The Voice Inside (Frost Easton Book 2)

by Brian Freeman

  “Fine, sir,” Frost replied, which wasn’t true. The bad dream clung to him and refused to go away. “Have we found Cutter?”

  “No, but the man can only hide for so long. Someone will spot him.”

  Frost didn’t share Hayden’s optimism. Cutter was smart, and he’d already proven that he could stay below the radar for days at a time. If he wanted to disappear, he could. If he wanted to strike again, he could.

  Hayden read the skepticism in Frost’s face. “Cutter may not be back in prison yet, but he will be soon. That’s thanks to you.”

  “It’s too late for Maria Lopes,” Frost said.

  “I know that. I know you’re going to take that hard for a long time, but it’s not your fault. It wasn’t your fault with Jess, either.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether it was my fault. If I can’t stop things like this, what the hell am I doing here?”

  The captain sighed. He hauled his bulk out of the chair and went over to the window. Reflections of the city lights glowed on his mottled skin.

  “You don’t think Jess said the same thing to me with every one of Cutter’s victims?” the captain said. “He was always one step ahead of her, and he finally broke her. She was a good cop who became a bad cop to get him behind bars. You played by the rules. That’s what we have to do, even when we lose people because of it.”

  “I’ll feel better when we have Cutter in custody,” Frost said.

  “Well, then let the rest of us do our jobs and find him. Go home.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Frost left the office and headed straight to the elevators. There was nothing more to do here. He emerged outside the Mission Bay headquarters building into a cold, driving rain. He made no attempt to cover himself, and the rain soaked down over his hair and clothes. He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked two blocks to his Suburban. There were almost no other cars on the street. When he opened the driver’s door, he saw that the seat was covered in Maria’s blood. He stood there, staring at it, as the rain poured inside.

  Finally, he got in and closed the door. The gusts of wind made the truck shiver. He listened to the hammering on the roof. The nightmare was still vivid in his brain, and he actually checked his wrist to see if the last platinum watch was still there. But it wasn’t. This was the real world. In the real world, victims didn’t simply lie down and go to sleep the way they did in his dream. They died slowly, choking, gasping, as you whispered to them and held them in your arms.

  Now he knew how Jess died.

  Now he knew how Katie died.

  It was almost as if Rudy Cutter was teaching him a lesson. You already saw death up close. You need to see the dying, too.

  Frost reached into the back seat and grabbed the photo album of Hope’s sketches. In the aftermath of Maria’s murder, he’d neglected to bag it and bring it inside to be logged as evidence. He thought about going back to the building now, but he couldn’t drag himself out of the truck in the rain. It could wait until morning.

  He flipped through the early pages. He knew what he was looking for. The sketch of Maria Lopes as a baby, held by her mother, was a third of the way into the album. He stared into Maria’s innocent eyes. She was a baby on her first day of life. Welcome to the world. Thirty-two years later, she would bleed out in the abandoned shell of a missile station. It was a good thing she didn’t know her fate back then, because fate was a jerk. Fate was a son of a bitch.

  Go home.

  He was still tired, but he wasn’t ready to go home yet. He wondered if Eden was in the house. Waiting for him. Sleeping in his bed. She was a lover, but she was also a writer, and he wasn’t ready to talk to a writer yet. He didn’t want to have his thoughts taken down so that he could read about them in a book someday. He’d avoided reading the part of Eden’s manuscript that dealt with Katie, because he didn’t want to see the reality of her murder in black and white. He didn’t want to know how Eden dealt with it, how she described it, and what she’d said about him. The brother who found the body. The brother who became a cop. The brother who let the killer go and then hunted him down. He was no hero.

  Frost drove aimlessly through the city. He didn’t have a destination in mind. It was as if he had to search every street corner for Rudy Cutter, as if he could cover every inch of San Francisco on his own. Eventually, he realized how pointless it was. His hands turned the wheel block by block and chose a new destination for him without engaging his brain. He found himself on 280 heading south through the pouring rain, at a time of night when the freeway was mostly empty. He got off near Balboa Park and wound through the jumble of city streets to the neighborhood where Phil Cutter lived.

  The house was dark, but he didn’t think Phil was asleep.

  There was a squad car on the street, just in case Rudy showed up here. Frost showed his badge to the cop in the car, and he knew that he looked like a sight. The borrowed shirt didn’t really fit. The back of it was soaked with blood because of the blood in his car. He was wet to the bone. Even so, the cop didn’t ask any questions. He probably figured Frost was planning to beat the hell out of Phil to get answers about his brother.

  Phil obviously thought so, too. When Frost rang the bell, Rudy’s brother kept the chain on the door and didn’t invite Frost inside.

  “It’s the middle of the night!” Phil barked. “What the hell do you want? I already told the other cops I don’t know where Rudy is. I haven’t seen him. You think he’s stupid enough to come here? This is the last place he’d go.”

  “Do you know what happened tonight, Phil?” Frost asked quietly.

  “I don’t care what happened. It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

  “Your brother killed another woman,” Frost snapped. “Can you live with that?”

  Frost couldn’t help remembering how this had all started. Phil had left him an anonymous note. Can you live with a lie?

  “Quit hassling me, man. What Rudy does has nothing to do with me.”

  “If you helped him, we’ll put you in jail, too.”

  “I didn’t do a damn thing,” Phil replied.

  “Then why were you following me?”

  “I wasn’t following you,” the man replied.

  “I saw your Cadillac, Phil. You were outside the restaurant on the Embarcadero last night. You took off when I started across the street.”

  “So what?” Phil asked. “Is that a crime? You going to arrest me for making an illegal U-turn?”

  “What did Rudy want to know about me? What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing.”

  Frost shook his head. “Where were you this evening?”

  “Home. Alone.”

  “Did Rudy call you? Did you help him get away?”

  “I was here,” Phil rasped, his voice cracking. “I told you. I didn’t go nowhere.”

  A rattling cough bubbled out of Phil’s throat. His eyes looked sunken and gray. He was a skeleton, dressed in black shorts and a black tank top. Alcohol breathed like fire from his mouth, along with the same bitter cigarette smoke that Frost had smelled whenever he crossed paths with Phil. Frost realized that the man was telling the truth. He hadn’t gone anywhere tonight. He’d been home. Smoking. Drinking himself into a stupor.

  Frost looked at the empty street, then at the garage. Last time he’d been here, the garage door had been open, and the inside was a dumping ground for years of broken equipment and debris. There was no room for a car.

  “Where’s your Cadillac, Phil?”

  The man shrugged. “In the shop.”

  “Yeah? Which one?”

  “Somewhere over on Mission.”

  Frost leaned into the crack of the door. He was inches from Phil’s face. “Rudy’s got it, right? You met him somewhere, and you let him take the car. That’s how he got to San Bruno.”

  Phil didn’t say a word, but the squint of fear in the man’s eyes was enough to convince Frost that he was right. Rudy was in the Cadillac. He grabbed his phone to call in
an update on the search, and he started down the steps. He was done here. He was done with Phil turning a blind eye to what his brother had done.

  But as he turned away from the front door, he heard Phil mutter something behind him, in a burst of shock and surprise.

  “Holy hell.”

  Frost turned back. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” Phil replied quickly, but the man swallowed hard and stared down at the cracked concrete on the porch.

  Frost realized that the back of the white shirt he’d borrowed was covered in Maria’s blood. Phil couldn’t handle seeing it. It was one thing to know that your brother was a murderer. It was another thing to see the victim’s blood, only hours after she’d died.

  “Yeah, that’s what he does,” Frost said softly. “He cuts their throats. You can’t believe how much blood there is.”

  Phil’s left eye twitched. He breathed loudly through his nose.

  “Is there anything you want to tell me?” Frost asked him.

  Phil opened his mouth, but then he clamped it shut. Frost waited, wondering if the man would break, but Phil stayed stubbornly silent. Eventually, Frost hissed in frustration and went back down the steps. He had the door of the Suburban open when Phil finally shouted at him through the sheets of rain.

  “Hey.”

  Frost looked up. Phil had come out of the house onto the porch. His hands were on his hips. Wind buffeted his tall, skinny frame.

  “Hey, I wasn’t lying, man,” Phil called. “I wasn’t following you.”

  Before Frost could ask any questions, Phil turned around and stormed back inside and slammed the door shut. Frost got into the Suburban and sat in the darkness of the truck, with the rain pounding on the windshield. He replayed what Phil had said in his head, and he heard the emphasis on that last word.

  I wasn’t following you.

  Frost felt a sickness in his soul that he hadn’t felt since that day at Ocean Beach. A crushing fear. A wild despair.

  He knew. He knew.

  He heard another voice in his memory. This one was the voice of Gilda Flores, Nina’s mother.

  Tabby and Nina were inseparable. Much like me and her mother. We were pregnant at the same time, and Nina and Tabby were first babies for both of us, so we went through it all together.

  Frost snatched up the album of Hope’s sketches again. He wanted to be wrong. There was no way that Rudy Cutter could know the truth, no way he could realize that Frost had a vulnerability so deep that he could barely even acknowledge it to himself. He wanted to believe it wasn’t possible, but he was reminded again that fate was a jerk. Fate was a son of a bitch.

  Don’t make this personal between us, Inspector.

  Too late.

  He flipped the fragile pages of the album. He saw the names inscribed at the bottom of each sketch. Dozens of names, spread out over several years. Mothers and babies. Mothers and daughters. Mothers and victims.

  And there they were.

  Catherine and Tabitha.

  Cutter was going after Tabby.

  45

  Rudy sat in the old Cadillac, two blocks from the marina. He’d been here for hours, hypnotized by the rain, staring through the darkness and haze at the apartment building across the street. It was almost dawn on Sunday, but there wouldn’t be any sunrise today, just the gloom of black clouds. The only thing that helped him see was the streetlight overhead. The yachts in the harbor were invisible.

  His clothes hadn’t dried. They were still a mess of rain, mud, and blood. He’d had a narrow escape from Sweeney Ridge. The cops had descended on the hills like locusts, and even in the fog, he’d barely eluded them on his way back to the parking lot at Skyline College. A helicopter searchlight had passed over the Cadillac only seconds after he’d ducked inside.

  He wasn’t a fool. He knew he didn’t have much time left. Everyone was looking for him.

  The street around him was empty in the rain. Above the boulevard trees, a light came on in the third-floor apartment, and a silhouette moved behind the curtains. He lifted his binoculars, but there was nothing to see. He’d already spotted Easton’s brother leaving two hours earlier in the dead of night, and after that, the windows had been dark. But not now. She was up. Weekends didn’t matter in the restaurant world. She’d be leaving soon.

  Rudy reached behind him and grabbed a trench coat from the back seat. He took what he needed from his backpack. The Taser. The knife. The duct tape. And Maria’s watch, already smashed, its time stopped at 3:42 a.m. He secured them all in the right-side pocket of the coat. He was ready. He kept his eyes trained on the steps that led down from the apartment building plaza, and he waited.

  It was strange. He no longer felt alive. The numbness that had dominated his life for so many years was back. When he’d slid the knife across the neck of Nina Flores, he’d felt a rush that must have been like shooting up with pure heroin. Hope was Nina; Nina was Hope. He’d finally been able to get revenge on his wife for what she’d done to their daughter. With each murder after that, the anticipation had built toward a perfect moment of violence. It became an addiction.

  But now he felt empty. The rush was gone.

  He’d thought, with Jess Salceda, that it was simply because she wasn’t part of the game. She was an outsider who’d trespassed where she didn’t belong. He’d assumed that it would be different with Maria, but it wasn’t. There was no high, no adrenaline, no vaulting sense of purpose. Killing her gave him nothing.

  And yet he couldn’t stop himself. He needed the rush even more badly now that he couldn’t find it. He would do anything to feel that way again, even if it was only one last time for one last moment.

  Up on the third floor, the lights went off again. The apartment was dark.

  Rudy tensed, his eyes on the plaza steps. The rain kept coming in waves. The wind roared. He checked the mirrors and saw that he was alone on the street. It would take less than a minute for her to lock the apartment, go down three flights of stairs, cross the courtyard, and emerge onto the sidewalk.

  As he waited for her, his backup phone rang.

  Rudy thought about ignoring it, but he knew it was Phil. And Phil calling now meant trouble.

  “This is a bad time,” he said, answering the phone.

  “Where are you?” Phil asked.

  “You know where I am.”

  “You should split, man,” his brother said. “Now.”

  Rudy briefly closed his eyes. Phil had always been the weak link, the one who would crack sooner or later. “What did you tell them?”

  “Enough that they’ll be coming for you,” Phil replied. “You better get away from there while you can. Sorry.”

  Phil hung up.

  At that same moment, across the street, Rudy saw Tabby Blaine dash down the steps in the rain. Her red hair was a flame on the dark morning. She wore a belted purple raincoat down to her ankles. She turned away from the bay toward her car, walking easily in heels. It was now or never.

  Rudy grabbed his coat. He got out of the Cadillac and shrugged the coat onto his body. He crossed the street and made his way to the sidewalk and settled in behind her. Leaves blew off the trees in the wind and scattered between them. The rain covered the noise of his footsteps. If she looked back, she would see him, but she didn’t look back.

  Slowly, he increased his pace and closed the gap.

  At the end of the block, she crossed the street, and he was off the curb before she reached the other side. He knew which car was hers. A red Saab. He could see it halfway up the block, squeezed onto a short patch of curb between two driveways. Inside the pocket of his coat, his hand closed around the grip of the Taser.

  The rain blew into their faces. Rudy had to squint and rub his eyes to see. He was close behind her now, almost close enough to grab. She was at the bumper of the Saab, and she put a hand into her pocket. He heard the beep of the car doors unlocking as she yanked out her key fob.

  Then everything happened at once.

  T
abby’s phone rang. He could hear the ringtone playing a song. “Shut Up and Dance.” He was right behind her now, but she stopped as she answered the phone. He stopped, too. They were both on the street, immediately next to the Saab, but she didn’t know he was there.

  “Hey, Frost,” Tabby said into the phone. “You’re up early.”

  Simultaneously, another noise filled the street. The noise of sirens. Instinctively, Rudy looked back over his shoulder, and where the street intersected Marina Boulevard at the harbor, he saw a police car veer around the corner. And then another. And another. They converged at the apartment building, and as the police officers flooded from the vehicles, they already had their guns drawn in their hands.

  In an instant, they spotted the Cadillac parked across the street. In the next instant, they surrounded it.

  Rudy turned back. The police couldn’t see him two blocks away. Tabby was still on the phone, but she heard the sirens, too, and as she turned around, she saw him directly behind her. Her green eyes were smart and alert. She knew exactly who he was and why he was here. She opened her mouth to say something into the phone—a scream, a cry for help—but before she could say a word, he fired the Taser into her neck.

  Her body lurched as the electricity jolted her. She crumpled, knees bending, and he grabbed her. Her phone spilled to the sidewalk, and he kicked it away. He scooped up her keys. It took him only a few quick seconds to yank open the front door of the Saab and stuff her inside, facedown. He bent over her body as rain poured in and clumsily pulled her wrists together and wound gray tape around to bind her hands behind her. She twitched, already beginning to recover from the electrical jolt. He slammed the passenger door shut and ran around to the driver’s side.

  He got in and locked the doors, and he started the car and put it in gear. He eyed the mirror. The police had already filled the street two blocks away, but they hadn’t spotted him. They were streaming into the plaza of the apartment building. He heard more sirens, more vehicles getting closer.

  Tabby squirmed violently in an attempt to get up, but he shoved her face down hard. As she screamed, he covered her mouth and pushed the sticky blade of the knife below her ear.