter was in prison. I didn’t think it mattered anymore.”

  Frost looked at the receipt again. This time, he noticed the name and address of the Tibetan gift shop where Katie had stopped, and he saw the next piece of the puzzle taking shape in his mind. It was a puzzle piece that didn’t fit.

  “Do you know this shop?” he asked his father. “Do you know where it is?”

  “I know it’s on Haight.”

  “Yes, but the shop is four blocks east of the restaurant where Katie worked. It’s practically as far as Herb’s gallery.”

  “So what?”

  Ned was directionally challenged. Frost got his own sense of direction, which had saved him time after time during his taxi-driving days, from his mother.

  “To get to Todd Clary’s place near USF, Katie should have gone west from the restaurant,” Frost told him. “By stopping at the gift shop, she was headed in the opposite direction of where she needed to deliver the pizza. That doesn’t make any sense. Where the hell was she going?”