“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.”
From the kitchen, Frost heard the sizzle of meat and smelled an intoxicating mix of seasonings. The house always smelled good when Duane came to visit. “I’m going to get a beer,” he told Tabby. “Do you want a drink? Chardonnay or something?”
“Beer sounds good.”
“Glass or bottle?” he asked.
“Oh, bottle, please. I may look like a girly girl, but I’m a tomboy at heart. Although I guess Tabby should be a tomcat, right? My mom was Catherine, and she was Kitty. So naturally her daughter became Tabitha and Tabby.”
Frost chuckled. He liked her a lot.
Leaving Tabby to cuddle and coo with Shack, he went into the kitchen, where Duane seemed to be in five places at once. He was a whirlwind of motion. Meat grilled, buns baked, edamame shelled, olives chopped, and through it all, he sang a bad karaoke version of “Heathens” by Twenty One Pilots.
“Listen, I want to talk to you about something,” Frost told him. “Can we grab a few minutes alone after dinner?”
Duane eyed him curiously. “Man of mystery. What’s going on?”
“It can wait. I’ll tell you later.”
“Sure, whatever.” His brother didn’t waste time on anything else when he was cooking.
“Tabby’s great,” Frost added.
“Yeah, she is.” Duane raised his voice. “Hey, Tabs, Frost thinks you’re great.”
“He’s great, too,” she replied from the living room.
“You want to help me with the cooking in here?” Duane called to her.
“Nah, you’re good,” Tabby replied.
Frost laughed. He enjoyed seeing another chef stand up to Duane. “How long have you two been going out?”
“Six months,” Duane said, with a hint of a smile.
Frost’s mouth fell open in surprise. To Duane Easton, six months was a lifetime. His brother usually went through sous chefs as lovers like a kid grabbing chocolates from a box. Duane’s life was his career, and the girls he dated were mostly about burning off sexual energy at the end of a fourteen-hour day.
“And I’m only finding out about her now?” Frost asked.
“I wanted to see if it was real first. Actually, we’re practically living together. She stays at my place most of the time.”
Frost had nothing to say, but he liked hearing it. He was almost willing to believe that a miracle had happened and that his brother was in love.
Duane was older than Frost by five years, but he’d always acted younger. Frost and Katie had looked like twins, but Frost didn’t see much resemblance to himself in his brother’s face. Duane was shorter than Frost by nearly half a foot and as skinny as pencil asparagus. His hair was straight and shoulder length, and tonight he had it tied behind his head. He had a narrow nose that was so long that it seemed to droop at the end by its own weight.
“Have you told Mom and Dad about her?” Frost asked.
“They introduced us.”
“Seriously? How did that happen?”
“It’s a long story,” Duane said.
Their parents lived in Arizona and didn’t come back to San Francisco very often. The city was mostly about bad memories for them. Frost waited for an explanation of how his parents had brought Duane and Tabby together, but Duane was back in the middle of his bison burgers, and he didn’t have anything more to say about the origins of his new relationship.
Frost grabbed two Sierra Nevada beers and returned to the living room.
He drank with Tabby on the sofa near the window. Shack licked beer from her finger, which made her giggle. She told him about her job in the restaurant, her time in culinary school, her favorite foods, and her cousin who played for the 49ers, but when he tried to maneuver her to the topic of how she and Duane had met, she smoothly changed the subject.
Before he could try again, his brother interrupted. Dinner was ready, and Duane’s food waited for no one.
They laughed their way through the meal for the next hour. Duane told dirty jokes, but his were like Ivory soap compared to the ones Tabby told. Frost was in no rush to finish, because he was preoccupied with a sense of dread about the after-dinner conversation. Duane wasn’t going to like what he had to say, so Frost put off telling him.
In the midst of dessert, however, the phone rang. Frost let the machine take it, which was a mistake. Everyone heard the message.
“Inspector, this is Khristeen Smith at the San Francisco Chronicle. I’d like to talk to you about the court hearing for Rudy Cutter next week. There are a lot of rumors flying, and the one name that keeps coming up is yours. Please call me back.”
The reporter left her number, and then the house was silent. He watched a concerned glance shoot back and forth between Duane and Tabby. His brother put down the truffle that was in his hand, and he shot Frost a laser-like stare. The two of them had eyes that didn’t let go.
“Rudy Cutter?” Duane asked.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Frost said.
“So talk.”
Frost glanced at Tabby, but Duane quickly intervened. “She can hear anything you have to say.”
“Okay. Cutter’s attorney filed a motion to have his conviction thrown out.”
“What the hell for?” Duane asked.
“Jess manufactured evidence against him. The watch she found in Cutter’s house was planted. A fake. It didn’t really belong to the last victim.”
Duane stood up in the dining room. He went to the front windows and peered through the curtains. He was silent for a long time. On the other side of the table, Tabby stared at her plate with a kind of quiet shock fixed on her face.
“Is Cutter going to get out?” Duane asked.
“That depends on the judge, but it looks that way.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“I wish I was.”
“This is bullshit. That son of a bitch killed Katie and all those other women. What judge is going to put him back on the street?”
“I know that. The thing is, what Jess did—”
“I don’t care what she did,” Duane interrupted him. “I wish we’d fried him in the electric chair. That piece of shit doesn’t deserve to be breathing.”
“I hear you. You’re right.”
Duane turned back from the window and jabbed a finger at him. “Why does this reporter want to talk to you? She said your name keeps coming up. Why are you involved in this?”
Frost rubbed a hand across his beard. He tried to come up with words. Tabby still didn’t look up.
“I’m the one who blew the whistle on Jess.”
“What?”
“I found out that she planted fake evidence. I took it to the captain and the district attorney.”
Duane shook his head. “Why would you do that?”
“What do you mean, why? I had an obligation. It’s my job.”