The Voice Inside (Frost Easton Book 2)

by Brian Freeman

  This time, squinting into the fog, she saw a face.

  A man stood on the ridge, not ten feet away from her, dressed in jeans and a black hoodie, his hands hidden. He stared at her with fixed, dead eyes. And just as quickly, he disappeared. The face vanished, obscured by the moving cloud of fog. In that split second, she recognized him.

  The face, coming and going, belonged to Rudy Cutter.

  He was right there.

  Maria felt a chill, not from cold, but from fear. Instinctively, she took a step backward, and the trail gave way to the crackle of branches under her sneakers. She told herself that this was another fantasy conjured by the fog. Cutter wasn’t targeting her; he was going after someone else. The police had said so.

  She listened and heard no footsteps anywhere around her. She was alone.

  Or was she?

  Something was behind her, and she spun around. Except there was nothing. And then, just as quickly, she felt someone coming near her from the other direction. She turned again.

  Nothing. No one.

  She wanted to call out, but she clamped her mouth shut. She didn’t move. She didn’t make a sound. She realized she was holding her breath. If I can’t see him, then he can’t see me.

  But was any of it real?

  Maria remembered the buzzing of her phone. She reached into her pocket and grabbed the phone and stared at the glow of the screen. Two missed calls. Both of them from Frost Easton. She had voice mail waiting for her, and she held the phone tightly against her ear to listen to the message. She wanted him to reassure her that everything was fine. Instead, his voice brought all the terror back.

  “Maria, stay home. I’m sending the police. Rudy Cutter may be nearby.”

  She tried to hang up the phone. Instead, her fingers trembling, she accidentally punched the speakerphone button, and the message started over and boomed into the fog. It took forever to shut it off. The silence, when the noise was over, felt ominous, as if she’d told the world exactly where she was. She stood there, waiting, panicking.

  The fog got thicker and thicker.

  Maria was certain now. Cutter was here. She could feel him. Blindly, not even looking down, she ran.

  The San Bruno police beat Frost to Maria’s door. They were waiting for him when he arrived. Three uniformed officers stood around two squad cars, and he could see that Maria’s front door was open, with another officer just inside the doorway. He introduced himself to the cops on the street.

  “What’s the status?” Frost asked.

  “The homeowner isn’t here,” one of the officers replied. He was a burly Filipino kid in his early twenties. “The nanny answered the door. She said Ms. Lopes left on a run about forty-five minutes ago.”

  Frost shook his head. “She went for a run? Now? I can’t believe she would take a risk like that after I talked to her.”

  “Well, the nanny said she got a call from the SFPD giving her the all clear,” the cop told him.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, some detective called and said not to worry, she wasn’t the target.”

  Frost knew who had made that call. Rudy Cutter. The spider had lured her into the web. They were running out of time.

  “Where did she go?” he asked.

  “The park trails. Beyond that, the nanny doesn’t know. She says Ms. Lopes likes to vary her route.”

  Frost was too far away to hear noise from the ridge. A scream wouldn’t even be a whisper. All he knew was that Cutter was after Maria. And Maria wasn’t answering her phone. She thought she was safe, when in fact, she’d been lured to the hills by Cutter himself.

  He stared up at Sweeney Ridge. The fog descended toward him, heavy and thick. It had crossed the summit and was stealing like a prowler into the valley. From where he was, he couldn’t see the slope of the hills now. Daylight was already fading to night, adding a black shroud to the haze of the fog.

  Maria was up there. They had to go get her.

  “Leave one officer inside the house, in case she gets home,” Frost said. “The rest of you, let’s go.”

  43

  Frost led them into the valley. The only noise was the clap of their boots on the trail. There was almost no wind. After a hundred yards, they reached the first fork, where one path descended toward the lake and the other climbed sharply to the top of the ridge. He sent one of the uniformed officers straight ahead, and the two others stayed with him on the route up the hill.

  He locked his knees as he pushed higher with each step. The fog thickened. The handful of trees clinging to the slope became silhouettes against a gray wall. It was a mile from the valley to the summit, and as they reached each lower peak, the trail descended into the next seam and then rose again. The tight switchbacks were like horseshoes. He stopped regularly, hoping to hear the thump of Maria’s footsteps descending toward them, but they were three solitary ghosts on the hillside.

  Far below, the wail of sirens rose from the city. Reinforcements were on their way. He called Captain Hayden from the slope and asked him to coordinate with the police in San Bruno and Pacifica to place men at the obvious trail outlets. Even so, he knew their best chance of catching Cutter was here on the ridge. The reach of the hills was vast, spilling down into neighborhoods in the west and east. In the fog and the growing darkness, Cutter could easily slip away.

  Frost dialed Maria’s phone again. As before, she didn’t answer.

  He shouted for her: “Maria!”

  His voice sounded loud, but he didn’t know how well it carried. A crow, disturbed by the noise, ascended with a mocking cry from the brush nearby. They waited for Maria to call back, but stillness hung over the trail. There was nothing for them to do but keep climbing.

  As they neared the high peak of the ridge, the wind revived and slapped their faces like a wet hand. Pockets of clear air wormed into the fog. With one step, the path would be invisible; with the next, they’d momentarily see a snapshot of the low foliage around them. Telephone poles crowned the hillside. Where the paved trail curved northward, he spotted a smaller, unpaved cross trail leading south. At the intersection of paths, he saw a small stone restroom with an angled tin roof.

  Frost crossed the stretch of dirt and took out a small flashlight from his pocket. He yanked open the restroom door and examined the tiny interior with the light. The sewage smell was strong. No one was inside.

  “What now?” one of the cops asked.

  The trails followed the up-and-down peaks of the ridge. Frost shined a light along the path in both directions, but the fog threw the light back in his eyes. There were no footprints on the dry ground. He cupped his hands around his mouth and called for Maria again. She didn’t answer.

  “The two of you head south,” he told the other cops. “The trail splits past the discovery monument, so you can each take one. I’ll go north. If you find anything, shout.”

  They split up. Frost watched the fog envelop the officers as they headed down the path. He turned around and made his way back to the paved trail, which continued higher at a shallow climb. He marched, completely alone, through a milky bubble. The damp air got into his bones.

  His flashlight swept the ground at his feet as he walked. Near the next peak, amid the sea of gray, he spotted a tiny flash of color. When he reached it, he found a red sneaker tipped over forlornly on the trail. It was an expensive shoe, a Nike Flyknit, and it looked almost new. No one would have voluntarily left it behind. He crouched down and slid a finger inside, and the interior of the shoe felt warm and wet.

  Frost cast his flashlight around the dense brush. Not far away, a dead-end spur off the main trail led to an old weather station. He jogged that way, keeping an eye on the gravel for other clues that Maria may have left behind. The hilltop was cold. The wind roared, making music on the steel instruments tower. He felt as if he were on the summit of the world up here.

  A squat white storage tank dominated the open ground. The dirt was lined with rutted tire tracks, but they weren’t rece
nt. He made a circuit around the building, finding nothing. This was the highest spot on the ridge, and from where he was, the land flattened. The fog thinned slightly, but the light of the day was mostly gone. He shouted Maria’s name again. He could barely hear himself.

  Frost tramped through the brush back to the main trail. He continued north. Two hundred feet along the ridge line, he squinted as he saw another flash of color in the light of his flashlight. It was a second shoe, a matching red Nike. The shoes were like breadcrumbs left by Maria. She’d been taken up here; she’d been dragged this way. She couldn’t be far.

  Less than a quarter mile away were the ruins of an old missile complex that had been built in the ’50s to protect the Bay Area from a Soviet air assault that never came. The remote buildings had long since been abandoned to decay, but every Sweeney Ridge hiker knew about them. Frost ran. Through the fog, he saw the first of the lonely missile buildings take shape ahead of him, with its commanding view over the Pacific, where soldiers could monitor the skies. The cinder-block walls were painted over with wild graffiti. The doors and windows were long gone, leaving empty shells for birds to nest and animals to take shelter. It was a Cold War ghost town.

  “Maria!”

  This time, he heard something. Muffled. Not far away. A woman screamed. The voice rose in a shrill wail and then cut off sharply. The eddies of the wind made it impossible to tell where it had come from.

  Frost drew his gun into his hand. He crept forward into the missile complex. Weeds sprouted through the cracks in the stone and trembled in the breeze. The cement platforms, like the buildings, were covered in graffiti. He saw drawings of alien heads. Peace signs. A beatnik with black, empty eyes. Long ago, someone had painted a warning on the ground in bold capital letters:

  WE ALL MUST MEET OUR MOMENT OF TRUTH.

  That was exactly how Frost felt.

  He climbed the cracked steps into the first building. Most of the roof was gone. The interior was dark, and when he cast his light around the space, he saw fallen rubble and the remnants of people who had come here to party in the ruins. Broken bottles. Needles. Moldy food picked apart by birds.

  But no one was here.

  He returned into the growing darkness. There wasn’t much time.

  “Cutter!” he shouted into the wind. “Give it up! I know you’re here. I know about Hope and the sketches. I know everything. You’re done. It’s over. Don’t make it worse.”

  He made a slow circle, trying to peer through the fog. Nothing moved, other than the fragile weeds. He felt mist on his face. Leading the way with his gun, he crossed the trail onto a circular cement platform in the middle of a spiderweb of dirt trails. Whatever had been housed here was gone. There was more graffiti. More loose stone. The bushes grew taller here, partially blocking his view of the next building in the missile complex, which was fifty feet away. Behind the waving branches, as the fog blew in and out, he saw rusted vent grills on top of the cinder-block wall and wild red-and-orange graffiti letters spelling out the word RIOT.

  He could see the shell of a doorway, too.

  And there was Rudy Cutter. Alone.

  Frost saw no sign of Maria Lopes. For a long, frozen moment, he stared at Cutter, and Cutter stared back at him. The man’s face was a mask, a mystery, without any happiness or sadness. As Frost’s gaze followed the line of the man’s body, he saw something else, too, secured in the man’s hand.

  A knife.

  Red blood dripped from the blade to the dirt.

  Frost leaped forward through the tangle of vines rooted in the ground. The brush trapped him, making it almost impossible to move. As he ran, he couldn’t see. The weeds were as tall as he was. He dragged himself through a sharp, tight web that scratched his face, and then he finally burst out onto the cracked pavement in front of the building. Cutter was already gone. The darkness had swallowed him up. Frost lit up the walls and the hillside behind the missile complex, but there was no sign of him.

  He sprinted for the building and threw himself inside. His flashlight reflected a shiny spattered blood trail across the debris on the stone floor. It led him under the rotting wooden timbers in the ceiling and toward a huge open window frame that was bordered with peeling green paint. In the next abandoned room, he saw a plastic mannequin, its body crusted with dirt, its head cut off, its arm pointed straight ahead, as if it were beckoning him.

  He ran to the window frame and climbed through to the other side.

  At the feet of the mannequin was Maria Lopes.

  Seeing her, Frost felt his heart seize. Her blood was everywhere. Her blood made a lake. Rudy Cutter had slashed her throat deeply and ruthlessly. Frost ran to her and held her, but her eyes were closed, and each breath she drew was labored and long. He called 911; he alerted the paramedics and police; but he knew he was already too late. The hillside was too remote. There wasn’t enough time. He ripped the sleeve off his coat and wrapped her neck and applied pressure, but he was holding back a heart pumping its life into the cold air with each beat.

  This woman, this lovely woman, had been alive when he met her hours earlier. A mother. A wife. And then, like the others, she’d crossed paths with Cutter, and he’d stolen all of it away from her.

  It made Frost want to scream. It made him want to cry. He’d been too late for Katie. Too late for Jess. And now too late for Maria, too. Cutter had won again. He always won.

  Frost murmured lies into Maria’s ears as the two of them waited in the dark ruins. It’s okay, hang on, help is coming, you’re going to be fine. But she wasn’t going to be fine. Her eyes never opened. All the while, her ragged breaths came further and further apart, until only a few minutes later, they stopped altogether. A breath went out; nothing came back in. The silence was awful as she died in his arms.

  44

  One of the other detectives at police headquarters gave Frost a new shirt to wear. He changed in the bathroom. His own shirt was soaked in Maria’s blood, and when he took it off, he saw that blood had seeped through onto his arms and chest. He cleaned himself at the sink as best as he could, but when he was done, he still saw remnants in the seams of his skin and under his fingernails. When he looked in the mirror, he saw gruesome red highlights in his hair.

  It was already past midnight. The hunt was on. The police had converged on the missile complex at Sweeney Ridge, but Cutter was nowhere to be found. He’d disappeared into the sprawling hills. There were police helicopters overhead, shining spotlights on the trails, but he was either hidden in the forest or he’d escaped back to the city. Every cop in the Bay Area was looking for him.

  Frost waited for Pruitt Hayden in the captain’s office. He’d already been waiting a long time. He hadn’t realized how tired he was until he sat down. The room was warm, and his head swam. He found his eyes blinking shut, and without realizing it, he drifted to sleep. In his dreams, he saw ten long, jewel-encrusted daggers dangling from his living room ceiling at home, tethered by silver threads, all of them dripping blood. He saw identical gleaming platinum watches on both of his arms, five on the left, five on the right, all of them set to 3:42 a.m.

  A woman stood directly below each knife. All the victims. Nina, Rae, Natasha, Hazel, Shu, and Melanie. And now Maria, too—and Jess—and Katie. They seemed unaware of the lethal danger just over their heads. Slowly, one by one, as he shouted to warn them, the knives fell, burrowing into their skulls and vanishing. One by one, the women calmly lay down on his living room floor. With each victim, a watch disappeared from his wrist and appeared on the wrist of the woman at his feet. There was no rush. It was leisurely and horrible and silent. A knife fell. A victim died. His watch became her watch.

  One, two, three, four, on and on. He couldn’t stop it.

  Soon it was Maria’s turn. Maria in her red sneakers. He called out, but his voice didn’t make a sound. The knife fell, and she was gone. Then Jess. His deep track. She stared at him in the moody and intense way she always did, but she didn’t say anything. The knife
penetrated her skull, like all the others. She sank to her knees, and she toppled sideways, and she lay still.

  He had two watches left on his wrist, but there was only one victim left in the room. Katie.

  His sister grinned at him. She held a pizza box and stared around with wide blue eyes at the Russian Hill house. She called out to him, in the familiar Katie voice he hadn’t heard in years.

  “Hey, did you order this pizza? Because I think I’m in the wrong place.”

  Frost tried to answer. He tried to scream at her: Go, go, go, go, go. But he was too late. He was always too late. He was too late for every one of them; they were all gone; they were all dead. The thread broke, and the knife fell. His pretty, sunny sister put down the pizza box carefully on the floor and then stretched out beside it, as if she were no more than a child taking a nap.

  There was one watch left on his wrist. One knife dangling from the ceiling. But no victim. There was no one else in the room. It was supposed to be over, but he knew it wasn’t over yet. A voice whispered in his ear. He was alone in the room with the victims, but Rudy Cutter’s voice was in his head: You think you’ve seen it all, but horror can always get worse.

  Frost started awake as he heard the rattle of the handle on the door behind him. He checked the clock on the wall. Nearly two hours had passed. Pruitt Hayden rumbled inside, as huge and threatening as a grizzly bear. The captain dropped heavily into his office chair and leaned forward.

  “Sorry to keep you stuck in here for so long. I just got back to the office. How are you, Easton?”