The Voice Inside (Frost Easton Book 2)

by Brian Freeman

  “What did you tell Cutter about me?”

  “I told him to go to hell,” Eden replied.

  He wondered if that was the truth. Eden was complicated. She’d built relationships with the men on both sides of this case. Him and Rudy Cutter. It was impossible to know where her loyalties lay, other than with herself. Her book came first. He also realized that he needed to keep her close to him so he could watch what she was doing.

  “Do you think he’d come after you again?” he asked her.

  “I live in a security building. He can’t get close to me.”

  “He already did,” Frost said. Then he made a risky decision. “Do you want to stay here with me for a few days?”

  There was curiosity in her eyes. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “One, to keep you safe. Two, to get your help. If Cutter thinks we’re close to the truth, then maybe we can figure it out together.”

  He didn’t add, Three, to keep an eye on you.

  “It’s sweet of you to offer,” she said, although he was sure that she suspected he had ulterior motives.

  “So stay. Your notes are already here. You can work when you want. I have plenty of room. I don’t use the master bedroom, so you can take it for yourself.”

  Her eyes were calculating again. “If I do this, I can’t stop being a writer. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “I get it.”

  “Anything that happens is fair game for the book. Including anything between us.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  “Okay then,” Eden said. “You and Shack have a roommate. I can pick up some things from my place later.”

  “Good.”

  He wondered how quickly he would regret his offer, and he didn’t have to wait long. As he turned to go back inside the house, Eden grabbed his arm. This time, she stood very close to him. “Frost, wait. There’s something else.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve been keeping a secret from you,” she said. “Cutter was trying to hold it over my head. I should have told you before, but I didn’t know how you’d react.”

  “So tell me now.”

  “It was me,” Eden said. “I was the one who found the watch.”

  Frost’s jaw hardened. He understood immediately what she meant. “Of course you did. I should have known right away. I knew it wasn’t Phil.”

  “Cutter told me in prison that he’d been framed. I thought it was crazy, but he laid out this whole scheme of what must have happened. He wouldn’t agree to any of my interviews if I didn’t help him look for the watch. So I did. I never expected to find anything, but Cutter was telling the truth. I found out about the muggings in the Mission District. Lamar Rhodes. His sister. I saw her wearing the watch. It didn’t take long to figure out what Jess had done.”

  Frost shook his head. “And you told Cutter all about it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So I guess you had to listen to the voice inside, too. Not just me.”

  “You’re right, I did,” Eden said. “And I made the same call you did, Frost. I couldn’t cover it up.”

  “What about Phil and the games he played with me? Breaking into my house? Leading me on a treasure hunt?”

  “That was all Cutter. I didn’t know what he was going to do. I figured he’d simply call his attorney, but he can never do things the easy way.”

  Frost wanted to be mad at her. He wanted to be furious. Eden had been the one who put the entire plan in motion. Because of her, Cutter was free, and Jess was dead. But that was a lie. She was right. They’d both seen the same facts, and they’d both made the same decision. He couldn’t blame her for it.

  Eden watched the emotions play across his face. “Do you want to rescind your invitation?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t have to stay here. I understand if you think I betrayed you.”

  “This doesn’t change anything,” he told her, although he couldn’t keep the coolness out of his tone. “I made the offer because I think it’s safer for you to be here with me. Now let’s get started.”

  She looked relieved. “Started at what?”

  “Figuring out what Cutter is going to do next.”

  Frost went back inside the house, and Eden followed him. He put the watch out of his head. He went to the boxes that he’d stacked in the foyer, and he grabbed one off the top and brought it back to the inlaid coffee table in front of the sofa.

  “When I talked to Phil today,” Frost said, “he gave me an idea. Jess was originally focused on finding a connection among the victims to Cutter’s daughter. Nina turned twenty-one the same year that Wren would have turned twenty-one. That kind of thing.”

  “Sounds right,” Eden said.

  “Yes, but if the victims reminded him of Wren, I don’t think Cutter would have been able to kill them. I wonder if we have it backward. Maybe, somehow, the victims reminded him of Hope. She’s the one who took everything from him.”

  Eden sat down on the sofa. “I don’t know, Frost. I didn’t find anything that Nina and Hope had in common. They were about as different as two people could be. I still think Jess was right. Nina must have reminded him of Wren. Somehow the others did, too.”

  “Yes, but Cutter loved Wren. Whereas he still hates Hope like this all happened yesterday.”

  “True. So what do you want?”

  Frost pointed at the box of notes. “Is there anything in there about Hope?”

  “Quite a lot.”

  “Okay. Tell me about her. Help me get inside her head.”

  “I wish I could,” Eden replied. “She may be even more of a mystery than Rudy is. I mean, how does a mother murder her own child? The docs all talked about PPD, but that’s the clinical explanation, not the emotional explanation. Most people I talked to just called her a monster.”

  “You don’t believe that,” Frost said.

  “No. You’re right. When you say someone is bad to the bone, it lets them off the hook. Hope wasn’t evil. That’s why it’s hard to understand her doing something so terrible. And it’s not like she didn’t do good things in her life, too. She was an ER nurse, which is as tough as it gets. Nobody remembers that now, because it doesn’t balance the scale.”

  “Was Rudy abusive to her?”

  Eden shook her head. “The opposite, in fact. He put up with a lot.”

  “What about her childhood?”

  “Pretty normal middle-class stuff. It sounds like Hope was a troubled kid going way back, though. I talked to her mom, Josephine. She feels guilty. You would, too, if you spent all those years raising a girl who grew up to kill her own daughter.”

  “There has to be more. You said Hope was troubled. In what way?”

  “Depression. Mood swings. That was the bipolar part of her. If you’re looking for connections to Nina, that’s not it. Nina was a happy kid. No sign of mental illness.”

  Frost frowned. He didn’t see any connections, either. Even so, he was beginning to believe that he was on the right track. If you wanted to catch a killer, you had to follow the anger. And Cutter’s anger was all about Hope.

  “Rudy was dead inside for years,” Frost said. “That’s the part I don’t get. What woke him up?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Phil said that everything stopped for Rudy after Wren died. He didn’t talk about him being angry. It sounded like he was numb.”

  Eden nodded. “A few of Rudy’s coworkers said the same thing. Losing Wren drained all the emotion out of him.”

  “But then his anger flooded back when he met Nina,” Frost said. “I want to know why. There must have been something about Nina that reminded him of Hope and what she did. You said you interviewed Hope’s mother. Is she still local? Where does she live?”

  “She’s in the same house in Stonestown where Hope grew up.”

  “Let’s go talk to her,” Frost said.

  32

&nb
sp; Rudy leaned against one of the flagpoles in the Civic Center plaza. The wind had kicked up, and the flag snapped to attention over his head. Warm sun from a cloudless sky offset the wind. He had his hands in the pocket of his sweatshirt, the black hood covering his head. Around him, a few homeless people slept on the green grass, and children played on the monkey bars.

  On the sidewalk on Larkin, he spotted two uniformed police officers walking side by side toward city hall. Cops never missed a thing. They were always watching even when they weren’t watching. Rudy squatted and fumbled with his shoelace with his head down. He waited until the cops had passed him, and when he stood up, he didn’t look back over his shoulder. Looking back was a dead giveaway that you didn’t want to be seen.

  He could hear their boots, walking away. They hadn’t spotted him.

  He focused his attention on the six-story downtown library building on the other side of the plaza. That was his destination. He strolled along the sidewalk, and behind his sunglasses, his eyes moved from face to face. The sleeping bodies on the grass. The mothers on the benches, watching their children. The parking police, doling out tickets on the cars.

  At the intersection, he crossed the street with a cluster of pedestrians. On the opposite side, the library loomed like a prison of gray stone, with rows of small square windows adorned with X’s, as if the architect had been playing a game of tic-tac-toe. People came and went through the doors. He followed them, marching into a circular atrium, which rose toward a vast ceiling skylight that looked like a spiderweb. The building hummed with the quiet echo of voices.

  Rudy knew where he was going. He’d been here before. He got on the elevator and punched the button for the fifth floor, where the library kept its computer training center. He kept his hoodie up and his sunglasses over his eyes. He stared straight ahead.

  The doors began to close, but then they opened again as a small, skinny black man in his thirties slipped inside. The man wore a jean jacket covered in San Francisco patches and an Alcatraz baseball cap. He had the look and smell of a homeless person taking refuge from the streets, and he swayed in the elevator as if he were listening to the beat of a song that only he could hear.

  “Beautiful day outside, ain’t it?” the man said to Rudy. “You been outside? That is one gorgeous day God made for us.”

  Rudy nodded but didn’t look at him. “Yeah.”

  “You here for the books? Most folks come for the books. Lots and lots of books in this place. Me, I like the magazines. Motorcycle magazines, mostly. Daddy had a motorcycle when I was a kid, and he let me ride on the back. That’s how I got my nickname. People call me Bike.”

  Rudy said nothing.

  “You ever been on a motorcycle?” the man asked.

  “No.”

  “Daddy loved it. Nothing like riding on the open road, he said. Wind in your face and bugs in your teeth.” The man broke into a fit of laughter. “Daddy made that joke a lot. Bugs in your teeth.”

  Rudy forced a smile, but his mind was elsewhere. The arrival of the fifth floor rescued him from further conversation. He got out of the elevator and immediately turned right toward the computer center. The man in the jean jacket sauntered out behind him and headed toward the magazine room on the other side of the library.

  The computers were set up on long white tables near a series of cubicles occupied by library staff. A glass wall separated the training center from the corridor. It was a busy day, and most of the computers were already taken. He spotted one open computer halfway down the aisle, and he walked there quickly, avoiding eye contact with the employees inside the cubicle walls.

  Sitting down, he glanced in both directions at the people close to him. On his left side, a teenager with a cross shaved into her orange hair tapped the keyboard at lightning speed. She seemed to be writing fantasy fiction; he could see references to otherworldly monsters coming through time portals. On his right, a man in his sixties in a worn business suit worked on his résumé. Nobody paid any attention to Rudy. He silently slipped plastic gloves on his hands before touching the keyboard, and he slid off his sunglasses so he could see better.

  He called up a search engine on the Internet and typed the name Maria Lopes on the keyboard. He got millions of results. He was about to narrow the search when someone thumped loudly on the glass wall in front of him. It was the black man from the elevator. He had a motorcycle magazine in his hand, and he pointed at it and gave Rudy a thumbs-up. Rudy responded with a quick smile and looked down again, hoping the man would leave, but the man stayed on the other side of the wall, repeating, “Hey!”

  People in the library began to look their way.

  “Hey!”

  Rudy looked up again, an impatient question in his eyes.

  “Bugs in your teeth, huh?” the man called, laughing. “Right?”

  Rudy tried to laugh at the joke, and when he did, the man finally took his magazine and walked away. Rudy was alone again. He felt stares directed his way; he needed to work quickly. He tapped in a new search term:

  Maria Lopes San Francisco

  He still got an unmanageable number of results.

  However, he noticed a row of thumbnail photographs included with the search. He clicked on the “Images” tab and found a larger array of hundreds of pictures of different women. Apparently, they were all named Maria Lopes, and they all lived in San Francisco. Some were old; some were young. Some wore cowboy hats; some wore bikinis. They were brunettes and blondes. Interspersed among the photos were religious icons, dolls of Spanish dancers, and pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  He scrolled down.

  And there she was.

  Rudy recognized her immediately. He’d seen that face day after day for weeks; he’d sat two rows away from her on a double-decker tour bus; he’d spied on her bedroom window through binoculars across from her old apartment. Maria Lopes—his Maria Lopes—was thirty-two years old. Her birthday was February 19. She had long, straight brunette hair, but he could see that she’d added blond highlights in the last four years. Her eyebrows had a wicked arch. Freckles dotted her forehead. She smiled with only her lips, in a perky, sexy way.

  In the online photograph, Maria wore a business outfit, gray skirt and scoop-neck black blouse, with a slim gold chain around her neck. The picture didn’t say who she was or where she was, but it was an unusual photograph: Maria stood next to a tall woman dressed in a silk kimono with a styled black wig and a gold butterfly on top of her head like a tiara. The two women posed in front of a backdrop of garish multicolored streamers.

  Rudy was puzzled.

  Then he thought, Opera.

  He was about to click on the picture for more information when he realized that someone was standing over him beside the computer.

  “Buddy,” a male voice said, low and unpleasant.

  Rudy looked up. A teenager with a bald head and loose-fitting jeans crowded the chair.

  “Buddy, that’s my computer. I was sitting here.”

  “Sorry, it was empty,” Rudy murmured, trying not to attract attention. “Nobody was here.”

  “I was taking a leak, man. I’ve been here for almost an hour. I reserved it, so take a hike.” The young man raised his voice and gestured at the nearest employee working in one of the cubicles. “What’s the deal here? Somebody can just take my computer when I go to the damn bathroom?”

  Rudy slid his sunglasses back on his face and yanked up his hood. He pasted a smile on his face. “No problem, it was just a misunderstanding. I didn’t realize the computer was reserved. Go ahead, take it, I’m done here.”

  He slid the mouse to the top of the screen and clicked out of the browser. He stripped off his gloves and shoved them in his pocket.

  One of the librarians called to him. “If you want to reserve one of the other machines, sir—”

  “No, that’s okay,” Rudy replied quickly. “Thanks.”

  “Out of the chair, man!” the teenager insisted.

  Rudy stood up.
“All yours.”

  He bumped hard against the teenager with his shoulder, nearly knocking the kid over, and tucked his head down into his chest as he walked away. He could feel everyone in the computer lab watching him go. He listened for a voice saying his name. A whisper. A warning. They’d all looked right at him.

  That’s Rudy Cutter.

  But no one recognized him. He was safe.

  He made his way back to the library elevators, where he waited impatiently, pretending to stare at the paintings on the wall. With a musical ding, one of the elevators arrived, and he studied his feet and wiped a hand over his face to hide himself as the people inside got out. When the car was empty, he stepped inside, but as he did, he threw a last glance at the open interior of the library’s fifth floor.

  Not far away, the black man with the patch-covered jean jacket and the Alcatraz cap sat in an overstuffed armchair, staring right at Rudy over the top of a motorcycle magazine.

  33

  “Why are you stopping here?” Eden asked as Frost pulled to the curb on Haight in front of a Tibetan boutique with Asian lanterns and brass-and-turquoise jewelry in the store windows. The bright paint on the trim was the color of sunflowers. Like seemingly every other business on Haight, its neighbor was a tattoo parlor.

  “Quick detour,” he replied.

  They were heading for the house where Hope Cutter’s mother lived near the Stonestown mall, but he wanted to stop here first. This was the gift shop where Katie had purchased a ceramic fountain as an anniversary gift for their parents. It was probably the last place anyone would have seen her alive. And the shop was in the opposite direction of where she should have been headed with Todd Clary’s pizza.

  He explained to Eden what his father had told him. She studied the storefront with a little frown on her face.

  “It’s not really so strange, is it?” she said. “We’re only a block past Masonic, and you can get through the Panhandle there. She could have turned around and headed north after she stopped at the shop.”

  Frost shook his head. “A U-turn? On Haight? Good luck with that. Come on, you know what the traffic is like around here. Even going around the block would probably have added ten minutes at that time of night. The next cross street that cuts through the Panhandle is Baker, and by then, she would have been half an hour away from Todd Clary’s place. Katie was a little scattered, but she was a native, like me. She wouldn’t make a mistake like that.”