The Voice Inside (Frost Easton Book 2)

by Brian Freeman

  “Good.”

  Duane winked at her. “Should I tell him the news? Or do you want to?”

  Frost looked back and forth between them. “News?”

  “Let’s not do this now, Duane,” Tabby suggested. “Please. Frost said he needs to go. It’s been a stressful day for everyone.”

  “No, no, it’s the perfect time!” Duane replied. “Mom and Dad are here. It’s the whole family! We should be talking about good news for a change after everything that’s happened.”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense,” Frost said.

  Duane grabbed Tabby’s hand again. He looked as giddy as Frost had ever seen him. “We’re getting married!”

  Frost felt speechless. It was a terrible time to be speechless. A flush rose in Tabby’s cheeks, and Duane bent over and kissed her forehead. Frost tried to come up with something to say and finally said, “Oh, wow.”

  An exceptional comeback.

  “When I thought about how close I came to losing her,” Duane went on, “it made everything so damn clear. I love this girl. So when Mom and Dad got here, I got down on one knee. I wanted them to see it, too. I know they never thought they’d see the day, but they brought us together. The whole thing is fate. I never much believed in fate, but I do now.”

  Fate.

  Yes, Frost knew exactly what he thought about fate.

  “Isn’t it wonderful, Frost?” his mother asked from across the room.

  “Wonderful,” he told both of them. “It’s great. Really.”

  “Get a tux, best man,” his brother told him. “And get one for Shack, too.”

  “Shack’s tux comes prefitted,” Frost reminded him.

  Duane thought about it and laughed. “You’re right! Now, that’s funny. See? Fate.”

  Frost tried to read Tabby’s face, but she made it difficult by looking out the window instead of at him.

  “I hate to celebrate and run,” Frost said, “but I really do need to get home.”

  “Sure, sure, will we see you tomorrow?” Duane asked.

  “Of course.”

  Duane grabbed him for another hug. “Thanks again, bro. You’re the best.”

  Frost squeezed his brother’s shoulder without saying anything more. He wanted to get out of there as fast as he could. He hugged his mother, who responded awkwardly in her usual way, and then he headed for the door. His father went with him. Ned put an arm around his shoulder as they walked to the elevator.

  “Janice and I are heading back to Arizona tomorrow,” Ned said.

  “It was good seeing you, Dad. Despite the circumstances.”

  “I know it’s torture for you to leave San Francisco, but it would be nice to have you come visit us.”

  “I will.”

  “Come for Christmas,” Ned suggested. “We already talked to Duane and Tabby about coming down for the holidays. We’ve got the room. It would be nice to have the family together.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Frost replied, which was the Easton family way of making no promises.

  The elevator door opened, but his father stopped him before he could get on. The door slid closed again with the two of them standing outside. It took Ned a minute to get out the words.

  “I was wondering, did you find out anything more about Katie?” Ned asked. “I mean, before Cutter died?”

  Frost had been expecting the question. He wished he had an answer for him. If there was one thing he’d wanted from Cutter, it was the truth about Katie, but Cutter had never regained consciousness. The secret died with him. Frost felt robbed of the opportunity to stare into the man’s eyes and ask him why.

  “I’m sorry. No, I didn’t. He wasn’t able to tell me a thing.”

  “She doesn’t really fit like the others, does she?” his father asked.

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  Ned shook his head in confusion. “I guess all we can do is live with it, but it still feels like a mystery. I hate that.”

  “I know it does, Dad,” Frost replied, “and I hate it, too. But not every mystery gets solved.”

  Frost went from the hospital back to Ocean Beach, and he stayed there for two more hours in silence, watching the waves. His phone was off. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. The rain had ended, but the winds remained strong, keeping the surf angry and high. It didn’t matter that Cutter was dead. It didn’t matter that the case was over. He had a sense of unfinished business, but the ocean had no answers for him.

  Eventually, there was nothing else to do but go home.

  It was past midnight when he let himself inside the house on Russian Hill. In the foyer, he saw that Eden’s boxes, with her research notes and manuscript, were still there. He knew she’d be waiting for him when he returned, because she wasn’t done with him yet. She needed a last interview. She needed an ending for her story.

  Shack bounded to the foyer to greet him and immediately began his typical King Kong climb up Frost’s leg.

  “Watch those claws, buddy,” Frost said, but the cat paid no attention. Shack staked out his spot on Frost’s shoulder and stayed there as Frost wandered into the living room with the lights off and then out onto the patio to watch the city and the stars. The storm had vanished; the night was clear and cool.

  He turned on his phone, and he had several messages waiting for him. Some were from the media, which he skipped. The first personal message was from Herb.

  “Frost, my friend. You’re all over the news. I’m grateful that things ended well, although I’m sure that doesn’t make what you went through any easier. I’ve got to teach a class at my gallery in the morning, but we obviously need to have a Sierra Nevada together very soon. If you need to talk in the interim, call me anytime.”

  The next message was from Eden in her usual smoky voice.

  “It’s late. I’m not sure when you’ll be back, but I hope you’re okay. I’m going to bed upstairs. Wake me up when you get home.”

  And the last message was from Tabby. It had come in only five minutes earlier.

  “Hey. It’s me. Everybody just left. I took a hit of the pain meds, so I’m probably going to be loopy. I wanted to say . . . actually, I have no idea what I want to say to you. Thanks? I’m sorry? This is hard. I feel like we should . . . I don’t know . . . I feel like there are some things . . .”

  There was a pause so long that he thought she’d drifted off to sleep. But then she went on.

  “I’m not making any sense, am I . . . I guess this is the morphine talking. I better hang up before I say something really stupid. Stop by tomorrow, okay? I’d like to see you. Night, Frost.”

  He played the message again. And again. Then he went back inside the house. He thought about having a drink but concluded it wasn’t a good idea. Shack hopped off his shoulder onto the sofa, and Frost went upstairs to one of the spare bedrooms, where he took a shower. The hot water revived him. Afterward, instead of going downstairs to the sofa where he usually slept, he went into the master bedroom.

  Eden was there. She slept on her stomach on the king-sized bed. He sat down in the overstuffed armchair on the other side of the room and watched her. In his memory, he could feel the touch of her skin and the smoothness and curves of her body. It would have been easy to climb into bed next to her. Wake her up. Have sex with her. That was what she wanted, and a part of him wanted it, too.

  Instead, he sat in the chair until his eyes felt heavy, and he finally fell asleep right where he was.

  When he woke up, he saw the clock on the nightstand, and he was instantly alert. It was 3:42 a.m. That shouldn’t have mattered to him now, because Rudy Cutter was dead, but he realized that a disturbance in the house had awakened him. Again. It was the same as it had been weeks earlier.

  He’d heard something in the house below him. And unmistakably, he smelled the dark burn of Phil Cutter’s cigarette smoke.

  Frost went into the master closet and found a lockbox on the upper shelf. His department weapon had been taken from him because of
the shooting, but he kept a backup firearm for himself. He retrieved the gun and padded downstairs in his bare feet. The smell of smoke was stronger down here. Shack, his back fur arched, had taken refuge on top of the mahogany bookshelf, but the intruder was already gone.

  He saw nothing amiss in the house this time. No Halloween surprises. No alarm clocks. All that had been left for him was a slim manila envelope in the middle of the floor.

  Frost picked it up by the edges. He took the envelope into the dining room, where he put his gun on the table and switched on the lights. He turned over the envelope in his hands and saw a message scrawled on the outside:

  Rudy wanted you to have this.

  The envelope was light, as if almost nothing were inside. Frost undid the clasp and opened the flap. He saw a small piece of paper tucked near the bottom of the envelope, and he overturned it and let the paper flutter onto the dining room table. It was no more than four inches by six inches, with what looked like grease stains on the surface. Using the cap of a pen, Frost turned the paper over and saw that it was a green, lined receipt, the kind used for taking orders at diners.

  And at pizza restaurants.

  Frost recognized the handwriting on the slip. Katie had written it. He saw the name above the delivery address, too. Todd Clary. Clary had ordered an olive-and-arugula pizza with garlic cream sauce to 415 Parker. It was the last order Katie had ever taken. This receipt was what had sent her on a delivery run that would end in her murder. It still made no sense to him.

  He checked the envelope again. There was nothing else inside. Rudy Cutter had obviously believed that this piece of paper would offer up the answer to Katie’s death, but Frost didn’t understand its significance. He studied the receipt for a hidden clue, but all he saw was what Katie had scribbled down from Clary’s phone call:

  Todd Clary

  Delivery to 415 Parker

  Large olive/arugula cream sauce

  $24.35

  The note made him heartsick because seeing it brought Katie to life again. He could see her writing it; he could hear her voice. Twenty minutes later, she’d carried the pizza out the door on Haight and climbed into her Chevy Malibu.

  And headed the wrong way.

  Why?

  Frost stared at the receipt. He knew Katie better than anyone; he should have been able to figure out what she was telling him. But finally, he realized that his closeness to Katie was the problem. He had to stop looking at the receipt like a brother who’d grown up with her.

  He stared at it again, like a stranger.

  And he knew. Just like that, he saw what Katie had written, and he knew what she’d done. The answer was staring him in the face. He knew why Katie had gone east from the restaurant, not west toward Todd Clary’s house. He knew where she was going with that pizza.

  It didn’t take him long to figure out the rest. He had everything he needed to solve the mystery. The pieces came together, one after another, like gears meshing in an elaborate machine. Half an hour later, he knew why Katie had been killed that night and whose secret she would have exposed if she’d stayed alive.

  When the truth finally settled into his brain, he realized that Cutter had been right all along. Horror can always get worse.

  48

  Frost was sitting on the sofa in the shadows when Eden Shay came down from the bedroom at the first light of dawn. She’d put on satin pajama bottoms and a spaghetti-strap top. Her black curls were a wild mess. She saw him and cocked her head in surprise.

  “Well, there you are. The hero returns. What time did you get in?”

  “Late.”

  “I was hoping you’d join me in bed.”

  “I watched you sleep,” Frost said.

  “Really? There’s something sensual about that. I like it.”

  Frost didn’t answer. He was done with the flirting. He was done being played.

  “So Cutter’s dead,” Eden said. “It was all over the news.”

  “Yes, he is. You must be relieved.”

  She looked at him strangely. “Relieved?”

  “You can finish your book now.”

  “Oh. Sure.” She eyed the kitchen behind her. “Can I make you breakfast?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You say that now, but you haven’t tried my hot-and-spicy scrambled eggs.”

  She wandered in her bare feet into the kitchen. He watched her, unable to move. She retrieved eggs from the refrigerator and frowned at the expiration date, but began to crack them into a bowl anyway. She opened his cabinets and found whatever chili spices he had—which probably dated back to Shack’s original owner—and opened the jars. She dug up a pan and swirled some oil in the bottom.

  “Do you want to talk about yesterday?” she called to him. “I understand if you’re not ready. You need time.”

  When he didn’t answer, she glanced over her shoulder.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  Frost got up from the sofa. He walked over and stood at the entrance to the kitchen. “Do you remember Robbie Lubin?”

  Eden’s eyebrows arched curiously. “Sure. He’s Natasha’s brother.”

  “I seem to recall you telling me that you visited him in Minnesota when you first started researching the case for your book.”

  “You recall correctly,” Eden replied. Her voice was light but wary. “I told you, I always do my homework. Why?”

  “When you visited Gilda Flores back then, she showed you Nina’s bedroom, right?”

  “Of course. You know that. What’s this about?”

  Frost tried to ignore the roaring in his head. He wanted to be dead inside; he wanted to feel nothing. But that was impossible. This woman had come to him, and he’d let her into his life. He’d given her everything she wanted. He was attracted to her. He’d slept with her. And all along, she’d been manipulating him. All along, she’d hidden the truth.

  His instincts had told him from the beginning not to trust her. He should have listened to the voice inside.

  “This is about the fact that you solved the Golden Gate Murders seven years ago,” Frost said. “You knew that Rudy Cutter was the killer before anyone else did.”

  The curiosity, the playfulness, the innocence all vanished from her face, which became a mask of icy calm. He read her expression. In an instant, she realized that he’d figured it all out. She was already wondering how far he’d gone and what he could prove.

  “What are you talking about, Frost?” Eden asked, giving nothing away.

  “Hope’s sketches. The mothers and daughters. That’s the connection that ties all the victims together. Well, except Katie, but you already know that, don’t you? Jess never figured out Cutter’s pattern, because she never saw more than one of Hope’s sketches. I assumed that no one did, but that’s not true. You saw the sketches. You saw one on the wall in Nina’s bedroom, and you saw another one when you visited Robbie in Minnesota.”

  Eden shrugged. “If I did, then obviously, I missed it. Or I didn’t appreciate the significance.”

  “You? No, you wouldn’t have missed a detail like that. No way. I can only imagine the adrenaline you must have felt. How hard was it to keep the truth to yourself? To keep the excitement off your face so Robbie didn’t suspect? You saw that sketch, and you knew you had the clue that would break the whole case open.”

  Eden turned off the heat on the stovetop. She rinsed her hands, and then she turned around and leaned back against the kitchen counter. Her face showed nothing at all. No secrets. No guilt.

  “Frost, are you out of your mind?”

  “I get it. You don’t think I can prove it. Maybe I can’t. But as smart as you are, I still think you left a trail. At first, I couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t have taken this straight to Jess. That would have been the right thing to do, but it wouldn’t have been much of a story, would it? No, the real story for a writer like you would be to find the killer yourself. And that’s what you did. I imagine you talked to people at the
hospitals to track down Hope. Did you lie and say that you had a sketch of your own? Maybe your mother died recently and it would mean so much to you to find out who did that little portrait? It probably wasn’t too hard to make the connection. Did you talk to a few retired nurses? Did you bribe someone in HR to run some personnel searches for you? Someone’s going to remember you asking all those questions, Eden. Count on it. We’ll get your e-mail and phone records, too. I don’t know exactly how you made the breakthrough, but sooner or later, you found Hope’s name. And of course, once you did a little research on Hope, you found your way to Rudy Cutter. He would already have been stalking Hazel Dixon by then. And meanwhile, you started stalking him.”

  Eden couldn’t hide her hostility now. He was backing her into a corner, and she didn’t like it there.

  “If I’d learned Rudy Cutter’s name, I would have given it to the police,” she said.

  Frost shook his head. “No. Not you. This was the ultimate opportunity for a writer like you. You could be embedded with a serial killer. You could get inside a murderer’s head while he was still committing his crimes. Even your brother had never done anything like that.”

  “You should be a writer yourself,” Eden snapped. “You’re quite the storyteller.”

  “I’m curious, how exactly did it work?” Frost went on, ignoring her denials. “Did you approach Rudy and tell him what you knew? Did you make a deal with him? You’d keep his secret if he let you follow along with everything he did? After all, that was the same deal you made with me. How far did it go, Eden? How far did you take it? Were you with him as he stalked Hazel Dixon? Were you actually there when he slashed her throat? Did he let you watch?”

  He looked into her eyes, and he knew he was right. She’d been there. She’d been part of the crime. And from that moment forward, she could never go back. She’d become an accessory to murder.

  “I think I should go,” Eden said.

  “You’re not going anywhere. Not until you tell me about Katie.”

  “I’m sorry, Frost. I know you’ve been under a lot of pressure lately, but you’re delusional.”

  “Did I ever tell you about Katie’s handwriting?” Frost asked.