Brian Freeman - The Voice Inside

Eden sat down on the sofa. “I don’t know, Frost. I didn’t find anything that Nina and Hope had in common. They were about as different as two people could be. I still think Jess was right. Nina must have reminded him of Wren. Somehow the others did, too.”

“Yes, but Cutter loved Wren. Whereas he still hates Hope like this all happened yesterday.”

“True. So what do you want?”

Frost pointed at the box of notes. “Is there anything in there about Hope?”

“Quite a lot.”

“Okay. Tell me about her. Help me get inside her head.”

“I wish I could,” Eden replied. “She may be even more of a mystery than Rudy is. I mean, how does a mother murder her own child? The docs all talked about PPD, but that’s the clinical explanation, not the emotional explanation. Most people I talked to just called her a monster.”

“You don’t believe that,” Frost said.

“No. You’re right. When you say someone is bad to the bone, it lets them off the hook. Hope wasn’t evil. That’s why it’s hard to understand her doing something so terrible. And it’s not like she didn’t do good things in her life, too. She was an ER nurse, which is as tough as it gets. Nobody remembers that now, because it doesn’t balance the scale.”

“Was Rudy abusive to her?”

Eden shook her head. “The opposite, in fact. He put up with a lot.”

“What about her childhood?”

“Pretty normal middle-class stuff. It sounds like Hope was a troubled kid going way back, though. I talked to her mom, Josephine. She feels guilty. You would, too, if you spent all those years raising a girl who grew up to kill her own daughter.”

“There has to be more. You said Hope was troubled. In what way?”

“Depression. Mood swings. That was the bipolar part of her. If you’re looking for connections to Nina, that’s not it. Nina was a happy kid. No sign of mental illness.”

Frost frowned. He didn’t see any connections, either. Even so, he was beginning to believe that he was on the right track. If you wanted to catch a killer, you had to follow the anger. And Cutter’s anger was all about Hope.

“Rudy was dead inside for years,” Frost said. “That’s the part I don’t get. What woke him up?”

“What do you mean?”

“Phil said that everything stopped for Rudy after Wren died. He didn’t talk about him being angry. It sounded like he was numb.”

Eden nodded. “A few of Rudy’s coworkers said the same thing. Losing Wren drained all the emotion out of him.”

“But then his anger flooded back when he met Nina,” Frost said. “I want to know why. There must have been something about Nina that reminded him of Hope and what she did. You said you interviewed Hope’s mother. Is she still local? Where does she live?”

“She’s in the same house in Stonestown where Hope grew up.”

“Let’s go talk to her,” Frost said.

Rudy leaned against one of the flagpoles in the Civic Center plaza. The wind had kicked up, and the flag snapped to attention over his head. Warm sun from a cloudless sky offset the wind. He had his hands in the pocket of his sweatshirt, the black hood covering his head. Around him, a few homeless people slept on the green grass, and children played on the monkey bars.

On the sidewalk on Larkin, he spotted two uniformed police officers walking side by side toward city hall. Cops never missed a thing. They were always watching even when they weren’t watching. Rudy squatted and fumbled with his shoelace with his head down. He waited until the cops had passed him, and when he stood up, he didn’t look back over his shoulder. Looking back was a dead giveaway that you didn’t want to be seen.

He could hear their boots, walking away. They hadn’t spotted him.

He focused his attention on the six-story downtown library building on the other side of the plaza. That was his destination. He strolled along the sidewalk, and behind his sunglasses, his eyes moved from face to face. The sleeping bodies on the grass. The mothers on the benches, watching their children. The parking police, doling out tickets on the cars.

At the intersection, he crossed the street with a cluster of pedestrians. On the opposite side, the library loomed like a prison of gray stone, with rows of small square windows adorned with X’s, as if the architect had been playing a game of tic-tac-toe. People came and went through the doors. He followed them, marching into a circular atrium, which rose toward a vast ceiling skylight that looked like a spiderweb. The building hummed with the quiet echo of voices.

Rudy knew where he was going. He’d been here before. He got on the elevator and punched the button for the fifth floor, where the library kept its computer training center. He kept his hoodie up and his sunglasses over his eyes. He stared straight ahead.

The doors began to close, but then they opened again as a small, skinny black man in his thirties slipped inside. The man wore a jean jacket covered in San Francisco patches and an Alcatraz baseball cap. He had the look and smell of a homeless person taking refuge from the streets, and he swayed in the elevator as if he were listening to the beat of a song that only he could hear.

“Beautiful day outside, ain’t it?” the man said to Rudy. “You been outside? That is one gorgeous day God made for us.”

Rudy nodded but didn’t look at him. “Yeah.”

“You here for the books? Most folks come for the books. Lots and lots of books in this place. Me, I like the magazines. Motorcycle magazines, mostly. Daddy had a motorcycle when I was a kid, and he let me ride on the back. That’s how I got my nickname. People call me Bike.”

Rudy said nothing.

“You ever been on a motorcycle?” the man asked.

“No.”

“Daddy loved it. Nothing like riding on the open road, he said. Wind in your face and bugs in your teeth.” The man broke into a fit of laughter. “Daddy made that joke a lot. Bugs in your teeth.”

Rudy forced a smile, but his mind was elsewhere. The arrival of the fifth floor rescued him from further conversation. He got out of the elevator and immediately turned right toward the computer center. The man in the jean jacket sauntered out behind him and headed toward the magazine room on the other side of the library.

The computers were set up on long white tables near a series of cubicles occupied by library staff. A glass wall separated the training center from the corridor. It was a busy day, and most of the computers were already taken. He spotted one open computer halfway down the aisle, and he walked there quickly, avoiding eye contact with the employees inside the cubicle walls.

Sitting down, he glanced in both directions at the people close to him. On his left side, a teenager with a cross shaved into her orange hair tapped the keyboard at lightning speed. She seemed to be writing fantasy fiction; he could see references to otherworldly monsters coming through time portals. On his right, a man in his sixties in a worn business suit worked on his résumé. Nobody paid any attention to Rudy. He silently slipped plastic gloves on his hands before touching the keyboard, and he slid off his sunglasses so he could see better.

He called up a search engine on the Internet and typed the name Maria Lopes on the keyboard. He got millions of results. He was about to narrow the search when someone thumped loudly on the glass wall in front of him. It was the black man from the elevator. He had a motorcycle magazine in his hand, and he pointed at it and gave Rudy a thumbs-up. Rudy responded with a quick smile and looked down again, hoping the man would leave, but the man stayed on the other side of the wall, repeating, “Hey!”

People in the library began to look their way.