Brian Freeman - The Voice Inside

“You’re right, she was really tall,” he said.

“Six four,” Robbie replied. “And you can bet she reminded me about that every time I saw her.”

“Of course she did,” Frost said, smiling.

He was about to hand the phone back to Robbie Lubin.

And that was when he saw it.

He stared at the picture and squinted to make out the details. At first, he didn’t realize what he was looking at, but when he did, chills ran up and down his body. With his thumb and forefinger, he enlarged the photograph, not to look at Natasha and Robbie, but to zoom in on the bookshelf behind them. There, on the shelf, beside the basketball trophies, he could see a small picture frame no larger than five-by-seven inches.

Enlarged, the image was blurry, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t wrong about it. Inside the picture frame was the puzzle piece that had eluded Jess for years. Inside the picture frame was the answer. The connection. The motive. The reason why all those women had to die. Behind that sliver of glass was the evidence that would put Rudy Cutter back in prison for the rest of his life.

“What is that?” Frost murmured, pointing at the screen with his finger. “Where did it come from?”

Robbie leaned in to see what Frost was looking at. “Oh, the sketch? Mom gave that to Tash when she turned eighteen. It’s just a little portrait of Mom holding Tash as a baby when she was at the hospital. Tash thought it was pretty cool. I still have it on the wall in my place in Minnesota. It’s a little reminder of her.”

Frost kept staring at the sketch in the frame.

It was a drawing of a mother with a baby in her arms. The sketch was roughly done, but by a talented hand. He could recognize Dominika Lubin, younger, glowing with triumph and exhaustion. Her eyes beamed at her child, at the new life she was holding. And the baby had her own eyes closed, asleep and at peace in a new world. The sketch must have been done within hours of Natasha’s birth.

He saw the label inscribed underneath the portrait: Dominika and Natasha . Below it was Natasha’s birthdate.

“Do you know who made this sketch?” he asked.

Robbie shrugged. “Sorry, no. Honestly, I don’t even know where Mom got it. Why?”

Frost didn’t answer. He already knew who the artist had to be. He knew, because he’d seen an almost identical sketch in the bedroom of Nina Flores, and it was obviously done by the same hand. He’d seen that same sketch of Nina Flores somewhere else, too. It was clearly visible in the background of the photograph of Nina and Tabby that Nina had worn as a button on her twenty-first birthday.

Anyone looking at the photograph, anyone who knew what that sketch was, would have recognized it, even in miniature. Seeing it, seeing the technique, Frost realized that he’d seen the same artist’s work in the self-portrait over the fireplace in Josephine Stillman’s house. That was partly why the painting had seemed so oddly familiar to him. It wasn’t just the face. It was the style.

Rudy Cutter would have recognized it, too.

He would have spotted it instantly when Nina Flores showed off the buttons she was wearing in the coffee shop.

He would have seen that sketch and known that his wife, Hope, had drawn it.

When Frost went back inside the Lubin house, he shared what he’d discovered with the families, and the parents began to remember. They’d all owned similar sketches of mother and daughter.

Camille Valou had given a sketch like that, of herself and Melanie in the hospital, to her in-laws during a family visit to Switzerland. She assumed they still had it at their chalet in Wengen.

Rae Hart’s parents had kept a similar sketch in a box of memorabilia in their attic. They hadn’t looked at it in years.

Shu Chan’s mother had sent her sketch to Shu’s grandmother in China.

Hazel Dixon’s father remembered the sketch, but they’d lost it and most of the other keepsakes from Hazel’s childhood in a fire several years earlier.

No one except Gilda Flores had ever hung the sketch on a wall, and that was only because she’d left Nina’s bedroom exactly as it had been years earlier. The sketch of Natasha was still on display in Robbie Lubin’s house, but he was two thousand miles away in Maple Grove, Minnesota. None of the other families had known that similar sketches existed. And neither had Jess.

He couldn’t blame her for missing it.

Even if Jess had researched where the victims were born, she wouldn’t have seen a pattern. The mothers had used three different hospitals in different parts of the city, and Frost assumed that Hope Cutter hadn’t stayed in any given job at a particular hospital for a long period of time. Hope was also an ER nurse, not an obstetrics nurse. There was no reason for her to be in the maternity ward. However, he remembered what Hope’s mother, Josephine, had told him. Hope would visit pediatrics on her breaks at the hospitals and chat with the new mothers.

And then there was Katie.

Just like every other part of her murder, Katie didn’t fit the pattern. She hadn’t been born in San Francisco at all, but had been an unexpected surprise while Janice was visiting Frost’s aunt in San Luis Obispo. His parents had no similar sketch of her. It all reinforced his belief that Katie had stumbled onto Rudy Cutter and not the other way around. She’d seen him somewhere, doing something that no one was supposed to see.

There was only one problem with the new evidence.

The parents all remembered the sketches of their babies, but none of the parents in the room remembered Hope Cutter at all. The sketches weren’t signed. There was nothing to tie her to any of them.

“The only thing I remember about the sketch,” Camille Valou told him, “was that it was a sweet little mystery. I never knew where it came from. When they release you from the hospital with a child, they send you home with all this material. It’s overwhelming, and of course, you’re already tired and anxious. It was several days before I opened this plain manila envelope that was in the packet. The sketch was inside. No explanation. No note. No signature. Just the picture. I thought it was lovely, of course, but I had no idea who had made it.”

Gilda Flores said the same thing.

So did the other mothers.

“I actually called the hospital about it,” Rae Hart’s mother recalled. “I wanted to know who had made the sketch, because I wanted to send a thank-you note. I thought maybe this was a little gift that the hospital did for all the mothers. But they didn’t know anything about it.”

“My wife called, too,” Steven Dixon told him. “No one at the hospital knew where it had come from. I remember them telling her that she wasn’t the only one who had found a sketch tucked in with their materials. Several other mothers had called about the same thing. But apparently the artist had kept it a secret, because they hadn’t found out who was doing it.”

No one knew Hope.

No one remembered Hope.

And yet Frost knew Hope Cutter had made those sketches. It was her. That was what had triggered Rudy’s rage all those years later. A sketch. A link between Nina Flores and Rudy’s wife.

A link that one of the women named Maria Lopes shared, too.

All he had to do was prove it. And find out who was next.

He knew someone who could help him.

Frost parked outside Josephine Stillman’s house near Stonestown.

Hope’s mother answered the door, and she didn’t look surprised to see him. Her face had a defiant cast. She patted her auburn hair, and then she folded her arms across her chest. “I assumed you’d be coming back here,” she said.

“And you know why, don’t you?” Frost asked.