“Did he know that you’d recognized him?”
“Hard to say. Like I said, I didn’t realize who he was until he was almost gone. Then I remembered that Herb had posted something about this guy out on Street Twitter.”
“We need to hurry,” Frost said. “Cutter might be coming back, and I don’t want him to know we’re on to him.”
Herb hoisted his suitcase in the air. “I had the same thought. I figured this would be a good time to bring my sidewalk art to the front of the library, don’t you think? I’ve been looking to do a 3-D landscape of Angel Falls in Venezuela. I went BASE jumping there a while back. It’s not for the faint of heart.”
“Is there anything you haven’t done, Herb?” Frost asked.
“I have a fairly long bucket list,” his friend replied with a shrug. “Anyway, I’ll set up shop outside. If I spot Cutter on his way back, I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks.”
Frost, Eden, and Bike took the elevator to the fifth floor. At the glass wall outside the computer center, Bike pointed to the unit that Cutter had been using. The computer was turned off, and a handwritten sign had been taped to the monitor that read, “Out of Service.”
Frost thanked Bike with a twenty-dollar bill, and then he and Eden found the nearest librarian, whose name tag said Wally. Wally could have been an inspiration for his namesake in the Dilbert cartoons. He was short, round, bald, and wore glasses. Frost showed him his badge and spoke in a low voice so that the other patrons around them couldn’t hear their conversation.
“Thanks for keeping everyone off that machine,” Frost said.
“Of course. Herb said it was important.”
Frost smiled to himself. Everyone in San Francisco knew Herb.
“Do you remember the man who was sitting there?” Frost asked. He found a photo of Rudy Cutter on his phone. “Is this him?”
“I wish I could tell you, but I can’t,” the librarian replied. “There was a disagreement about the computer being reserved, but I didn’t see the face of the man who left. He wore some kind of hooded sweatshirt.”
“Has anyone used the machine since then?” Frost asked.
“Well, the other man didn’t stay long. Another ten minutes or so. There may have been one or two other users who sat down before Herb asked us to take the unit offline, but no more than that.”
“Okay. Thanks. If this man comes back, don’t approach him, and don’t give any sign that you’ve recognized him. But send me a text right away.” He handed the librarian his card.
“I will.”
Frost and Eden sat down in chairs in front of the computer. He peeled off the sign and booted up the machine. They sat shoulder to shoulder. He was aware of the perfume she wore.
He slid gloves onto his hands. He opened up the browser on the computer and checked the search history, hoping that Cutter hadn’t had time to delete it before he was chased out of the library. He was lucky. The history was intact. He saw a long list of Google search terms stretching back throughout the course of the day.
“When did Bike say he saw Cutter?” Frost asked.
“About two hours ago,” Eden replied.
Frost checked his watch and scrolled to a point in the history two hours earlier in the afternoon. He reviewed the search terms one by one. Most were innocuous, but then Frost saw a name among the search history:
Maria Lopes
And below it a similar search:
Maria Lopes San Francisco
He froze the screen where it was. Eden stared at it, too.
“You think Cutter did that search?” she asked.
“The timing is right,” Frost said. “Does the name mean anything to you? Do you recall Cutter mentioning a woman named Maria Lopes?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“The searches before and after seem to be unrelated. It doesn’t look like he clicked on any of the results he found. Either he didn’t find what he was looking for or he was interrupted before he could do anything more.”
“Or he knew what he needed as soon as he saw it,” Eden suggested.
Frost nodded. “True.”
“So who’s Maria Lopes?” she asked.
“If my gut is right, Cutter’s in the process of targeting his next victim. He knows who she is, or at least what her name is, but apparently, he doesn’t know much more than that. That’s interesting.”
He stood up and returned to the librarian named Wally. “I’m going to be calling for an officer to watch over that machine. And we’re going to need to have our forensics people study it in detail. In the meantime, we need to keep it off and unused. I don’t want anyone touching it. Okay?”
The librarian nodded. “Yes, of course. Anything you need.”
Frost returned to Eden. He switched off the machine. Next to him, another of the computers in the lab was open. “Let’s rerun the search on a different unit. I want to see what we get when we start looking for Maria Lopes in San Francisco.”
The two of them sat down at the computer, and Frost booted up the same browser and reentered the search term that Cutter had used. He was dismayed but not surprised by the number of results. There appeared to be numerous women with the same name around the city.
Eden reached out and put her hand over his on the computer mouse. “Let’s look at the ‘Images’ tab. If he clicked to enlarge a photograph, it wouldn’t show up in the history as a separate search. But maybe something will jump out at us.”
He felt the warmth of her fingers. She kept her hand there as she scrolled downward through an array of photographs.
“See anyone you know?” he asked.
“No. Do you?”
Frost shook his head. “I don’t.”
Eden took away her hand and rolled slightly backward on the chair next to him. “So what do we do? We don’t know which woman he was trying to find.”
“I need to talk to every Maria Lopes in San Francisco,” Frost replied. “At least the younger ones. One of them is in danger.”
“Cutter’s going to work fast, Frost. He won’t wait weeks this time. He knows you’re close.”
Frost knew that was true. Time was short. Even so, he was hoping that he was finally one step ahead of Rudy Cutter.
“He may suspect that we’re close, but he doesn’t know we’ve gotten this far,” Frost said. “That’s our advantage. We know his next move now. When he goes after Maria Lopes, whoever she is, we’ll be waiting.”
35
Rudy listened to footsteps echoing on the marble floor of the San Francisco Opera building. The lobby felt like a palace, with rows of Doric columns and brass-and-crystal lanterns hanging from an inlaid gold ceiling. People came and went, mostly in business suits, and their conversations made a constant, hollow murmur that hung in the air. There was a performance of Rigoletto scheduled for the evening, and that meant a wave of activity in the hours before the show.
He’d been here once before. That was decades earlier, not long after he and Hope had been married. Someone had given them tickets to Bellini’s Norma. He didn’t even remember who it was. They’d been underdressed because they couldn’t afford opera finery. He remembered feeling out of place, and he’d sat through the opera in severe discomfort, feeling assaulted by the screeching voices in Italian. He’d assumed Hope would feel the same way, but when he looked at her at one point, he saw tears running down her face.
He’d never even asked her what it was that affected her so much. They didn’t talk about things like that.
It wasn’t a good memory.
Rudy found what he wanted near the entrance to the theater hall. A printed program. He stuffed it in his pocket and turned around and exited the building onto the stone steps leading down to Van Ness. Colorful opera banners flapped in the light breeze over his head. The sun was already low, and the temperature was dropping. He headed to the street corner and crossed to the other side, where he sat down on the cold ground with his back propped against a sculpture outsid
e Symphony Hall. From where he was, he could see the main steps of the opera building and the porte cochere for vehicles on the cross street.
The late-afternoon traffic jammed the intersection in every direction. Commuters were heading home.
He took the program out of his pocket and flipped through the pages to the listing of administrative staff. There were more people than he expected. Accountants, system administrators, music librarians, school-program coordinators, communication managers, marketers, and dozens of other people working behind the stage. He went through the list name by name, and he finally found her.
Maria Lopes. She was their assistant director of annual giving. A fund-raiser asking for money.
He was in the right place.
It was Friday. Maria was probably working. And it was almost the end of the day, which meant she should be leaving soon.
Rudy leaned forward with his arms on his knees, looking like a San Francisco street person with nowhere to go. Behind his sunglasses, he studied everyone leaving the opera building. It wasn’t easy. Dozens of people left simultaneously, heading in different directions. Trucks and buses blocked his view. He was far enough away to see both sides of the building, but the distance made it hard to distinguish each face. As the minutes passed, it also got darker.
Maria didn’t show.
Lights came on around him. Headlights blinded him as the cars passed. His vantage became useless. Most of the people who looked like office staff had been leaving through the side entrance on Grove Street, so he took a chance that Maria would do the same. He got up and crossed the street and staked out a new position near the wall of the opera building. It was after six o’clock now. He only had a moment to study each face emerging through the glass doors before they passed out of the lights and were lost on the dark street.
Six thirty came and went.
Then seven o’clock.
He began to think he was wasting his time. Either he’d missed Maria or she wasn’t at work. Then, through the nearest doors ten feet away, he spotted a profile that had a familiar cast. It had been four years, so he wasn’t sure, and the hair was much shorter than he remembered. The woman reached the sidewalk and headed away from him; she’d disappear soon. He had to make a choice. Stay or go.
Rudy followed her.
He remained half a block back, tracking her in and out of the crowd of pedestrians. The height was right. The walk was right. It might be Maria, but he couldn’t risk getting close enough to confirm it. She wore a leather jacket down to her ankles, and her shoulder-length hair was tucked under a purple beret. She led him directly east toward Market Street, and he guessed that she was heading for the BART station to catch a train. He was right.
He was ten people behind her on the crowded escalator leading underground. The BART station was a dangerous place for him. There were cameras everywhere. He had to buy a ticket, using cash, and by the time he did, the woman had disappeared. He waded back into the mass of people, and he spotted what looked like a purple beret among the bobbing heads. He forced his way through the push-and-shove of the crowd, and he found her again, on the platform for the Millbrae line heading south.
The woman momentarily turned his way, checking the departure monitors for the next train. He hid his face before she could see him, but he recognized her.
It was Maria Lopes.
Four years had changed her. He saw someone who was older, more serious, more mature. The free spirit on the tour bus had responsibilities now. But that was to be expected. Wren would have been the same, all these years later.
It was cool down below near the train tunnels. Rudy waited, watching the crowd gather, keeping an eye on Maria. Five minutes later, with a roar and a gust of wind, a train surged into the station. It was standing-room only. Maria was among the people pushing shoulder to shoulder to find space inside, and Rudy let himself get a little closer behind her. There were only three people between them inside the packed train car. If she’d peered back between the strangers, she would have seen his face, but she didn’t. She had headphones in her ears. She read her phone, head down. She was oblivious to the world.
The train left the Civic Center station. He held on to a shoulder strap as the car jostled. Throughout the downtown stops, more people got on than got off, squeezing the crowd closer together. Soon, Maria was so near he could have reached out to touch her. If he’d pursed his lips and exhaled, she would have felt the warmth of his breath on the back of her neck. Even when he’d stalked her four years earlier, he’d never been this close. And yet she was unaware.
They headed out of the city together. Maria didn’t live in San Francisco now. Going south, the train stopped in Daly City. Then Colma. Then South San Francisco. As the crowd thinned, he drifted to the far back of the car, putting more people between them. He found a seat; so did Maria. There were only two stops left: San Bruno and Millbrae.
As they neared the San Bruno station, Maria slid her headphones out of her ears and secured them in her purse, along with her phone. The train pulled in, and she got up, not looking behind her, and headed out onto the platform. She walked toward the tall escalators. Rudy followed, letting the distance between them increase. There was nowhere for her to go.
Maria emerged into the night outside the station. The bay was less than a mile away, sending a cold breeze off the water. The dark hills loomed to the west. She walked briskly toward the multilevel parking garage, with the look of someone who did this every day. Her leather jacket swished; her heels tapped. She tugged the beret down on her head.
Rudy noticed a police station immediately adjacent to the garage, but there were no cops outside. He lagged behind her, watching the way in and the way out of the garage. She reached the elevators and got inside, and when the doors closed, he ran, taking the steps and jogging up to the next floor. The elevator got there just as he did, and he hung back. Maria walked down the middle of the garage aisle, and he spied her from a distance as she climbed inside a Chevy sedan. She backed out and headed down the ramp.
She was gone.
Rudy turned around and went back down the steps.
He considered his options as he returned to the station. The garage was a possibility. If he took her there, he’d have her car in which to go somewhere more private. But the garage also had cameras, and BART riders came and went with every ding of the elevator doors. There was also the threat of cops at the nearby police station. It was a risk. And the weekend was already here, so Maria wouldn’t be heading back to the garage until Monday. Two days was a lifetime for him now.
He had to find out where Maria lived, and he had to be ready to move fast.
As he waited on the cold platform for the next northbound train, with only a handful of other people heading into the city, Rudy heard his phone ringing in his pocket. The only person who had that number was Phil. He walked to the far end of the station where he was alone, and then he answered the phone.
“What’s up?”
“Hey,” his brother replied. Phil knew better than to use names; somewhere, the government was always listening. “That person you told me to keep an eye on? I’m on the case.”
“Where?”
“A restaurant near the Ferry Building.”
“Alone?”
“No. Looks like a family dinner. What do you want me to do?”
“Just keep watching,” Rudy said. “And keep me posted.”
36
It didn’t take long for Frost to regret going to the family dinner.
“A toast!” his father said, raising a bottle of beer in the direction of Duane and Tabby. His voice was loud, but everyone in Boulevard was loud on Friday night. “To my oldest son and the girl who finally managed to get him to spend ten minutes outside that food truck of his. Honestly, Tabby, I didn’t think it could be done. Duane, you make sure this one sticks around.”
Tabby, who sat between Duane and Frost, poked Frost’s brother in the side. “But no pressure or anything, right?”
“Or getting me into a kitchen at all,” Frost added to no one in particular.
They all drank. Frost, Ned, and Tabby had beer, and Duane had his usual carrot juice. His mother had a glass of chardonnay.
Tabby had arranged for a table where they could see the frenzied work of the chefs in the restaurant’s open kitchen. That was where Tabby could be found on most evenings. The interior of Boulevard was like stepping into a ’20s French bistro, with hanging art-deco lights, bronze sculptures of half-naked women, iron grillwork, and a brick ceiling over their heads. Even the signage made the place look like a station on the Paris Metro line.
Frost’s mother eyed him from the opposite side of the table. He was waiting for the quiet verbal stiletto, and he didn’t have to wait long.
“And now that Duane finally has a girl in his life,” Janice murmured from behind her wineglass, “perhaps the day may actually come when we can say the same thing about Frost.”
Tabby covered her mouth, and Frost knew she was laughing hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. She slung an arm around his shoulder and whispered in his ear, “Aren’t families great?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he replied. “I’ve only had mine.”
Duane leaned forward. His brother’s long black hair was loose tonight, and he wore a tie for what was probably the first time in a decade. The tie was for his parents, but below the tablecloth, he wore cargo shorts.
“Actually, bro, is there a secret you want to share with us?” Duane asked with a wicked little grin.
Frost was puzzled. “Um, no.”
“Then I guess it’s up to me to spill the beans. Tabby and I stopped at Frost’s place on the way over here so we could drop off a care package for the weekend. Frost was already gone, so I let the two of us inside. And my, my, my, what did we find? There was a girl in residence at Chateau Shack.”
The Voice Inside (Frost Easton Book 2) Page 22
