The Voice Inside (Frost Easton Book 2)

by Brian Freeman

  Camille half stood from the chair, as if she were possessed by a desire to cross the room and slap him. Then she sat back down and looked away, biting her lip.

  The stories began.

  Dominika Lubin started. Her husband, who was very tall and several years older, sat next to her. She recalled the empty house after Natasha had gone away to college and how long the four years had felt while their daughter was away. Eventually, Natasha had moved home and taken a job with the parks department, which meant she could walk across the street to work in Stern Grove. Mother, father, and daughter had been able to have breakfast every day.

  Until Rudy Cutter came.

  After that, the house had felt empty again, as if Natasha had gone back to school; only this time, Dominika knew her daughter was never coming home.

  Rae Hart’s father spoke next.

  Then Gilda Flores. Then Camille Valou. Then Hazel Dixon’s husband, with their young son in his lap. Everyone was crying. Frost himself felt dizzy, hearing all the names again, victim after victim. He knew their faces, but he didn’t know them, not really, not until now. They were like the ghosts in the room, haunting the ones they’d left behind. He listened to the voices, but all he could hear in his head was the voice of Rudy Cutter over the phone, and he’d never felt angrier or more helpless in his life.

  While he was consumed with his own thoughts, his mother spoke to him from across the room.

  “Frost? Would you like to share something about Katie?”

  They all looked at him. Every face turned to him expectantly. The silence was like the ticking of a clock. Tick tock. He thought about what he could say, but he had nothing. Heat gathered on his neck. His mouth felt dry. He ran his hand back through his brown hair and said, “I need some air.”

  Just like that, he turned and bolted from the house. He slammed the door behind him. He crossed the street to the trees, where he steadied himself against one of the thick eucalyptus trunks. It was difficult to breathe. In the dense gloom of the woods, day felt like night.

  Close by, someone spoke to him. “You part of the group?”

  Frost glanced sideways and saw a man about his own age sitting on a fieldstone bench with his legs jutting out into the dirt. He held a cigar in his hand, leaching peppery smoke into the air. He wore a rust-colored sweater and jeans, and he had black hair and red glasses on his face.

  “Excuse me?” Frost said.

  “I saw you come out of the house. I figured you must be a member of the families.”

  “I am. My name’s Frost Easton.”

  The man pushed himself off the bench. He extended a hand, which Frost shook. “Robbie Lubin. Tash—Natasha—was my sister.”

  “Katie was mine,” Frost replied.

  Robbie dug in the pocket of his jeans, and his hand emerged with another cigar. “Want one?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Tash always gave me a hard time about cigars. She said they stank. So naturally, I smoked them around her whenever I could.”

  Frost smiled. “That sounds about right.”

  Robbie gestured at the house. “The whole group-hug thing has never been my style. I prefer to grieve in my own way.”

  “Me, too.” Frost tried to remember what he’d heard about Natasha’s brother. “Someone told me you were from Minnesota. Is that right? Or am I thinking of someone else?”

  “That’s me,” Robbie told him. “I live in a suburb of Minneapolis called Maple Grove. I work for Medtronic. My parents can’t understand what I’m doing out there. They think of Minnesota as the frozen tundra.”

  “I have some Minnesota roots of my own,” Frost said.

  “Oh?”

  “Well, if you believe my mother, they were taking a cross-country driving trip while she was pregnant with me, and they were debating baby names. Apparently, they were passing through Southern Minnesota, and they saw a highway sign pointing to the town of Easton in one direction and the town of Frost in the other. ‘Frost Easton.’ My mother took it as a sign from the universe.”

  “I like it.” Robbie sucked on the cigar and blew out a cloud of smoke.

  “So was Natasha older or younger?” Frost asked.

  “Tash was four years younger than me.”

  “Same with me and Katie.”

  “Were the two of you close?” Robbie asked.

  “Best friends since we were kids. We hung out together all the time. How about you?”

  “As kids, not so much,” he replied. “I was a science geek. Tash was into athletics. A basketball player. She was freaky tall, like our dad. We did our own thing in those days, but that changed when she went to college. I was doing an internship at Medtronic, and as luck would have it, Tash got recruited to the U of M basketball team. So she moved in with me. We lived together all four years she was in school. At that point, we became super close.”

  “But then she moved back to California?” Frost asked.

  “Right. The winters out there weren’t for her. She hated them. And I think she felt bad having both of us so far away from our parents. I’m glad Mom and Dad had those couple of years with her living at home again. You know, as things worked out.”

  “Yeah.”

  Robbie studied him from behind his bright-red glasses. “You’re the cop, right? The one who found the watch?”

  Frost nodded.

  “My parents aren’t fans of yours,” Robbie told him. “They thought you should have kept your mouth shut. For what it’s worth, I told them they were wrong. I’m in a business where you can’t take shortcuts, and I don’t approve of anyone who does, even when they do it for the right reasons.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “I can only imagine what an agonizing choice it was for you. You’re not a disinterested observer.”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a picture of Katie?” Robbie asked.

  “Sure.”

  Frost pulled his phone out of his pocket and called up the screen-saver photo he used. It showed him and Katie on a beautiful summer day at Alcatraz, the year before she was killed. Her head leaned against his shoulder; she had a big smile; and her hair was sunny blond. That was how he liked to remember her.

  Robbie took a long look before handing the phone back to him. “You two look a lot alike.”

  “Everyone says that,” Frost agreed. He added, “Do you have a picture of Natasha?”

  “Of course.”

  Frost had seen many pictures of Natasha Lubin over the years—including horrible ones from the crime scene—but he knew that Robbie was looking for an opportunity to show off his sister. That was what siblings did. Robbie pulled out his own phone and scrolled through a long series of pictures to find the one he wanted.

  “This is us in my apartment in Minneapolis,” he told Frost, “when Tash was a senior.”

  Frost turned the camera sideways to make the landscape image bigger. It was a sweet shot. Natasha was in her yellow basketball uniform, with long dark hair tied into a ponytail. She towered six inches over her older brother. Robbie looked younger and skinnier, with longer black hair but the same glasses. The two of them mugged for the camera, fighting playfully over the basketball that Natasha held in her big hands. They were obviously in Natasha’s bedroom; Frost could see basketball trophies lined up on a bookshelf behind them.

  “You’re right, she was really tall,” he said.

  “Six four,” Robbie replied. “And you can bet she reminded me about that every time I saw her.”

  “Of course she did,” Frost said, smiling.

  He was about to hand the phone back to Robbie Lubin.

  And that was when he saw it.

  He stared at the picture and squinted to make out the details. At first, he didn’t realize what he was looking at, but when he did, chills ran up and down his body. With his thumb and forefinger, he enlarged the photograph, not to look at Natasha and Robbie, but to zoom in on the bookshelf behind them. There, on the shelf, beside the basketball trophies,
he could see a small picture frame no larger than five-by-seven inches.

  Enlarged, the image was blurry, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t wrong about it. Inside the picture frame was the puzzle piece that had eluded Jess for years. Inside the picture frame was the answer. The connection. The motive. The reason why all those women had to die. Behind that sliver of glass was the evidence that would put Rudy Cutter back in prison for the rest of his life.

  “What is that?” Frost murmured, pointing at the screen with his finger. “Where did it come from?”

  Robbie leaned in to see what Frost was looking at. “Oh, the sketch? Mom gave that to Tash when she turned eighteen. It’s just a little portrait of Mom holding Tash as a baby when she was at the hospital. Tash thought it was pretty cool. I still have it on the wall in my place in Minnesota. It’s a little reminder of her.”

  Frost kept staring at the sketch in the frame.

  It was a drawing of a mother with a baby in her arms. The sketch was roughly done, but by a talented hand. He could recognize Dominika Lubin, younger, glowing with triumph and exhaustion. Her eyes beamed at her child, at the new life she was holding. And the baby had her own eyes closed, asleep and at peace in a new world. The sketch must have been done within hours of Natasha’s birth.

  He saw the label inscribed underneath the portrait: Dominika and Natasha. Below it was Natasha’s birthdate.

  “Do you know who made this sketch?” he asked.

  Robbie shrugged. “Sorry, no. Honestly, I don’t even know where Mom got it. Why?”

  Frost didn’t answer. He already knew who the artist had to be. He knew, because he’d seen an almost identical sketch in the bedroom of Nina Flores, and it was obviously done by the same hand. He’d seen that same sketch of Nina Flores somewhere else, too. It was clearly visible in the background of the photograph of Nina and Tabby that Nina had worn as a button on her twenty-first birthday.

  Anyone looking at the photograph, anyone who knew what that sketch was, would have recognized it, even in miniature. Seeing it, seeing the technique, Frost realized that he’d seen the same artist’s work in the self-portrait over the fireplace in Josephine Stillman’s house. That was partly why the painting had seemed so oddly familiar to him. It wasn’t just the face. It was the style.

  Rudy Cutter would have recognized it, too.

  He would have spotted it instantly when Nina Flores showed off the buttons she was wearing in the coffee shop.

  He would have seen that sketch and known that his wife, Hope, had drawn it.

  40

  When Frost went back inside the Lubin house, he shared what he’d discovered with the families, and the parents began to remember. They’d all owned similar sketches of mother and daughter.

  Camille Valou had given a sketch like that, of herself and Melanie in the hospital, to her in-laws during a family visit to Switzerland. She assumed they still had it at their chalet in Wengen.

  Rae Hart’s parents had kept a similar sketch in a box of memorabilia in their attic. They hadn’t looked at it in years.

  Shu Chan’s mother had sent her sketch to Shu’s grandmother in China.

  Hazel Dixon’s father remembered the sketch, but they’d lost it and most of the other keepsakes from Hazel’s childhood in a fire several years earlier.

  No one except Gilda Flores had ever hung the sketch on a wall, and that was only because she’d left Nina’s bedroom exactly as it had been years earlier. The sketch of Natasha was still on display in Robbie Lubin’s house, but he was two thousand miles away in Maple Grove, Minnesota. None of the other families had known that similar sketches existed. And neither had Jess.

  He couldn’t blame her for missing it.

  Even if Jess had researched where the victims were born, she wouldn’t have seen a pattern. The mothers had used three different hospitals in different parts of the city, and Frost assumed that Hope Cutter hadn’t stayed in any given job at a particular hospital for a long period of time. Hope was also an ER nurse, not an obstetrics nurse. There was no reason for her to be in the maternity ward. However, he remembered what Hope’s mother, Josephine, had told him. Hope would visit pediatrics on her breaks at the hospitals and chat with the new mothers.

  And then there was Katie.

  Just like every other part of her murder, Katie didn’t fit the pattern. She hadn’t been born in San Francisco at all, but had been an unexpected surprise while Janice was visiting Frost’s aunt in San Luis Obispo. His parents had no similar sketch of her. It all reinforced his belief that Katie had stumbled onto Rudy Cutter and not the other way around. She’d seen him somewhere, doing something that no one was supposed to see.

  There was only one problem with the new evidence.

  The parents all remembered the sketches of their babies, but none of the parents in the room remembered Hope Cutter at all. The sketches weren’t signed. There was nothing to tie her to any of them.

  “The only thing I remember about the sketch,” Camille Valou told him, “was that it was a sweet little mystery. I never knew where it came from. When they release you from the hospital with a child, they send you home with all this material. It’s overwhelming, and of course, you’re already tired and anxious. It was several days before I opened this plain manila envelope that was in the packet. The sketch was inside. No explanation. No note. No signature. Just the picture. I thought it was lovely, of course, but I had no idea who had made it.”

  Gilda Flores said the same thing.

  So did the other mothers.

  “I actually called the hospital about it,” Rae Hart’s mother recalled. “I wanted to know who had made the sketch, because I wanted to send a thank-you note. I thought maybe this was a little gift that the hospital did for all the mothers. But they didn’t know anything about it.”

  “My wife called, too,” Steven Dixon told him. “No one at the hospital knew where it had come from. I remember them telling her that she wasn’t the only one who had found a sketch tucked in with their materials. Several other mothers had called about the same thing. But apparently the artist had kept it a secret, because they hadn’t found out who was doing it.”

  No one knew Hope.

  No one remembered Hope.

  And yet Frost knew Hope Cutter had made those sketches. It was her. That was what had triggered Rudy’s rage all those years later. A sketch. A link between Nina Flores and Rudy’s wife.

  A link that one of the women named Maria Lopes shared, too.

  All he had to do was prove it. And find out who was next.

  He knew someone who could help him.

  Frost parked outside Josephine Stillman’s house near Stonestown.

  Hope’s mother answered the door, and she didn’t look surprised to see him. Her face had a defiant cast. She patted her auburn hair, and then she folded her arms across her chest. “I assumed you’d be coming back here,” she said.

  “And you know why, don’t you?” Frost asked.

  Josephine simply opened the door and let him walk into the house. He went into the small living room, where Hope’s self-portrait stared down at him, full of quiet despair. Hope had been keeping her secret in plain sight all this time.

  He showed Josephine the same photo he’d shown her the previous day.

  “This sketch in the background of the picture,” Frost said. “That’s what you saw when you studied it. That’s why you reacted the way you did. Hope drew that sketch, didn’t she?”

  Josephine didn’t need to look at it again. “Yes, she did.”

  “You should have told me immediately.”

  “After so much time, why does it matter?”

  “It matters because all the victims had sketches like this done when they were babies. That’s the connection that ties them together. Did you know that Hope was doing sketches of new mothers at the hospitals where she was working? Did you ever see them?”

  The old woman stared up at the portrait of her daughter. “Of course.”

  “Tell m
e about them.”

  Josephine walked over to an old-fashioned mahogany martini table. She opened the drawer and dug through a stack of letters and photographs inside. She found what she was looking for—a yellowed sheet of paper torn from a spiral notebook—and handed it to him. It was a sketch done in ballpoint pen of a mother and child, almost identical in structure to the sketches Frost had seen. This one had the artist’s signature written in script below the sketch: Hope Stillman. Even the handwriting matched the names written on the other sketches.

  “I had a photograph of myself in the hospital holding Hope on the day she was born,” Josephine said. “I showed the picture to Hope when she was ten years old. A day later, she came back to me with this sketch. She did it from memory. You can see she had a gift for art even then. I was proud and sad at the same time.”

  “Sad?” Frost asked.

  “Look at Hope’s face in the sketch,” Josephine said.

  Frost did. The face of the baby was like the face in the self-portrait over the fireplace. Unhappy. Tortured. Even at ten years old, Hope was already wrestling with demons.

  “That’s the one thing she changed from the photograph,” Hope’s mother went on. “She’s smiling in the original picture. The way any innocent baby would be. But not in the sketch.”

  “And what about the drawings at the hospitals?” Frost asked.

  “I told you, Hope liked to visit the new mothers. I think she was looking for something that had always eluded her. She wanted to believe that a baby would complete her. She saw joy in the faces of the mothers, and it was a joy she’d never been able to find herself. After she talked to them, she would make these little sketches at home. All from memory. She made sure the original went to the mothers, but she kept copies for herself. And she made copies for me, too. She only sketched the girls, though. Hope never wanted anything for herself except a daughter. She made dozens of these portraits.”

  Dozens.

  Hope had visited each of the mothers. She’d probably held each child in her arms. They were all on Rudy Cutter’s list. Unless Frost could stop him, Cutter was far from done. But now, finally, they had hard evidence to tie him to every murder. They could rearrest him. If they could find him.