Brian Freeman - The Voice Inside

But was any of it real?

Maria remembered the buzzing of her phone. She reached into her pocket and grabbed the phone and stared at the glow of the screen. Two missed calls. Both of them from Frost Easton. She had voice mail waiting for her, and she held the phone tightly against her ear to listen to the message. She wanted him to reassure her that everything was fine. Instead, his voice brought all the terror back.

“Maria, stay home. I’m sending the police. Rudy Cutter may be nearby.”

She tried to hang up the phone. Instead, her fingers trembling, she accidentally punched the speakerphone button, and the message started over and boomed into the fog. It took forever to shut it off. The silence, when the noise was over, felt ominous, as if she’d told the world exactly where she was. She stood there, waiting, panicking.

The fog got thicker and thicker.

Maria was certain now. Cutter was here. She could feel him. Blindly, not even looking down, she ran.

The San Bruno police beat Frost to Maria’s door. They were waiting for him when he arrived. Three uniformed officers stood around two squad cars, and he could see that Maria’s front door was open, with another officer just inside the doorway. He introduced himself to the cops on the street.

“What’s the status?” Frost asked.

“The homeowner isn’t here,” one of the officers replied. He was a burly Filipino kid in his early twenties. “The nanny answered the door. She said Ms. Lopes left on a run about forty-five minutes ago.”

Frost shook his head. “She went for a run? Now? I can’t believe she would take a risk like that after I talked to her.”

“Well, the nanny said she got a call from the SFPD giving her the all clear,” the cop told him.

“What?”

“Yeah, some detective called and said not to worry, she wasn’t the target.”

Frost knew who had made that call. Rudy Cutter. The spider had lured her into the web. They were running out of time.

“Where did she go?” he asked.

“The park trails. Beyond that, the nanny doesn’t know. She says Ms. Lopes likes to vary her route.”

Frost was too far away to hear noise from the ridge. A scream wouldn’t even be a whisper. All he knew was that Cutter was after Maria. And Maria wasn’t answering her phone. She thought she was safe, when in fact, she’d been lured to the hills by Cutter himself.

He stared up at Sweeney Ridge. The fog descended toward him, heavy and thick. It had crossed the summit and was stealing like a prowler into the valley. From where he was, he couldn’t see the slope of the hills now. Daylight was already fading to night, adding a black shroud to the haze of the fog.

Maria was up there. They had to go get her.

“Leave one officer inside the house, in case she gets home,” Frost said. “The rest of you, let’s go.”

Frost led them into the valley. The only noise was the clap of their boots on the trail. There was almost no wind. After a hundred yards, they reached the first fork, where one path descended toward the lake and the other climbed sharply to the top of the ridge. He sent one of the uniformed officers straight ahead, and the two others stayed with him on the route up the hill.

He locked his knees as he pushed higher with each step. The fog thickened. The handful of trees clinging to the slope became silhouettes against a gray wall. It was a mile from the valley to the summit, and as they reached each lower peak, the trail descended into the next seam and then rose again. The tight switchbacks were like horseshoes. He stopped regularly, hoping to hear the thump of Maria’s footsteps descending toward them, but they were three solitary ghosts on the hillside.

Far below, the wail of sirens rose from the city. Reinforcements were on their way. He called Captain Hayden from the slope and asked him to coordinate with the police in San Bruno and Pacifica to place men at the obvious trail outlets. Even so, he knew their best chance of catching Cutter was here on the ridge. The reach of the hills was vast, spilling down into neighborhoods in the west and east. In the fog and the growing darkness, Cutter could easily slip away.

Frost dialed Maria’s phone again. As before, she didn’t answer.

He shouted for her: “Maria!”

His voice sounded loud, but he didn’t know how well it carried. A crow, disturbed by the noise, ascended with a mocking cry from the brush nearby. They waited for Maria to call back, but stillness hung over the trail. There was nothing for them to do but keep climbing.

As they neared the high peak of the ridge, the wind revived and slapped their faces like a wet hand. Pockets of clear air wormed into the fog. With one step, the path would be invisible; with the next, they’d momentarily see a snapshot of the low foliage around them. Telephone poles crowned the hillside. Where the paved trail curved northward, he spotted a smaller, unpaved cross trail leading south. At the intersection of paths, he saw a small stone restroom with an angled tin roof.

Frost crossed the stretch of dirt and took out a small flashlight from his pocket. He yanked open the restroom door and examined the tiny interior with the light. The sewage smell was strong. No one was inside.

“What now?” one of the cops asked.

The trails followed the up-and-down peaks of the ridge. Frost shined a light along the path in both directions, but the fog threw the light back in his eyes. There were no footprints on the dry ground. He cupped his hands around his mouth and called for Maria again. She didn’t answer.

“The two of you head south,” he told the other cops. “The trail splits past the discovery monument, so you can each take one. I’ll go north. If you find anything, shout.”

They split up. Frost watched the fog envelop the officers as they headed down the path. He turned around and made his way back to the paved trail, which continued higher at a shallow climb. He marched, completely alone, through a milky bubble. The damp air got into his bones.

His flashlight swept the ground at his feet as he walked. Near the next peak, amid the sea of gray, he spotted a tiny flash of color. When he reached it, he found a red sneaker tipped over forlornly on the trail. It was an expensive shoe, a Nike Flyknit, and it looked almost new. No one would have voluntarily left it behind. He crouched down and slid a finger inside, and the interior of the shoe felt warm and wet.

Frost cast his flashlight around the dense brush. Not far away, a dead-end spur off the main trail led to an old weather station. He jogged that way, keeping an eye on the gravel for other clues that Maria may have left behind. The hilltop was cold. The wind roared, making music on the steel instruments tower. He felt as if he were on the summit of the world up here.

A squat white storage tank dominated the open ground. The dirt was lined with rutted tire tracks, but they weren’t recent. He made a circuit around the building, finding nothing. This was the highest spot on the ridge, and from where he was, the land flattened. The fog thinned slightly, but the light of the day was mostly gone. He shouted Maria’s name again. He could barely hear himself.

Frost tramped through the brush back to the main trail. He continued north. Two hundred feet along the ridge line, he squinted as he saw another flash of color in the light of his flashlight. It was a second shoe, a matching red Nike. The shoes were like breadcrumbs left by Maria. She’d been taken up here; she’d been dragged this way. She couldn’t be far.

Less than a quarter mile away were the ruins of an old missile complex that had been built in the ’50s to protect the Bay Area from a Soviet air assault that never came. The remote buildings had long since been abandoned to decay, but every Sweeney Ridge hiker knew about them. Frost ran. Through the fog, he saw the first of the lonely missile buildings take shape ahead of him, with its commanding view over the Pacific, where soldiers could monitor the skies. The cinder-block walls were painted over with wild graffiti. The doors and windows were long gone, leaving empty shells for birds to nest and animals to take shelter. It was a Cold War ghost town.