Brian Freeman - The Voice Inside

“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.

“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.