Brian Freeman - The Voice Inside

He checked the envelope again. There was nothing else inside. Rudy Cutter had obviously believed that this piece of paper would offer up the answer to Katie’s death, but Frost didn’t understand its significance. He studied the receipt for a hidden clue, but all he saw was what Katie had scribbled down from Clary’s phone call:

Todd Clary

Delivery to 415 Parker

Large olive/arugula cream sauce

$24.35

The note made him heartsick because seeing it brought Katie to life again. He could see her writing it; he could hear her voice. Twenty minutes later, she’d carried the pizza out the door on Haight and climbed into her Chevy Malibu.

And headed the wrong way.

Why?

Frost stared at the receipt. He knew Katie better than anyone; he should have been able to figure out what she was telling him. But finally, he realized that his closeness to Katie was the problem. He had to stop looking at the receipt like a brother who’d grown up with her.

He stared at it again, like a stranger.

And he knew. Just like that, he saw what Katie had written, and he knew what she’d done. The answer was staring him in the face. He knew why Katie had gone east from the restaurant, not west toward Todd Clary’s house. He knew where she was going with that pizza.

It didn’t take him long to figure out the rest. He had everything he needed to solve the mystery. The pieces came together, one after another, like gears meshing in an elaborate machine. Half an hour later, he knew why Katie had been killed that night and whose secret she would have exposed if she’d stayed alive.

When the truth finally settled into his brain, he realized that Cutter had been right all along. Horror can always get worse.

Frost was sitting on the sofa in the shadows when Eden Shay came down from the bedroom at the first light of dawn. She’d put on satin pajama bottoms and a spaghetti-strap top. Her black curls were a wild mess. She saw him and cocked her head in surprise.

“Well, there you are. The hero returns. What time did you get in?”

“Late.”

“I was hoping you’d join me in bed.”

“I watched you sleep,” Frost said.

“Really? There’s something sensual about that. I like it.”

Frost didn’t answer. He was done with the flirting. He was done being played.

“So Cutter’s dead,” Eden said. “It was all over the news.”

“Yes, he is. You must be relieved.”

She looked at him strangely. “Relieved?”

“You can finish your book now.”

“Oh. Sure.” She eyed the kitchen behind her. “Can I make you breakfast?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You say that now, but you haven’t tried my hot-and-spicy scrambled eggs.”

She wandered in her bare feet into the kitchen. He watched her, unable to move. She retrieved eggs from the refrigerator and frowned at the expiration date, but began to crack them into a bowl anyway. She opened his cabinets and found whatever chili spices he had — which probably dated back to Shack’s original owner — and opened the jars. She dug up a pan and swirled some oil in the bottom.

“Do you want to talk about yesterday?” she called to him. “I understand if you’re not ready. You need time.”

When he didn’t answer, she glanced over her shoulder.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

Frost got up from the sofa. He walked over and stood at the entrance to the kitchen. “Do you remember Robbie Lubin?”

Eden’s eyebrows arched curiously. “Sure. He’s Natasha’s brother.”

“I seem to recall you telling me that you visited him in Minnesota when you first started researching the case for your book.”

“You recall correctly,” Eden replied. Her voice was light but wary. “I told you, I always do my homework. Why?”

“When you visited Gilda Flores back then, she showed you Nina’s bedroom, right?”

“Of course. You know that. What’s this about?”

Frost tried to ignore the roaring in his head. He wanted to be dead inside; he wanted to feel nothing. But that was impossible. This woman had come to him, and he’d let her into his life. He’d given her everything she wanted. He was attracted to her. He’d slept with her. And all along, she’d been manipulating him. All along, she’d hidden the truth.

His instincts had told him from the beginning not to trust her. He should have listened to the voice inside.

“This is about the fact that you solved the Golden Gate Murders seven years ago,” Frost said. “You knew that Rudy Cutter was the killer before anyone else did.”

The curiosity, the playfulness, the innocence all vanished from her face, which became a mask of icy calm. He read her expression. In an instant, she realized that he’d figured it all out. She was already wondering how far he’d gone and what he could prove.

“What are you talking about, Frost?” Eden asked, giving nothing away.

“Hope’s sketches. The mothers and daughters. That’s the connection that ties all the victims together. Well, except Katie, but you already know that, don’t you? Jess never figured out Cutter’s pattern, because she never saw more than one of Hope’s sketches. I assumed that no one did, but that’s not true. You saw the sketches. You saw one on the wall in Nina’s bedroom, and you saw another one when you visited Robbie in Minnesota.”

Eden shrugged. “If I did, then obviously, I missed it. Or I didn’t appreciate the significance.”

“You? No, you wouldn’t have missed a detail like that. No way. I can only imagine the adrenaline you must have felt. How hard was it to keep the truth to yourself? To keep the excitement off your face so Robbie didn’t suspect? You saw that sketch, and you knew you had the clue that would break the whole case open.”

Eden turned off the heat on the stovetop. She rinsed her hands, and then she turned around and leaned back against the kitchen counter. Her face showed nothing at all. No secrets. No guilt.

“Frost, are you out of your mind?”

“I get it. You don’t think I can prove it. Maybe I can’t. But as smart as you are, I still think you left a trail. At first, I couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t have taken this straight to Jess. That would have been the right thing to do, but it wouldn’t have been much of a story, would it? No, the real story for a writer like you would be to find the killer yourself . And that’s what you did. I imagine you talked to people at the hospitals to track down Hope. Did you lie and say that you had a sketch of your own? Maybe your mother died recently and it would mean so much to you to find out who did that little portrait? It probably wasn’t too hard to make the connection. Did you talk to a few retired nurses? Did you bribe someone in HR to run some personnel searches for you? Someone’s going to remember you asking all those questions, Eden. Count on it. We’ll get your e-mail and phone records, too. I don’t know exactly how you made the breakthrough, but sooner or later, you found Hope’s name. And of course, once you did a little research on Hope, you found your way to Rudy Cutter. He would already have been stalking Hazel Dixon by then. And meanwhile, you started stalking him.”

Eden couldn’t hide her hostility now. He was backing her into a corner, and she didn’t like it there.

“If I’d learned Rudy Cutter’s name, I would have given it to the police,” she said.

Frost shook his head. “No. Not you. This was the ultimate opportunity for a writer like you. You could be embedded with a serial killer. You could get inside a murderer’s head while he was still committing his crimes. Even your brother had never done anything like that.”