Brian Freeman: The Voice Inside

This was San Francisco. Absolutely nothing surprised Frost anymore.

“He said you’d come,” the man announced. He ducked behind the desk and scrambled onto a high stool and leaned forward with his elbows on the top of the cash register. They were eye to eye now.

“Who said that?” Frost asked.

“The guy who paid me two hundred dollars to open up tonight.”

“And who are you?” Frost asked.

“My name’s Copernicus,” the man replied.

“Like the astronomer?”

“I am the astronomer. That was me in a past life.” As Frost’s lips bent into a smile, the man added, “I realize there are plenty of nonbelievers.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Frost replied. “Who were you after Copernicus? Shakespeare?”

“Actually, I was a Chinese concubine in the city of Dadu during the Ming dynasty.”

“No kidding? You’d think the whole earth-revolves-around-the-sun thing would have gotten you a better gig the next time around.”

“Don’t mock what you don’t understand,” the man said.

“Fair enough. You’re Copernicus. So who paid you two hundred dollars to be open in the middle of the night?”

“I didn’t ask his name,” Copernicus replied. “He paid cash. That was good enough for me.”

“What did he look like?”

“Tall. And yes, don’t joke, I know everyone is tall to me. He wore a Giants cap and big sunglasses, so I didn’t see much of his face. He wore a bulky coat. I don’t know if he was heavy or skinny or what.”

“And what exactly did he want you to do?” Frost asked.

“He said I should open up the store at four in the morning and wait for a detective who looked like Justin Timberlake to show up,” Copernicus said.

“Funny.”

“Honestly, I don’t know who the hell that is, but I assume he meant you.”

“Well, I’m here,” Frost said. “Now what?”

“Now I’m supposed to give you this.”

Copernicus opened a cherrywood music box on the desk, which started playing a plink-plink version of the waltz from Carousel . Hidden inside was a woman’s watch, which the man grabbed and dangled by its clasp from his tiny hand. He held it out to Frost at the end of his arm. Before taking it, Frost slid on a pair of gloves, and then he pinched the edge of the band and examined it.

The watch was expensive and very distinctive. The face was teardrop shaped, surrounded by diamonds, and the silver band was encrusted with ruby and topaz stones. Frost recognized the design. Like everything else about this night, it was meant to evoke a memory of events that had happened five years earlier.

This was an exact replica of the watch owned by Melanie Valou. She’d been wearing it on the day she disappeared; it had been visible on her wrist, shiny and dazzling, on the ATM camera from Market and Van Ness. But the watch hadn’t been on her wrist when Melanie’s body was found. Instead, everyone knew that the watch would eventually be found on the wrist of the next victim. Just like all the others.

His lieutenant, Jess Salceda, had made it her mission in life to find where Rudy Cutter had hidden Melanie’s watch. After several searches of Cutter’s home that turned up nothing, she’d finally outsmarted him. His hiding place was ingenious, just a utility hole in the ceiling above a hardwired smoke detector, but Jess had spotted a small flake of plaster dust in the carpet that roused her suspicions. When she’d rooted about inside the hole with her finger, she’d discovered Melanie’s watch.

Finding it was the break that had finally put Rudy Cutter in jail for life. It was the break that had brought the murder spree to an end.

“Am I supposed to be impressed?” Frost asked. “I get it. This is a copy of Melanie Valou’s watch. Why should I care?”

Copernicus laughed. His muttonchops danced, and his teeth were tea stained.

“This isn’t funny,” Frost told him.

“No, it’s not that. Look, I don’t know whose watch this is or what the hell it means. The guy said give it to you, so I gave it to you. But he told me what you’d say, and he was right. That’s why I’m laughing. He said you’d call it a copy of this girl’s watch.”

“So what?” Frost asked.

“So he said I should tell you it’s not a copy. He says the other watch — the one you guys found — was the fake. The cops planted it.”

Frost didn’t go home.

He drove through mostly quiet streets to the far corner of the city. Dawn was still a long, dark hour away. He parked his police Suburban in the empty lot where buses normally unloaded tourists to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. Ocean gusts buffeted the vehicle. Above the waters of the bay, gauzy lights outlined the bridge deck, and fog shrouded the tops of the red towers. He watched the headlights of crazy-early commuters head south toward the city.

For tourists, this was the symbol of San Francisco. For the locals, it was just a bridge. It meant tolls and traffic jams. Frost had lived here his whole life, and he knew it was easy to become jaded about the beauty of this place. Sometimes, he forced himself to stop and stare and see his home through the eyes of strangers. He had to remind himself that he was lucky to be here, because there were days when he couldn’t see past the darkness of being a cop. Today was one of those days.

Melanie’s watch was in his gloved hand.

It had the heaviness of real silver and the shine of real jewels. It felt authentic, exactly the kind of watch that a rich woman like Camille Valou would have bought for her daughter in a boutique jewelry shop in Switzerland. But even if it was real, even if it was an exact match for the watch Melanie had worn, it had to be a replica. Jess Salceda had found Melanie’s watch in Rudy Cutter’s ceiling. Melanie’s mother, Camille, had identified it in court. There was no mistake.

He turned the watch over in his hand. Squinting, he made out a tiny inscription in French etched into the metal. La rêveuse.

The dreamer.

The original watch, which Jess had discovered, had no such inscription on the back. That was something Camille would certainly have noticed when Jess showed it to her. And yet the coincidence of an inscription in French — Camille had been born in Lyon — bothered Frost.

The watch was stopped. The mechanism had wound down, and the time was frozen in place.

3:42 a.m.

He told himself that someone was manipulating him. Playing with his head. He knew who it was. From inside the walls of San Quentin, Rudy Cutter had found a way to make all of this happen. Cutter was a smart, methodical man, who’d patiently stalked and killed seven women, who’d outsmarted Jess and the rest of the San Francisco Police for years. This mystery had his fingerprints all over it.

Rudy Cutter.

Jess and Cutter had played a game of cat and mouse before Melanie’s death. He was her prime suspect in what the press had dubbed the Golden Gate Murders. They’d called it that because the first victim, Nina Flores, had been found right here where Frost was parked, in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The clue that had helped Jess pinpoint Cutter came from a combination of luck and shoe leather. After one of the victims had been found in a hotel parking lot near the Cannery, a tourist had sent the police a series of videos taken in that area during her weekend vacation, which overlapped with the victim’s disappearance. Jess studied the videos and ran the license plates of every vehicle she saw parked near the Cannery. One car, one name, raised a red flag with her. The owner of the car — a forty-eight-year-old data entry clerk named Rudy Cutter — had come up in her investigation before. He’d used a credit card at the coffee shop where Nina Flores had worked. Jess had talked to him three years earlier, but back then, she’d had no reason to consider Cutter a suspect. He was just one of dozens of coffee shop customers she’d interviewed after Nina’s murder.