Brian Freeman - The Voice Inside

“Hey!”

Rudy looked up again, an impatient question in his eyes.

“Bugs in your teeth, huh?” the man called, laughing. “Right?”

Rudy tried to laugh at the joke, and when he did, the man finally took his magazine and walked away. Rudy was alone again. He felt stares directed his way; he needed to work quickly. He tapped in a new search term:

Maria Lopes San Francisco

He still got an unmanageable number of results.

However, he noticed a row of thumbnail photographs included with the search. He clicked on the “Images” tab and found a larger array of hundreds of pictures of different women. Apparently, they were all named Maria Lopes, and they all lived in San Francisco. Some were old; some were young. Some wore cowboy hats; some wore bikinis. They were brunettes and blondes. Interspersed among the photos were religious icons, dolls of Spanish dancers, and pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge.

He scrolled down.

And there she was.

Rudy recognized her immediately. He’d seen that face day after day for weeks; he’d sat two rows away from her on a double-decker tour bus; he’d spied on her bedroom window through binoculars across from her old apartment. Maria Lopes — his Maria Lopes — was thirty-two years old. Her birthday was February 19. She had long, straight brunette hair, but he could see that she’d added blond highlights in the last four years. Her eyebrows had a wicked arch. Freckles dotted her forehead. She smiled with only her lips, in a perky, sexy way.

In the online photograph, Maria wore a business outfit, gray skirt and scoop-neck black blouse, with a slim gold chain around her neck. The picture didn’t say who she was or where she was, but it was an unusual photograph: Maria stood next to a tall woman dressed in a silk kimono with a styled black wig and a gold butterfly on top of her head like a tiara. The two women posed in front of a backdrop of garish multicolored streamers.

Rudy was puzzled.

Then he thought, Opera.

He was about to click on the picture for more information when he realized that someone was standing over him beside the computer.

“Buddy,” a male voice said, low and unpleasant.

Rudy looked up. A teenager with a bald head and loose-fitting jeans crowded the chair.

“Buddy, that’s my computer. I was sitting here.”

“Sorry, it was empty,” Rudy murmured, trying not to attract attention. “Nobody was here.”

“I was taking a leak, man. I’ve been here for almost an hour. I reserved it, so take a hike.” The young man raised his voice and gestured at the nearest employee working in one of the cubicles. “What’s the deal here? Somebody can just take my computer when I go to the damn bathroom?”

Rudy slid his sunglasses back on his face and yanked up his hood. He pasted a smile on his face. “No problem, it was just a misunderstanding. I didn’t realize the computer was reserved. Go ahead, take it, I’m done here.”

He slid the mouse to the top of the screen and clicked out of the browser. He stripped off his gloves and shoved them in his pocket.

One of the librarians called to him. “If you want to reserve one of the other machines, sir—”

“No, that’s okay,” Rudy replied quickly. “Thanks.”

“Out of the chair, man!” the teenager insisted.

Rudy stood up. “All yours.”

He bumped hard against the teenager with his shoulder, nearly knocking the kid over, and tucked his head down into his chest as he walked away. He could feel everyone in the computer lab watching him go. He listened for a voice saying his name. A whisper. A warning. They’d all looked right at him.

That’s Rudy Cutter.

But no one recognized him. He was safe.

He made his way back to the library elevators, where he waited impatiently, pretending to stare at the paintings on the wall. With a musical ding, one of the elevators arrived, and he studied his feet and wiped a hand over his face to hide himself as the people inside got out. When the car was empty, he stepped inside, but as he did, he threw a last glance at the open interior of the library’s fifth floor.

Not far away, the black man with the patch-covered jean jacket and the Alcatraz cap sat in an overstuffed armchair, staring right at Rudy over the top of a motorcycle magazine.

“Why are you stopping here?” Eden asked as Frost pulled to the curb on Haight in front of a Tibetan boutique with Asian lanterns and brass-and-turquoise jewelry in the store windows. The bright paint on the trim was the color of sunflowers. Like seemingly every other business on Haight, its neighbor was a tattoo parlor.

“Quick detour,” he replied.

They were heading for the house where Hope Cutter’s mother lived near the Stonestown mall, but he wanted to stop here first. This was the gift shop where Katie had purchased a ceramic fountain as an anniversary gift for their parents. It was probably the last place anyone would have seen her alive. And the shop was in the opposite direction of where she should have been headed with Todd Clary’s pizza.

He explained to Eden what his father had told him. She studied the storefront with a little frown on her face.

“It’s not really so strange, is it?” she said. “We’re only a block past Masonic, and you can get through the Panhandle there. She could have turned around and headed north after she stopped at the shop.”

Frost shook his head. “A U-turn? On Haight? Good luck with that. Come on, you know what the traffic is like around here. Even going around the block would probably have added ten minutes at that time of night. The next cross street that cuts through the Panhandle is Baker, and by then, she would have been half an hour away from Todd Clary’s place. Katie was a little scattered, but she was a native, like me. She wouldn’t make a mistake like that.”

Eden pointed at the boutique window. “The shop closes at eight o’clock. You said the receipt was dated right before eight, right? Maybe she remembered that she needed to get a gift for your folks just as she was heading out to make her delivery. She dashed over here to buy something before the store closed.”

“Okay, but why make a special trip? She had two more days before their anniversary. She could have gone to the shop on Friday or Saturday. The only reason to stop was if it was right on her way. And it wasn’t.”

“So what happened?” Eden asked. “What are you thinking?”

Frost tried to put himself inside his sister’s head again. He tried to picture what she was doing on that last night. What she was thinking. Where she was going. He could imagine her in her car, singing along to the radio. The smell of the pizza on the seat next to her would have made her open the windows. He was familiar with all of the evidence from that night, but the evidence didn’t help him. Katie hadn’t made or received any calls or texts after she left the pizza joint. She was on her own.

“Katie broke the pattern,” he said. “It was March, not November. She was the only victim other than Nina Flores who wasn’t murdered in November.”

“But the police ruled out a copycat, didn’t they?”

“Yes, it was definitely Cutter. Katie was wearing Hazel Dixon’s watch on her wrist when I found her. And then Katie’s watch showed up on Shu Chan in November, so we know he took it from her. This was Cutter, but somehow Katie’s murder was different from his other crimes. I want to know why.”

He got out of the Suburban and went around to the sidewalk. Eden got out, too. The street was crowded. Tourists window-shopped. A double-decker sightseeing bus passed behind them. Haight was like a museum now, an artifact of what the ’60s had been. It looked real, but it wasn’t. The hippies had been replaced by technology yuppies, who were the only ones who could afford the city anymore. The customers getting the tattoos made a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, plus stock options.