Brian Freeman - The Voice Inside

Eden smiled. “Black Hoodie?”

“Yeah, that’s what he was wearing. Black hoodie, jeans, shades.”

“But you got a good look,” Frost said. “You’re sure it was him.”

“Oh yeah, he’s the guy you want.”

“How long was he at the computer before he left?” Frost asked.

“Not very long. I don’t think it was more than five minutes or so. Like I said, there was an argument. Some other guy reserved the computer, so he basically kicked your guy out. Hoodie didn’t put up a protest. He just left. He looked squirrelly, like he wanted out of here fast.”

“Did he know that you’d recognized him?”

“Hard to say. Like I said, I didn’t realize who he was until he was almost gone. Then I remembered that Herb had posted something about this guy out on Street Twitter.”

“We need to hurry,” Frost said. “Cutter might be coming back, and I don’t want him to know we’re on to him.”

Herb hoisted his suitcase in the air. “I had the same thought. I figured this would be a good time to bring my sidewalk art to the front of the library, don’t you think? I’ve been looking to do a 3-D landscape of Angel Falls in Venezuela. I went BASE jumping there a while back. It’s not for the faint of heart.”

“Is there anything you haven’t done, Herb?” Frost asked.

“I have a fairly long bucket list,” his friend replied with a shrug. “Anyway, I’ll set up shop outside. If I spot Cutter on his way back, I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks.”

Frost, Eden, and Bike took the elevator to the fifth floor. At the glass wall outside the computer center, Bike pointed to the unit that Cutter had been using. The computer was turned off, and a handwritten sign had been taped to the monitor that read, “Out of Service.”

Frost thanked Bike with a twenty-dollar bill, and then he and Eden found the nearest librarian, whose name tag said Wally. Wally could have been an inspiration for his namesake in the Dilbert cartoons. He was short, round, bald, and wore glasses. Frost showed him his badge and spoke in a low voice so that the other patrons around them couldn’t hear their conversation.

“Thanks for keeping everyone off that machine,” Frost said.

“Of course. Herb said it was important.”

Frost smiled to himself. Everyone in San Francisco knew Herb.

“Do you remember the man who was sitting there?” Frost asked. He found a photo of Rudy Cutter on his phone. “Is this him?”

“I wish I could tell you, but I can’t,” the librarian replied. “There was a disagreement about the computer being reserved, but I didn’t see the face of the man who left. He wore some kind of hooded sweatshirt.”

“Has anyone used the machine since then?” Frost asked.

“Well, the other man didn’t stay long. Another ten minutes or so. There may have been one or two other users who sat down before Herb asked us to take the unit offline, but no more than that.”

“Okay. Thanks. If this man comes back, don’t approach him, and don’t give any sign that you’ve recognized him. But send me a text right away.” He handed the librarian his card.

“I will.”

Frost and Eden sat down in chairs in front of the computer. He peeled off the sign and booted up the machine. They sat shoulder to shoulder. He was aware of the perfume she wore.

He slid gloves onto his hands. He opened up the browser on the computer and checked the search history, hoping that Cutter hadn’t had time to delete it before he was chased out of the library. He was lucky. The history was intact. He saw a long list of Google search terms stretching back throughout the course of the day.

“When did Bike say he saw Cutter?” Frost asked.

“About two hours ago,” Eden replied.

Frost checked his watch and scrolled to a point in the history two hours earlier in the afternoon. He reviewed the search terms one by one. Most were innocuous, but then Frost saw a name among the search history:

Maria Lopes

And below it a similar search:

Maria Lopes San Francisco

He froze the screen where it was. Eden stared at it, too.

“You think Cutter did that search?” she asked.

“The timing is right,” Frost said. “Does the name mean anything to you? Do you recall Cutter mentioning a woman named Maria Lopes?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“The searches before and after seem to be unrelated. It doesn’t look like he clicked on any of the results he found. Either he didn’t find what he was looking for or he was interrupted before he could do anything more.”

“Or he knew what he needed as soon as he saw it,” Eden suggested.

Frost nodded. “True.”

“So who’s Maria Lopes?” she asked.

“If my gut is right, Cutter’s in the process of targeting his next victim. He knows who she is, or at least what her name is, but apparently, he doesn’t know much more than that. That’s interesting.”

He stood up and returned to the librarian named Wally. “I’m going to be calling for an officer to watch over that machine. And we’re going to need to have our forensics people study it in detail. In the meantime, we need to keep it off and unused. I don’t want anyone touching it. Okay?”

The librarian nodded. “Yes, of course. Anything you need.”

Frost returned to Eden. He switched off the machine. Next to him, another of the computers in the lab was open. “Let’s rerun the search on a different unit. I want to see what we get when we start looking for Maria Lopes in San Francisco.”

The two of them sat down at the computer, and Frost booted up the same browser and reentered the search term that Cutter had used. He was dismayed but not surprised by the number of results. There appeared to be numerous women with the same name around the city.

Eden reached out and put her hand over his on the computer mouse. “Let’s look at the ‘Images’ tab. If he clicked to enlarge a photograph, it wouldn’t show up in the history as a separate search. But maybe something will jump out at us.”

He felt the warmth of her fingers. She kept her hand there as she scrolled downward through an array of photographs.

“See anyone you know?” he asked.

“No. Do you?”

Frost shook his head. “I don’t.”

Eden took away her hand and rolled slightly backward on the chair next to him. “So what do we do? We don’t know which woman he was trying to find.”

“I need to talk to every Maria Lopes in San Francisco,” Frost replied. “At least the younger ones. One of them is in danger.”

“Cutter’s going to work fast, Frost. He won’t wait weeks this time. He knows you’re close.”

Frost knew that was true. Time was short. Even so, he was hoping that he was finally one step ahead of Rudy Cutter.

“He may suspect that we’re close, but he doesn’t know we’ve gotten this far,” Frost said. “That’s our advantage. We know his next move now. When he goes after Maria Lopes, whoever she is, we’ll be waiting.”

Rudy listened to footsteps echoing on the marble floor of the San Francisco Opera building. The lobby felt like a palace, with rows of Doric columns and brass-and-crystal lanterns hanging from an inlaid gold ceiling. People came and went, mostly in business suits, and their conversations made a constant, hollow murmur that hung in the air. There was a performance of Rigoletto scheduled for the evening, and that meant a wave of activity in the hours before the show.

He’d been here once before. That was decades earlier, not long after he and Hope had been married. Someone had given them tickets to Bellini’s Norma . He didn’t even remember who it was. They’d been underdressed because they couldn’t afford opera finery. He remembered feeling out of place, and he’d sat through the opera in severe discomfort, feeling assaulted by the screeching voices in Italian. He’d assumed Hope would feel the same way, but when he looked at her at one point, he saw tears running down her face.