The Voice Inside (Frost Easton Book 2)

by Brian Freeman

  A gasp of surprise spilled from her lips, but she was ready for him. Her hand slashed from the deep pocket of her coat, and in an instant, she jumped forward with an eight-inch kitchen knife at the end of her arm, the tip of the blade poised near the bulge in Cutter’s throat.

  “Do you think I didn’t figure you’d come for me?” Jess hissed.

  Calmly, he put up his hands, palms outward, and took a step backward from her. “Easy,” he said.

  “You’re going to have to do better than that if you want to get at me, Cutter. I’ll cut your throat and not think twice about it.”

  His face was as dead as a zombie’s in the darkness. His eyes receded into his skull, and his mouth was a grim line. “No, I don’t think you will. That’s not who you are.”

  “Yeah? Don’t test me.”

  “If you wanted to kill me, I’d already be on the ground,” Cutter said.

  Jess didn’t lower the knife. “So what do you want? To gloat about beating me?”

  “Actually, I feel bad for you, Jess. You’ve lost your job. You’ll probably be heading to prison. Trust me, you won’t like it there. Was it really worth it?”

  “Yes, it was,” Jess said.

  Cutter shrugged. “And yet here I am. Right back where we started. I’m free again.”

  “We got four years with you nowhere near a woman.”

  “At the price of your whole life,” Cutter said.

  “I don’t care.”

  “You must be disappointed in Frost Easton. He could have saved you, and he didn’t.”

  “Frost does what’s right, even when he’s wrong.”

  “So I hear. That’s why I picked him.”

  “Watch out for Frost. He’s a better cop than me.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s right. You’re smart, but he’s smarter.”

  “Then this should be interesting. Will he cheat like you did to win?”

  “I hope you don’t expect me to apologize for not playing by the rules.”

  “I don’t. The question is how far you’re willing to go to stop me.”

  Cutter stepped closer again. His hands were still in the air, and she still had the knife poised at the end of her fingers. He bent down until the point of the blade pushed into the cartilage of his own windpipe. Any harder, and blood would flow. His black eyes locked with hers across the darkness.

  “Do it,” he whispered. “You said you wouldn’t even think twice.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, here I am, Jess. Kill me. This will be your only chance.”

  She felt sweat on her palm, and she was dizzy. Each of the faces of the seven victims flashed in her brain, echoing what he said: Do it. If he stayed free, there would be more bodies. All she had to do was jab the knife, thrust and rip. Sever his throat, watch him slowly succumb to death, exactly as he’d done to so many others. She didn’t care about the consequences for herself.

  Do it.

  Instead, Jess drew back the knife and secured it in her pocket again.

  She’d finally found one line that she couldn’t cross.

  Cutter didn’t say a word, but she felt his smug satisfaction, as if he knew her better than she knew herself. Even giving her the chance to kill him, he knew she wouldn’t take it. Just like he must have known that Frost would never throw that watch off the Golden Gate Bridge.

  “Good-bye for now, Jess.”

  Cutter backed away from her until he was at the fringe of the park. Then he turned without a word and melted into the night.

  13

  “Talk to me, Katie,” Frost murmured aloud.

  His sister had all the answers, but she wasn’t here to tell him what had really happened to her.

  Instead, Shack walked across the dashboard of the Suburban, put his front paws over the steering wheel, and shoved his wet nose against Frost’s beard. Shack had never gotten the message that cats weren’t supposed to like cars. He put up a fuss to accompany Frost whenever he left the house, and some days, Frost gave in and let the cat ride along with him.

  It was nine o’clock in the morning on a cool, sunny day. He was parked in the heart of the flower-power area, near Haight and Clayton. Wild, psychedelic colors adorned the storefronts. He could buy hemp clothes, shop for original Grateful Dead LPs, and get any part of his body pierced and tattooed here. If he wanted a rainbow-colored cat, he could get Shack’s fur painted, too.

  He was outside the hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Haight Pizza that had been serving up wood-fired pies with outlandish toppings since the Summer of Love. Frost had an artist friend, Herb, who’d grown up in that era and had a gallery a few blocks away. Herb swore he’d been to Haight Pizza on its very first day of operation in 1967. They made edamame pizzas. Sushi pizzas. Twinkie pizzas. If you knew the secret code word, you could get marijuana pizzas, too.

  On a Thursday night six years ago, at eight thirty on March 10, Katie had scribbled down an order for a pizza delivery to a man named Todd Clary at 415 Parker. His address was half a mile away near the University of San Francisco campus. She wasn’t even supposed to make the delivery herself, but the other driver had been late getting back. It was dark when Katie left. Frost could imagine her bouncing out of the restaurant door in a T-shirt and jeans, long blond hair tied in a ponytail, Todd Clary’s olive-and-arugula pizza with garlic cream sauce balanced on her palm. She’d whipped away in her imperial-blue Chevy Malibu. Headlights on. Probably speeding.

  And then—what?

  It was a mystery.

  Todd Clary never got his pizza. No one saw Katie or her Malibu again until Frost found her after midnight at Ocean Beach. Somewhere in that half mile, Rudy Cutter intercepted her and took her.

  None of it made sense. The timing of the crime didn’t fit. The first of Cutter’s victims, Nina Flores, had been murdered in April, but after that, every other victim died in November. Except Katie. The police initially suspected a copycat, but they soon confirmed that the watch found on Katie’s wrist belonged to the previous victim, Hazel Dixon. There was no doubt they were dealing with the same killer and the same string of murders. But her death was a break in the pattern.

  Why?

  Frost scooped up Shack from the dashboard and put him in the passenger seat. He started the engine and headed west on Haight to retrace his sister’s steps that night. No one knew the exact route Katie had taken, but the shortest route was to take Haight until it ended at Golden Gate Park and then head north before cutting over to Parker. Katie was a city native like Frost, and she would have known the fastest route.

  She had only one delivery to make. She didn’t need to stop anywhere between Haight and Parker, but Frost knew Katie’s grasshopper mind, and he could imagine her dashing inside a store for a quick errand along the way. The route took her past a coffee shop. A record store. A bicycle shop. Whole Foods. She could have stumbled into Rudy Cutter at any of those places.

  But no one remembered her. No one had seen her.

  Frost turned where Golden Gate Park bordered the street on his left. He drove past the Panhandle, and three blocks later, turned right. The road ended at a T intersection across from the dome and gold columns of Saint Ignatius Church. This was Parker Avenue, where Todd Clary lived. Frost turned left and drove three more blocks. He found himself across from a two-story green apartment house with a clay-tile roof. On his right was the sharp wooded hillside of Lone Mountain near the USF campus, dotted with thick brush and trees.

  That would have been the best place for the killer to take her.

  At night, anyone could have hidden on the hillside, unseen. When Katie got out of the Malibu, she would have been an easy target as she reached back into the car to grab the pizza box.

  Take her from behind, push her inside, and drive away. That was what Jess thought the killer had done.

  As he sat in the Suburban, Frost saw a man emerge from the apartment house and stare defiantly across the street with his hands on his hips. The man was
small, in his forties, with a comb-over and wire-rimmed glasses. He wore a suit and tie, although the tie was loose at his neck and the suit had seen better days. It was Todd Clary. They knew each other. Years earlier, Frost had pounded on Clary’s door, demanding answers and making wild accusations. That was before he was a cop and after he’d spent a night drinking with Duane, drowning their grief over Katie’s death.

  Clary hadn’t forgotten. He stormed across the street toward Frost.

  “You!” the man shouted. “Get the hell out of here!”

  Frost rolled down the window. “Mr. Clary—”

  “I knew you’d be back here! I saw they released that guy, and I knew you’d be looking at me again. It never ends! Do you know how many people threw crap at my house? Do you know how many neighbors called me a killer? All because I ordered a damn pizza!”

  “Mr. Clary,” Frost said calmly, “I know you weren’t treated fairly by anyone, including me.”

  “I didn’t see anything! I told you people that over and over and over. I was watching TV. I ordered a pizza, and when it wasn’t there an hour later, I called the store and asked where it was. That’s it. The next day, I’ve got cops going up and down the block, searching my house, going through my garbage, talking to my boss, making my life hell. Do you think I got an apology from anybody? No!”

  “I’m sorry. Really.”

  Clary acted as if he didn’t hear him. “Even after you caught the guy, you people kept saying I had something to do with it! Like this Cutter guy had me order a pizza so he could wait outside and grab the girl. I never met him! I had no idea who he was!”

  “Mr. Clary, I know you’re innocent,” Frost told him. “I can’t say it any plainer than that. I apologize for the suspicion that landed on your head. All I can say is, what happened that night was hell for me, too.”

  The man breathed heavily. His face was red, and his comb-over hung in the wind like the fin of a catamaran. Even so, Frost’s words got through to him. He opened his mouth, and then he clamped it shut again. Finally, he said, more quietly, “Look, I know this girl was your sister. I’m sorry for what happened to her. Nobody was happier than me to see that guy behind bars. It makes me sick to have him out on the streets again.”

  “Me, too. I want to get him back in prison, and that means I need to go back to the crimes he committed and figure out what we missed. That includes the night when Katie disappeared.”

  Clary shook his head. “I don’t know what happened to her.”

  “I understand.” Frost knew that the man was wearing his armor. Clary had been saying no, no, no for years, without even listening to what people were asking him. “This may sound strange, Mr. Clary, but you were probably the last person to talk to my sister alive.”

  Clary smoothed down his hair. He looked embarrassed. “I get what you’re saying, but all I did was order a pizza. It’s not like I had a conversation with her.”

  Frost laughed. “I think you may be the first person in history to say that. Katie had a rubber mouth, always talking. Most people couldn’t shut her up. The restaurant guys had to keep telling her to get off the phone, because she’d have half a dozen people on hold while she was still gabbing with the last person placing an order.”

  Clary cocked his head. “You’re right, I told the cops that. She was a chatty one. Kinda scattered, too.”

  “How so?” Frost asked.

  “Oh, I remember she rattled off ‘onions’ instead of ‘olives’ when she read the order back to me. I was nervous she was going to get it wrong.”

  “That sounds like Katie.”

  “She was nice, though. Bubbly.”

  “Yeah, she was. Anything else?”

  Clary shrugged. “Sorry. It was a long time ago.”

  “Well, I appreciate your talking to me.”

  “Hey, I’m not trying to be a jerk, but you’re wasting your time. You’re not going to find any answers at my place.”

  Frost nodded without replying. Clary turned around and retreated into his apartment. When the man was gone, Frost got out of the Suburban and studied the street in both directions. The neighborhood was empty. So was the wooded hillside leading up to the college. He tried to imagine Rudy Cutter at night, hiding in the bushes, but he knew that theory didn’t make sense. Cutter didn’t simply grab random women off the street, and there was no way he could have known in advance that Katie would be making a delivery to this address.

  Todd Clary was right. Frost was wasting his time.

  Somewhere in his head, he could also hear Katie talking back to him. It was as if she were sitting in his Suburban with Shack on her lap, impatiently waiting for him to drive away. Her chatty, scattered, bubbly voice called through the open window to him.

  Katie said, Get a clue, Frost. I was never here.

  14

  Frost had to navigate a gauntlet of security to get to the elevators in Eden Shay’s building. Eden owned a condo in the Rincon Hill neighborhood in a tower that was new, modern, and glass. When she answered the door and led him inside, he saw varnished gray wood, floor-to-ceiling windows, and appliances that were so clean he wondered if she ever used them. Her twentieth-floor flat faced east toward the Bay Bridge.

  “Pretty nice place,” he said, which was an understatement. It was beautiful, but it had a sterile, impersonal feel.

  “Says the cop with the house on Russian Hill,” Eden replied, smiling.

  “That’s a long story.”

  “I know. Your cat.”

  He stood at the window, but he looked back at her, impressed. She wasn’t lying when she said she did her research.

  “Do you want a Sierra Nevada?” she asked, as if to emphasize the point. “I bought a six-pack of Torpedo for you.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I’m an afternoon wine gal myself, so I hope you don’t mind if I indulge.” She toasted him with a wineglass from the counter that was already poured high with pinot grigio. “Wine is just one of my unhealthy obsessions.”

  “Go ahead,” Frost said.

  Eden joined him by the window. Her corkscrew curls danced on her face. In her heels, she was as tall as he was. She wore gray slacks that somehow matched the colors of the condo, and her sleeveless pink blouse showed off a lot of smooth skin. Her body had a faint citrus aroma, like grapefruit.

  “Why’d you choose to buy here?” he asked, watching her in profile as she drank her wine.

  “I had a house when I lived in the city the first time, but a house is more work than I want right now. I was looking to go simpler and smaller when I came back. This building is mostly filled with finance geeks and corporate lawyers. Not exactly my type, but that’s okay. I don’t hang out with the neighbors.”

  “Who do you hang out with?” Frost asked.

  “An Aussie girl like me? Mostly midgets, priests, and carnival workers.”

  He realized she was teasing him, and he smiled. He also felt guilty because his gaze kept drifting to the scar on her neck. It made him feel like a cliché, because he was sure that everyone she met did the same thing. She drank more wine, then ran one of her fingers along the zipper-like seam in her skin.

  “Do you want to ask me about it?” she said.

  “Only if you want to talk about it.”

  “Well, the kid hesitated when he slashed me,” Eden told him. “That’s what saved my life. He’d never killed anyone before. He didn’t go deep enough, and then he didn’t stick around to make sure I bled out. He and his brother just wanted to get the hell away from me after it was done. They were scared to death. More scared than me. Isn’t that strange? My brother always told me that a writer had to be aware of every single moment. The whole time in that basement, I was so focused on remembering the experience that I was never scared.”

  “Was it hard to write about it?”

  “It was like living it all over again,” she admitted. “It nearly killed me. After I wrote the scene about them cutting me open, do you know what I did? I spent two w
eeks volunteering at an animal shelter that had to perform euthanasia on cats and dogs.”

  “Why on earth would you do that to yourself?”

  “Because I needed to cry over and over, constantly, for days, without stopping. So that’s what I did. And because I felt as unwanted as those animals.”

  Frost didn’t know what to say. It was horrifying to imagine what the brothers had done to her, but almost more horrifying to think about the emotional suffering she was willing to inflict on herself. Eden projected an aura of dormant calm, but he felt as if he were staring into a volcano at a churning, melting river of lava. All these years, because of Katie, he’d thought of himself as a crime victim. But talking to Eden, he realized that he’d never had a clue what being a victim was really like. What she’d gone through was never over; it simply reemerged in her life in different forms like a nightmarish shape-shifter.

  “Do you hate the brothers for what they did to you?” he asked.

  “No, they’re too pathetic to waste an important emotion like hatred on them. And the irony is that they gave me my life. For all the savagery they inflicted on me, I’m where I am today because of those vicious little boys.”

  “That’s true of me and Rudy Cutter, too. He’s why I’m a cop.”

  “And do you hate him for what he did?” Eden asked.

  “Yes, I do.”

  Eden nodded, but she didn’t say anything. He wondered if she thought he was wrong to feel that way. Or maybe she was lying to cover up how much hatred she felt herself.

  “How did you wind up in the US originally?” Frost asked, changing the subject and trying to pull her away from the worst of her past.

  “We moved here when I was a teenager. My mom was American. A teacher from South Carolina. She met my dad on an ecotourism trip in Costa Rica. They got married and lived in Melbourne for twenty years, but eventually, we moved to New York when Dad got a job offer with one of the global finance partnerships. My brother was already studying journalism at Columbia, so it made sense.”

  “Is your mom still alive?”

  “No, it’s just me. Mom died not long after we came to the States. Then we lost my brother in Afghanistan. And now my dad. I’m an orphan.”