The Voice Inside (Frost Easton Book 2) Page 5

  And then the phone call came. The phone call that had sent him to Ocean Beach.

  The man’s voice had been distorted, like the hiss of a snake. He’d only learned much later that the voice belonged to Rudy Cutter.

  Frost picked through the box on the floor, taking out keepsakes and memories one by one. It took him a while to find what he was looking for. Then, behind a true-crime memoir—Katie was a voracious reader, like him, and they always traded copies of books they liked—he spotted the jewelry case that held the flower tiara.

  He’d given it to her on her last birthday as a joke. She was always complaining that she lived in San Francisco, but she’d never seen anyone with flowers in their hair. So he’d bought her a cheap silver tiara studded with rhinestone flowers and fake pearls. Looking at it now, he realized that it was pretty hideous, but Katie had worn it everywhere. She hardly ever took it off.

  She’d been wearing it when he found her at Ocean Beach. Her skin was gray, her eyes closed. Blood was everywhere, on her neck, on her clothes, pooling obscenely on the seat and the floor of the Malibu. And there was the flower tiara, nestled in her hair, as if any second her fingers would come to life and trill across the piano keys and she would break into the Scott McKenzie song. Finding her that way, he’d peeled the tiara from her head and slipped it into the pocket of his coat without even thinking about it.

  He knew now, as a cop, that he’d made a mistake. He’d removed evidence from a crime scene. He never showed the tiara to Jess. He never showed it to anyone, not Duane, not his parents. It was something between him and Katie alone. When he’d joined the SFPD, he’d quietly had a test run in the crime lab to make sure there was no DNA other than Katie’s on the tiara that might prove useful to the case. There wasn’t. So Frost saw no need to correct his innocent mistake. He’d kept the tiara here in the box ever since.

  When he held the tiara in his hand, he didn’t just see Katie’s face now. He saw Rudy Cutter, too, smiling at him in San Quentin. It infuriated him, having Cutter there in the middle of his memories. Everything was about to come crashing down. Friends, family, strangers, would hate him. All because of Melanie Valou’s watch. All because he was a Boy Scout who couldn’t live with a lie.

  On the lower level of the house, he heard the chime of the doorbell. He checked his watch in surprise. It was late. He went downstairs, with Shack hopping beside him. He opened the front door, where the rain beat down, loud and strong.

  The woman on the step was soaked to the skin, but she still had a cigarette smoldering in her mouth.

  “Hey, Frost.”

  It was Jess Salceda.

  7

  “I got a phone call today,” Jess told him as she crushed out her cigarette and marched into the house without an invitation. “It was Camille Valou. She was freaked out. She said you ambushed her at a restaurant and started asking some very odd questions.”

  “I guess I did,” Frost agreed.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Funny, that’s what I was going to ask you, Jess.”

  That elicited a sour laugh. Jess peeled off her khaki trench coat and shook rain out of the chocolate-colored bangs that hung down below her forehead. She stepped out of her wet boots and wandered into the living room, shivering at the cold. Shack, who knew Jess well, followed beside her. She put her hands on her hips and watched Frost with angry eyes, which didn’t surprise him. Anger was Jess’s calling card. She’d grown up in a cop’s world—cop father, cop ex-husband—and she was typically tough, hard, and serious.

  “Want a drink?” Frost asked.

  “Yeah.”

  He went to the bar and poured a shot of Trago Reposado. He didn’t drink tequila himself; he kept it in the house for Jess. She downed the shot and handed him the glass, and they stood there for a moment, looking at each other. The house was silent, except for rain thundering on the roof. They stood very close to each other, and he could see, not far behind the wall in her eyes, that she was scared to death.

  He felt a fleeting desire to kiss her. He could see her debating whether to slap him or rip off his clothes. It was always that way between them. They’d slept together twice last year when she was breaking up with her husband, but then they’d cut it off because they both knew it was stupid. Neither of them was looking for love or a relationship, but that didn’t lessen the electricity when they were alone and together.

  She was heavy and didn’t waste time with diets. Her nose was hooked like the beak on a bird of prey, and she had copper skin. She was in her forties and didn’t try to hide it. She had a rose tattoo high on her forearm, which was the only hint of softness in her armor. Being in bed with her was like taming a tiger.

  “Where is it?” Jess asked.

  “The watch? It’s safe.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “So you can get rid of it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Frost shook his head. “Sorry, Jess. It’s too late for that.”

  They were still only inches apart, like lovers, like prizefighters. Finally, she spun away with a low growl of frustration and marched to the patio door and slid it open. Shack followed, but when the rain spattered his fur, he shook himself and retreated. Jess lit another cigarette and blew smoke outside, but Frost could smell it wafting toward him.

  “So what happened?” she asked.

  He told her everything. The overnight break-in. The alarm clocks. Copernicus and the watch and the inscription. Meeting with Camille Valou and Rudy Cutter, and then confirming Cutter’s story. Jess stood by the patio door, smoking, listening, but not looking back at him. When he was done, they were both quiet.

  “All these years,” she murmured, as if there were a statute of limitations on ghosts coming back to haunt you. Then, after another minute of silence passed, she added, “We can still beat this.”

  “By lying?”

  “Yeah. What does Cutter really have? The sister of some punk mugger? She won’t hold up on the stand. We can say Cutter had a duplicate watch made and paid this girl to say she got it from her brother. Lamar’s not around to say yes or no.”

  “There are photos, too,” Frost said.

  “Then we’ll say the photos are fake. Camille will stick to her story, and so will I. We’ll win. No judge wants to turn this guy loose, Frost. That’s not how you get reelected.”

  Frost shook his head. “I won’t do that.”

  “Are you kidding? You’re really going through with this?”

  “I have no choice.”

  “And you don’t care about Cutter getting out?”

  “I care, but that doesn’t change anything, does it?”

  Jess threw the cigarette onto the patio, where it sizzled as it burned out. “I can’t believe you, Frost. This guy murdered Katie.”

  “You don’t need to remind me,” he replied icily.

  She folded her arms across her chest. He watched her breathing. The room got cold. She closed the door, but she stayed there, staring into the darkness and the rain. He could feel her trying to contain an explosion. She was ready to scream. To lash out. To throw things. They both knew what this meant for her. She’d lose her job. She’d probably go to jail. In the shadows, her eyes were like black holes. Her lips were pushed together, her mouth turned downward.

  “Do I need a lawyer?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I hate lawyers.”

  “I know.” He caught the irony, because he was a lawyer himself. He added, “Why did you do it, Jess?”

  She shrugged. She left the patio door and came around and sat on the sofa. It was obvious that she wanted to talk. To confess. Maybe to brag about what she’d done. He knew how she felt about “the line.” You crossed it when you had to. You took the consequences when they came.

  “Melanie’s father came to me,” she said. “It was his idea.”

  Frost said nothing.

  “Melanie was killed in November,” Jess went on, as if he didn’t remembe
r. “I knew it was Cutter, but for the life of me, I couldn’t find any hard evidence. Nothing we could use in court. And I was running out of time. You know that. By the next November, I knew it wouldn’t be long before he struck again. He had a pattern. If I didn’t put him away soon, we’d find another body in a car.”

  “I know,” Frost said.

  “And then Melanie’s father called me. Sam Valou. He asked me to meet him in Golden Gate Park. Somewhere no one would see us. That was when he showed me the watch. He said Melanie’s mother, Camille, bought two watches, one for Melanie, one for herself. Sam said Camille never wore hers, because he got her a kick-ass diamond watch around the same time. They kept the other watch—the match for Melanie’s watch—in a safe-deposit box. No one knew about it. Just him, Camille, and some ninety-year-old jeweler six thousand miles away in the Alps. He said the watches were identical. So if his wife’s watch were to show up in Cutter’s house, who would know the difference?”

  “He convinced you to plant it,” Frost said.

  “Convinced me? Hell, I jumped at the chance. I didn’t think twice about it. Not for a second. When we got the next search warrant for Cutter’s place, I made sure I had Camille’s watch in my pocket. It was easy to pretend I’d discovered it in the ceiling.”

  “But the two watches weren’t identical.”

  “No, Sam didn’t know that Camille had added an inscription before she gave the watch to Melanie. Camille always called her daughter ‘the dreamer,’ and so she had the words engraved on Melanie’s watch in French. It was a little thing for the two of them. I didn’t find out about that until it was too late. I showed Camille the watch to identify it, and she looked at the back, and she was speechless. She knew what we’d done. Sam persuaded her to go along with the ruse at Cutter’s trial, but when she was on the stand, I really didn’t know whether she’d back us up. I was holding my breath the whole time.”

  Frost shook his head. He didn’t even know what to say. “Jess.”

  “What, are you judging me? Don’t give me that shit, Frost. I did what I did to save lives. I’d do it again. Cutter needed to go down, and I couldn’t get him the straight way. So I got him the crooked way instead.”

  “I know the pressure you were under.”

  “You don’t know the half of it. The whole damn city was crucifying me because I couldn’t catch the guy who did this. And I couldn’t even stand up in public and say, ‘I know who the son of a bitch is, I just can’t prove it.’ Yeah, the pressure sucked, but I didn’t do it to get myself out from under the heat. I did it because Rudy Cutter was a murderer, and my job is to put murderers away. Sometimes you have to cut corners to do what’s right.”

  “Is that what you call it? Cutting corners? I call it a felony.”

  “Gee, it must be nice to be the only noble cop in San Francisco. You think anyone is going to thank you for exposing what I did?”

  “No.”

  “If this guy gets out and kills again, you’ll be the one who gets hung out to dry.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “I told you, we can still make this go away, Frost,” Jess insisted. “I’m not saying that for myself. I don’t care what happens to me. Think about all those women. Think about Katie.”

  “Do you really believe I’ve been thinking about anything else tonight? I don’t need a lecture from you, Jess. I didn’t ask for any of this. You’re the one who put me here.”

  Jess stood up again. “Okay. Whatever. Do what you have to do.”

  “I wish you’d come to me about this back then,” he told her.

  “What would you have said?”

  “Don’t plant the watch,” Frost replied.

  “That’s why I didn’t ask.”

  He went to the bar and poured her another shot of tequila. A larger one this time. He brought it to her, and she took it without a word and gulped it down. She wiped her mouth, and then she went to the bar herself and poured the next shot and drank that one, too. She kept talking.

  “I remember the look on Cutter’s face,” she told him. “The bastard was actually impressed. I mean, he knew it was a setup. But he didn’t say a word. It was like he was giving me credit for figuring out a way to win the game. And besides, what was he going to say? ‘Hey, that can’t be the real watch, because I’ve got the real one stashed in a safe-deposit box somewhere’?”

  “Except Cutter didn’t have it stashed,” Frost pointed out. “He never did. Lamar Rhodes had the watch, and he gave it to his sister.”

  “Well, I didn’t know that little fact, did I? Damn, what are the odds? Cutter grabs a watch off every other victim, but Melanie’s watch gets stolen before he took her. Unbelievable.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jess came and stood in front of him. She was uncomfortably close again. He smelled the tequila on her breath. He thought she might reach for him and kiss him. Sex him into a coma and, while he was sleeping, search the house until she found the watch and could destroy it.

  “Tell me you don’t think he’s innocent,” Jess said. Her voice was loud and slurred.

  “No, I don’t think that.”

  “I did not put an innocent man behind bars.”

  “I’m not saying you did.”

  “Rudy Cutter is a serial killer.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  Jess walked unsteadily toward the foyer, where she grabbed her trench coat. She slipped it on and opened the door to confront the rain. Frost followed her to the threshold. She stepped into the downpour, and then she turned around, with her hands shoved in her pockets.

  “We both had to make a tough choice on this one, Frost,” she called over the noise of the storm. “I can live with mine. Can you live with yours?”

  8

  The worst part was telling Duane.

  Frost opened the door, expecting his brother to be alone, but instead Duane had his latest girlfriend with him. His brother hoisted two bags of groceries from Bristol Farms in the air. He whipped inside the Russian Hill house like a hurricane, leaving a pert redhead on the porch in his wake.

  “Bison burgers!” he called to Frost over his shoulder. “On my famous garlic-rosemary focaccia buns, with melted Flagship cheddar. Plus sweet potato matchstick fries, edamame salad, and red-velvet truffles.”

  Duane was already out of sight, heading toward the kitchen, but Frost heard him call, “Shack, Shack, Bo-Back, how are you, buddy?”

  The girl on the porch, who was left alone, grinned at him. “I’m Tabitha, by the way, but everyone calls me Tabby. Tabby Blaine.”

  Frost heard a belated shout from inside as his brother introduced them. “Frost, meet Tabby. Tabby, this is my bro!”

  “Come on in,” he told her.

  “Thanks.” She strolled into the foyer and then the living room, and she headed immediately to the panoramic view over the bay. “What a place.”

  “It’s my cat’s,” Frost said.

  Tabby glanced at him over her shoulder, and her green eyes sparkled with amusement. She had very long eyelashes. “Yeah, Duane told me about Shack. I bet that line works pretty well with the girls. ‘Hi, I’m Frost, I rent a mansion from my cat.’”

  “It does, actually,” Frost admitted. “And here’s the little land baron himself.”

  Shack hopped onto the back of the sofa, and from there, he jumped immediately into Tabby’s arms. She caught him with a startled giggle, but she knew exactly how to hold him, and Shack settled against her shoulder and began to purr and swipe at her long red hair.

  “I hope you’re not allergic,” Frost said.

  “Wildly, actually, but that’s okay. I love cats. You can’t have the nickname Tabby and not love cats, right? I popped a Benadryl before coming over here, so I should be good for a while.”

  “Aw, Tabs, you made these matchsticks too thick,” Duane called in a crabby voice from the kitchen.

  “They’re perfect,” Tabby called back. “Quit complaining.”

  To Frost’s astonishment, Duane le
t it go. He’d never seen anyone challenge Duane about ingredients and live to tell the tale.

  “So you’re a chef, too?” Frost asked her.

  Tabby’s head bobbed. Shack continued to tickle her hair. “Yeah, I work over at Boulevard on the Embarcadero.”

  “Impressive. They’ve got a Beard Award, don’t they? I figured you worked with Duane in SoMa.”

  “Work with Duane? Oh please, do I look like a masochist? I helped him get ready for tonight, but that’s as far as I go. Did you know his nickname in the chef community is the Beast? Duane Beaston, that’s what they call your brother.”

  “I did know that, actually.”

  “So are you a beast, too?” Tabby asked, teasing him. “You don’t look like a beast.”

  “Only during a full moon,” Frost replied.

  “Well, well. I’d like to see that.”

  Tabby held Shack and wandered comfortably around the house as if she owned the place. She had a firecracker personality, unabashed and unafraid. That made her different from most of the girls that Duane dated, who usually looked scared to say a word in front of him. Tabby didn’t look older than thirty, and she was only a few inches taller than five feet. She wore tight jeans and an untucked men’s yellow dress shirt that she’d probably borrowed from Duane. Her freckled cheeks had a permanent rosy flush, and her smile went easily from innocent to wicked to smart.

  “What a beautiful figurine,” Tabby said, reaching up to caress the blue glass carving over the bay window. Her touch was delicate, as if she sensed that it was special.

  “It belonged to our sister, Katie,” Frost replied.

  Tabby’s green eyes became two little sympathetic emeralds. “Oh, of course.”