The Voice Inside (Frost Easton Book 2)

by Brian Freeman

  Tabby slid away from him in embarrassment. “Sorry.”

  He said nothing.

  “You know, about Jess,” she added.

  “Right.”

  She hugged herself tightly, as if the air had grown cold. She stared out at the water. She bit her lower lip and looked upset with herself. “I still miss Nina.”

  “I know. I still miss Katie, too.”

  “Sometimes I need a girlfriend to talk to about things.”

  “Sure.”

  Tabby shivered. “Cutter’s out there looking for someone new, isn’t he?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “It’s some girl just like Nina,” she went on. “She has no idea. I hate that.”

  “Me, too.”

  She shook her head. “I guess you’re right, it’s better not to know the future. Not if you can’t change it. I mean, what if it were me this time instead of some stranger?”

  “It’s not,” Frost said.

  Tabby stood up again, and he noticed that she wouldn’t look him in the eyes. “Are you sure? If I spun the wheel right now, how many days would I have left?”

  Rudy climbed down from the top deck of the tour bus at the vista point on the Sausalito side of the Golden Gate Bridge. His cheeks were windburned from the cold. He had his jacket zipped up. He wore sunglasses and a Chicago Cubs baseball cap that he’d picked up on the Wharf.

  Outside the bus, white morning fog poured down from the bridge toward the water like overflowing cotton candy. The city on the other side of the bay looked as if it were floating on top of a cloud. Behind him, the green hills were bathed in sunshine. He was part of a crowd of tourists, all of them with phones and cameras snapping pictures of the view.

  Rudy made sure he was out of the camera angles. He didn’t want any record that he’d been here.

  The tour guide, who narrated the city’s history as the bus went to each hop-on, hop-off stop, texted on his phone with his thumbs. He was on a break, waiting for the bus to continue its route. The man was in his thirties, with gold studs in both nostrils and a beret over his rainbow-colored hair. He wore a leather jacket decorated with chains.

  “What a view,” Rudy said.

  “To a kill,” the guide replied without looking up from his phone.

  Rudy recoiled. It took him a moment to realize the guide was simply echoing a James Bond movie, and then he laughed. He stayed in profile, so the guide didn’t have a chance to see his face straight on. “I just wanted to tell you that you do a great job with the narration.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I take these bus tours in all the cities I visit,” Rudy said, “but some of the guides aren’t great at telling stories. It’s more like, here’s this building, here’s that building. Here in Frisco, you guys always make the place come to life.”

  He watched the guide wince at the term Frisco, but the man made no effort to correct him. Instead, the man pointed at Rudy’s blue hat. “So you’re from Chicago?”

  “Yeah. Out in the suburbs.”

  “What do you do?”

  Rudy was prepared with a lie. “I sell wholesale furnace replacement parts. Not too exciting.”

  The guide shrugged. “Hey, we all have to do something.”

  “Yeah. Have you been giving these tours for a while?”

  “Three years,” the man said. “It brings in some extra bucks.”

  “Well, like I say, you guys are all really good. Last time I was out here, we had an amazing tour guide on the bus. This woman was like an actress, acting out stories at all the stops, singing, telling jokes. She was great. Do you know her?”

  “Long dark hair?” the guide asked.

  “I think so.”

  “That would be Maria. Maria Lopes. You’re right, she really got into it. Got terrific tips. We were all jealous.”

  “Is Maria still with the bus company? I’d love to take one of her tours again.”

  “No, she left a couple years ago.”

  “Oh, too bad,” Rudy said. He waited a beat and made sure his voice was casual. “What’s she doing now?”

  The guide shook his head. “I don’t know. Some office job near the Civic Center, I think. I heard she got married, too. Some rich tech guy.”

  Rudy hid his disappointment. “Well, good for her.”

  “Yeah, no kidding.” The tour guide checked his watch. “I better start herding the cats onto the bus. Time to go.”

  Rudy didn’t say anything else. He got back on the bus ahead of the other tourists and made his way to the upper level, where he took a seat in the front row. The East Bay air was cold, but on the other side of the fog, the city would be warm. He turned up the collar of his jacket.

  Maria Lopes didn’t work at her old job.

  She didn’t live in her old apartment; he’d already checked. It was a setback, but that was to be expected after four years. Maria was still somewhere in the city. She could run, but she couldn’t hide.

  He’d find her.

  30

  Frost found Phil Cutter’s house on the southern fringe of the city in the Crocker-Amazon area, near the border with Daly City. The two-story house was an eyesore on a street where most of the homes around it were small but well maintained. The yellow siding hadn’t seen paint in years. The windows were shaded by misaligned horizontal miniblinds. A sad little boulevard tree needed water. The only other thing alive on the postage-stamp front yard were tall weeds that had squeezed out the grass.

  The house’s garage door was open, and the interior was crowded with so many boxes and so much rusted junk that no one would have been able to fit a car inside. A dirty black Cadillac from the ’90s was parked on the street, blocking the driveway. Frost took a quick look inside the car, which was littered with old newspapers and crumpled fast-food bags. An air freshener in the shape of an evergreen tree hung from the mirror.

  He climbed the steps and banged a fist on the house’s front door. Phil Cutter answered with a bottle of brandy in his hand. His clothes drooped on his tall, skeletal frame, and so did his gray skin. He was in his early fifties and looked seventy.

  “Easton, right?” the man said with a raspy voice that ended in a cough. He smoothed down his wispy dark hair.

  “You know me?”

  “Sure, I figured you’d be here sooner or later. A couple other cops already stopped by a few hours ago. Don’t you guys talk to each other?”

  “This isn’t an official visit,” Frost said. “I just want to chat.”

  “Just a chat, huh? Okay, come on in.”

  Frost followed the man into the house. It had the smell of someone who hadn’t showered recently, with a layer of cigarette smoke on top of the body odor. Phil had an impatient, wiry walk, which was more athletic than his appearance suggested. In the living room, which faced the street, the man dropped into an armchair near the windows, and his knee bounced like a tic. Rows of shadows from the blinds fell across his face. Frost didn’t want to sit on any of the musty furniture, so he stood.

  “You look tired, Easton,” Phil said. “Don’t you get enough sleep? Alarm clocks keeping you up or something?”

  The man’s weathered face bent into a ghost of a smile.

  Frost got the joke. He also realized the cigarette smoke in the house had a familiar bitterness. “It was you? You broke into my house. You sent me on a chase to find the watch.”

  Phil retrieved a smoldering cigarette from a tin ashtray. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Who really found the watch?” Frost asked him. Phil looked like a man who could follow instructions, but it was hard to imagine him connecting the dots to the street thug who’d mugged Melanie Valou and stolen her watch. Rudy would have needed a private investigator for that.

  “Like I said,” Phil repeated, blowing out smoke and reaching for his brandy bottle. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Frost studied the small room. The wallpaper was heavy and dark, and it was
peeling away at the ceiling. An old Doberman—as skinny as its owner—slept on the floor. It hadn’t even barked when Frost arrived. He examined a few photographs hung on the walls and recognized younger versions of Rudy and Phil Cutter among the people in the pictures.

  He turned back to Phil.

  “Where’s your brother?” Frost asked.

  “No idea.”

  “Last night, he murdered a close friend of mine.”

  “That cop? I heard about that. But you won’t pin that on Rudy. He was here with me when that woman got killed. He came here straight from the Fillmore.”

  “That’s your story? We had a police car on your street. The officer didn’t see a thing. Nobody came or went.”

  Phil shrugged. “Rudy came in the back.”

  “Climbing fences? Sneaking through yards? Why would he do that?”

  “He’s done it since he was a boy. He was always good at coming and going without our parents knowing about it. So was I. We made a good team.”

  Frost studied the man in the chair. He had bags under his eyes and a two-day beard on his face. His forehead was high and furrowed with long lines. He looked lost, like one of those men who falls behind early in life and never catches up to the rest of the world.

  “Why do you cover for him?” Frost asked. “You know what he does.”

  Phil was silent. His jaw moved, as if he were trying to dislodge food from his teeth. Then he said, “You got a brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you should understand.”

  “I wouldn’t protect my brother if he killed someone,” Frost said. “I wouldn’t lie for him over something like that.”

  “It’s easy to say that if you’ve never faced it.”

  “All those years, you knew what Rudy was doing, and you never said a word to anyone. I don’t know how you live with that, Phil.”

  “What I know is that Rudy is everything I’ve got, and he always has been. For thirty years, it’s been him and me. Longer than that if you go back to when we were kids.”

  Frost didn’t push him. He wanted to plant a seed of guilt, and that was all. He pointed to a photograph on the wall that showed two young boys with their parents. The background looked like a Giants game, and he figured the picture had been taken at the old Candlestick Park.

  “Is this you and Rudy and your folks?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are they still alive?”

  “You know they’re not,” Phil replied. “They died when Rudy and I were in our teens. Car accident. Truck driver lost control on 280 and nailed them both. This was their house.”

  “Do you work?” Frost asked. “Other than breaking and entering, that is. I know about your record.”

  “I was an electrician for BART. I got injured on the job a decade ago.”

  “So how do you spend your days?”

  “What does it look like?” Phil asked, holding up the bottle.

  What it looked like was a man who was committing slow-motion suicide.

  Frost stared at the photograph again. He figured that Rudy Cutter must have been twelve years old at the baseball game. He mugged for the camera the way kids do. There was nothing in his face to suggest the man he would become. It would take decades for the evil to emerge.

  “Help me understand your brother, Phil,” Frost said.

  “Why should I?”

  “Because deep down, you know he’s sick and he has to be stopped.”

  “You want to stop him? Go find a watch and hide it in the ceiling like your friend did. She did it right here, you know, at the top of the stairs. She slipped it in behind the smoke detector.”

  “I’m not defending what Jess did,” Frost replied, “but what Rudy did to her was a hell of a lot worse.”

  “I already told you. Rudy was with me.”

  Frost shook his head. He couldn’t shake the man’s lies. “If you won’t tell me about Rudy, then tell me about Hope. I know what she did to their daughter. I can only imagine how that affected Rudy.”

  Phil hissed between his teeth. “Hope. What a freak show.”

  One of the other framed photographs on the wall showed Rudy holding a baby in his arms. Half the picture had been torn away, leaving a white space inside the frame. Frost suspected that Hope had been in the picture and that Phil had excised his sister-in-law from his memory.

  “You didn’t like her?”

  “She was trouble. Like Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde. You never knew what you were going to get with Hope. One minute she’d be juiced, running around with so much energy you just wanted to unplug her. Then she’d go into a dark place, and nothing could pull her out. When she got like that, she was a witch. I mean, she’d scream at Rudy. Ugly, ugly stuff. She’d hit him, too. She slashed him with a knife once, right across the chest. He still has the scar.”

  “A knife,” Frost said. “Knives come up a lot with them.”

  Phil was cool, not reacting to the verbal jab. His rheumy eyes didn’t blink. He kept smoking.

  “I don’t know why Rudy picked her,” he went on after a long silence. “Rudy was a good-looking guy. Still is. He could have done better than Hope. You ask me, she manipulated him. She knew how to pull his strings. If he ever talked about divorce, she’d go crazy, crying about how she couldn’t live without him. You talk about husbands abusing wives? This was a wife abusing her husband. She was an awful piece of work. Freaking psycho.”

  “And Wren?”

  Just like that, tears gathered in Phil’s eyes. He was an uncle who still missed his niece. “Aw, Wren, she was an angel. I’m telling you, that little girl had sunshine in her face. I don’t care what you think of my brother or what you think he’s done. He loved that girl. If she needed blood, he would have slit his own wrists to save her.”

  “So what really happened?” Frost asked.

  Phil’s face hardened. His eyes had a grim, faraway look. “Docs said Hope had a bad case of PPD. Bipolar, too. They’ve got lots of buzzwords, but if you ask me, she was just evil. She was jealous of Wren. Jealous of this sweet, beautiful girl, not even a year old. The baby got all the attention from Rudy. Hope just wanted to take her away from him. That was all it was. She couldn’t stand to see Rudy happy. So she smothered her own daughter and then killed herself like a coward.”

  The dog on the floor roused from his slumber and growled. Phil snapped his fingers to quiet him.

  “At 3:42 a.m.,” Frost said.

  “Let’s just say it was the middle of the night.”

  “What happened to Rudy after that?” Frost asked.

  “Rudy? He stopped.”

  Frost was puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “Life stopped for Rudy that day. Time stopped. Everything stopped. It was like he was frozen, you know? He quit his job. He was an underwriter, and he was good at it—the guy is wicked smart—but he couldn’t stomach it anymore. All the people who knew what had happened, all the sad stares, it was too much. He got some nothing job in data entry at B of A, where no one knew about his background. He moved in here with me. He just—stopped. He never started again. Not for years. Not until—”

  Frost stared at him. “Not until?”

  Phil didn’t say a word, as if he’d already said too much. It didn’t matter. Frost knew exactly when Rudy Cutter had come to life again.

  “Not until he met Nina Flores,” Frost said.

  31

  Eden Shay was waiting on Frost’s front steps when he arrived back at his Russian Hill house. She had her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped tightly together in her lap. She wore no makeup today. Her black curls looked flat. He grabbed Shack, who was sleeping on the front seat of the Suburban, and sat down next to Eden on the steps. She inched away from him.

  “You heard about Jess?” Frost asked.

  She nodded without looking back. “Sorry. I know she meant a lot to you.”

  He didn’t reply. He noticed the way Eden kept space between them now. She was the opposite of
Tabby. She didn’t reach out, take his hand, or hug him.

  “Do you want to come inside?” he asked her.

  “Sure.”

  Frost led her up the steps. Inside, he put Shack down, and the cat scampered away and disappeared. Normally, Shack stayed close whenever someone was in the house, as if he needed to be part of the conversation, but not today. Frost heard him thunder up the stairs to find his favorite spot in the closet.

  Eden wandered to the bay window. She was subdued. She opened the door and went out to the patio, and she stood at the railing, where the hillside fell off below her and the city stretched down toward the waters of the bay.

  He came up beside her. “What’s wrong?”

  “I think you should quit what you’re doing. Don’t go after Cutter. Let the other detectives do it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s dangerous,” she said. “Doesn’t what happened to Jess prove that to you?”

  He didn’t think this had anything to do with Jess. “What’s going on, Eden?”

  “Cutter found me.”

  He reached out for her shoulder, but she drew away. It was as if she were back in the basement in Iowa, recoiling from any touch, suspicious of every man. “Are you okay?”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “Did he threaten you?” Frost asked.

  “He didn’t need to. He knew how to find me. He knew where I was living. I got the message. If I didn’t help him, I’d be next.”

  “What did he want?”

  Eden’s head turned, and she stared at him now. “He wanted to know about you.”

  “Me? What about me?”

  “Everything. What I’d found out about you. What you knew about him and this case. He wanted to know if you’re getting close.”

  “It doesn’t feel that way,” Frost said.

  “Well, maybe you’re closer than you think. The point is, you’re getting in his way, and he doesn’t like it. Jess got in his way, and you saw what he did to her. That’s why you should stop.”

  “I’m not going to stop.”

  She shrugged. “No, I didn’t think you would.”