Brian Freeman - The Voice Inside

Frost looked at the empty street, then at the garage. Last time he’d been here, the garage door had been open, and the inside was a dumping ground for years of broken equipment and debris. There was no room for a car.

“Where’s your Cadillac, Phil?”

The man shrugged. “In the shop.”

“Yeah? Which one?”

“Somewhere over on Mission.”

Frost leaned into the crack of the door. He was inches from Phil’s face. “Rudy’s got it, right? You met him somewhere, and you let him take the car. That’s how he got to San Bruno.”

Phil didn’t say a word, but the squint of fear in the man’s eyes was enough to convince Frost that he was right. Rudy was in the Cadillac. He grabbed his phone to call in an update on the search, and he started down the steps. He was done here. He was done with Phil turning a blind eye to what his brother had done.

But as he turned away from the front door, he heard Phil mutter something behind him, in a burst of shock and surprise.

“Holy hell.”

Frost turned back. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Phil replied quickly, but the man swallowed hard and stared down at the cracked concrete on the porch.

Frost realized that the back of the white shirt he’d borrowed was covered in Maria’s blood. Phil couldn’t handle seeing it. It was one thing to know that your brother was a murderer. It was another thing to see the victim’s blood, only hours after she’d died.

“Yeah, that’s what he does,” Frost said softly. “He cuts their throats. You can’t believe how much blood there is.”

Phil’s left eye twitched. He breathed loudly through his nose.

“Is there anything you want to tell me?” Frost asked him.

Phil opened his mouth, but then he clamped it shut. Frost waited, wondering if the man would break, but Phil stayed stubbornly silent. Eventually, Frost hissed in frustration and went back down the steps. He had the door of the Suburban open when Phil finally shouted at him through the sheets of rain.

“Hey.”

Frost looked up. Phil had come out of the house onto the porch. His hands were on his hips. Wind buffeted his tall, skinny frame.

“Hey, I wasn’t lying, man,” Phil called. “I wasn’t following you .”

Before Frost could ask any questions, Phil turned around and stormed back inside and slammed the door shut. Frost got into the Suburban and sat in the darkness of the truck, with the rain pounding on the windshield. He replayed what Phil had said in his head, and he heard the emphasis on that last word.

I wasn’t following you.

Frost felt a sickness in his soul that he hadn’t felt since that day at Ocean Beach. A crushing fear. A wild despair.

He knew. He knew.

He heard another voice in his memory. This one was the voice of Gilda Flores, Nina’s mother.

Tabby and Nina were inseparable. Much like me and her mother. We were pregnant at the same time, and Nina and Tabby were first babies for both of us, so we went through it all together.

Frost snatched up the album of Hope’s sketches again. He wanted to be wrong. There was no way that Rudy Cutter could know the truth, no way he could realize that Frost had a vulnerability so deep that he could barely even acknowledge it to himself. He wanted to believe it wasn’t possible, but he was reminded again that fate was a jerk. Fate was a son of a bitch.

Don’t make this personal between us, Inspector.

Too late.

He flipped the fragile pages of the album. He saw the names inscribed at the bottom of each sketch. Dozens of names, spread out over several years. Mothers and babies. Mothers and daughters. Mothers and victims.

And there they were.

Catherine and Tabitha.

Cutter was going after Tabby.

Rudy sat in the old Cadillac, two blocks from the marina. He’d been here for hours, hypnotized by the rain, staring through the darkness and haze at the apartment building across the street. It was almost dawn on Sunday, but there wouldn’t be any sunrise today, just the gloom of black clouds. The only thing that helped him see was the streetlight overhead. The yachts in the harbor were invisible.

His clothes hadn’t dried. They were still a mess of rain, mud, and blood. He’d had a narrow escape from Sweeney Ridge. The cops had descended on the hills like locusts, and even in the fog, he’d barely eluded them on his way back to the parking lot at Skyline College. A helicopter searchlight had passed over the Cadillac only seconds after he’d ducked inside.

He wasn’t a fool. He knew he didn’t have much time left. Everyone was looking for him.

The street around him was empty in the rain. Above the boulevard trees, a light came on in the third-floor apartment, and a silhouette moved behind the curtains. He lifted his binoculars, but there was nothing to see. He’d already spotted Easton’s brother leaving two hours earlier in the dead of night, and after that, the windows had been dark. But not now. She was up. Weekends didn’t matter in the restaurant world. She’d be leaving soon.

Rudy reached behind him and grabbed a trench coat from the back seat. He took what he needed from his backpack. The Taser. The knife. The duct tape. And Maria’s watch, already smashed, its time stopped at 3:42 a.m. He secured them all in the right-side pocket of the coat. He was ready. He kept his eyes trained on the steps that led down from the apartment building plaza, and he waited.

It was strange. He no longer felt alive. The numbness that had dominated his life for so many years was back. When he’d slid the knife across the neck of Nina Flores, he’d felt a rush that must have been like shooting up with pure heroin. Hope was Nina; Nina was Hope. He’d finally been able to get revenge on his wife for what she’d done to their daughter. With each murder after that, the anticipation had built toward a perfect moment of violence. It became an addiction.

But now he felt empty. The rush was gone.

He’d thought, with Jess Salceda, that it was simply because she wasn’t part of the game. She was an outsider who’d trespassed where she didn’t belong. He’d assumed that it would be different with Maria, but it wasn’t. There was no high, no adrenaline, no vaulting sense of purpose. Killing her gave him nothing.

And yet he couldn’t stop himself. He needed the rush even more badly now that he couldn’t find it. He would do anything to feel that way again, even if it was only one last time for one last moment.

Up on the third floor, the lights went off again. The apartment was dark.

Rudy tensed, his eyes on the plaza steps. The rain kept coming in waves. The wind roared. He checked the mirrors and saw that he was alone on the street. It would take less than a minute for her to lock the apartment, go down three flights of stairs, cross the courtyard, and emerge onto the sidewalk.

As he waited for her, his backup phone rang.

Rudy thought about ignoring it, but he knew it was Phil. And Phil calling now meant trouble.

“This is a bad time,” he said, answering the phone.

“Where are you?” Phil asked.

“You know where I am.”

“You should split, man,” his brother said. “Now.”

Rudy briefly closed his eyes. Phil had always been the weak link, the one who would crack sooner or later. “What did you tell them?”

“Enough that they’ll be coming for you,” Phil replied. “You better get away from there while you can. Sorry.”

Phil hung up.

At that same moment, across the street, Rudy saw Tabby Blaine dash down the steps in the rain. Her red hair was a flame on the dark morning. She wore a belted purple raincoat down to her ankles. She turned away from the bay toward her car, walking easily in heels. It was now or never.