Including Frost’s sister, Katie.
This wasn’t just a sick game. Something else was going on.
Frost realized he was still cold. He felt a draft, and when he listened, he heard the wind whistling like a ghost. The glass patio door was closed, and so were the windows, but when he made his way to the house’s white-tiled foyer, he saw that the front door was ajar. It opened and closed, opened and closed, as currents of air dragged it back and forth an inch at a time.
He crossed the foyer and ripped open the door.
One of Frost’s long-bladed kitchen knives — exactly like the knives Rudy Cutter had used in all his murders — had been impaled deep in the chambered walnut of the door. Metal chopping wood. Was that what he’d heard? Was that the heavy thump that had awakened him?
The knife held a small postcard in place. It was something you’d buy at one of the dozens of souvenir shops at Fisherman’s Wharf. On the front of the postcard was a black-and-white ’20s-era photograph, which showed the famous Cliff House restaurant overlooking the Pacific surf. Frost didn’t miss the significance of the location.
Cliff House rose above the sand and rocks of Ocean Beach. He’d found Katie there in the back seat of her blue Chevy Malibu.
Frost retrieved a latex glove from inside the house so that he could carefully remove the knife from the door. He didn’t want to disturb any fingerprints, although he doubted that he’d find any. He took hold of a corner of the postcard with his gloved hand and turned it over. His name was scribbled on the address block of the postcard, but the street address written below his name wasn’t for the house on Russian Hill. Instead, it was for a location somewhere in the Mission District.
Somebody wanted him to take a drive.
The postcard had a message for him, too. One sentence.
Can you live with a lie?
Less than an hour later, at four thirty in the morning, Frost parked his SFPD Chevy Suburban under the Highway 101 overpass. He had Duboce Avenue mostly to himself. Even in a city that never slept, this was a dead time. The night was over, but the day hadn’t begun yet.
Frost got out of the Suburban. His eyes scoured the neighborhood under the streetlights. Painted murals adorned the massive columns of the freeway overpass. A gust of wind tumbled an empty paper cup down the street. Behind a metal fence, he saw the concrete ramps of a skateboard park, but in the overnight hours, there was no rattle and bang of kids doing acrobatics with their boards.
He knew this area well. His older brother, Duane, ran a food truck in the SoMa market only a few blocks away.
The address on the postcard was located on Mission Street behind him, but Frost walked the other way, toward a cobblestoned alley that led past a deserted parking lot under the freeway. Just like the time on the alarm clocks in his house, the choice of location was no accident. He’d been here before, when he was one of dozens of police officers canvassing the neighborhood, searching for any sign of a young woman named Melanie Valou.
Victim number seven.
Melanie was twenty-six years old, half-French, half-Algerian. Her parents had money, but Melanie, who was a San Francisco native like Frost, lived a Bohemian life, singing for tips in clubs and experimenting with bath salts and other new-age drugs. She had long, mussed black hair against ivory-white skin. Her lips were pale, and her eyes were dark and sunken. When she’d disappeared on November 17 five years earlier, she wore a wrinkled beige blouse and a knee-length garage-sale jean skirt. She’d been spotted on an ATM camera near Market and Van Ness, but that was the last time anyone saw her alive.
Everyone assumed Melanie had gone south from the bank to head home to her Mission District apartment. Police officers, including Frost, had fanned out across the area with her photo, knocking on doors, asking questions at homeless camps, and peering into the parked cars. Back then, Frost had gone up and down this alley a dozen times, trying to find a witness, but no one had seen Melanie.
No one except Rudy Cutter.
They’d finally found her body on Thanksgiving Day, in the trunk of a Honda Accord near Garfield Square.
Frost remembered the panic that had choked the city back then. Seven victims in four years. Seven women wearing macabre blood necklaces, where their throats had been slashed. They were all twenty-something in age, but beyond that, the victims had nothing in common. That was what made the killing spree so difficult to solve and why the fear had reached into every neighborhood. They were white, black, Hispanic, Chinese. They were tall and short. Heavy and thin. Rich and poor. They lived in different parts of the city, from Stonestown to South Beach to the Presidio. They had names like Nina. Natasha. Shu.
Katie.
When his sister had been killed — the fifth victim — Frost wasn’t a cop. He was a lawyer who’d never practiced law. A former taxi driver. A former captain of a charter fishing boat on the bay. An Alcatraz tour guide. He was restless, tall, good-looking, unattached. To the frustration of his parents, he had no idea where his life was going, but Katie had changed all that. Her death had given him a purpose. Now, six years after finding her body at Ocean Beach, Frost was a homicide inspector.
He left the alley and headed for Mission Street, where the postcard on his door had led him. In his dark imagination, he knew what he expected to find at the address that had been scrawled under his name. Another body. An eighth victim. And yet he knew that was impossible. The killings were over. Rudy Cutter was in San Quentin, and he was never getting out.
Power wires for the MUNI bus line made a web over his head. There were plenty of places to hide in the nighttime shadows of Mission Street. Frost wondered if his overnight intruder had come here, expecting him to follow, and was spying on his progress. He checked doorways as he hurried down the street and kept an eye on the homeless men, asleep under ratty blankets. The handful of cars parked at the meters looked empty. The building windows around him were dark. He didn’t feel watched, but that didn’t mean someone wasn’t following him.
The address from the postcard was three blocks down. It wasn’t what he expected.
He found a one-story building that looked as if it belonged in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The front wall was covered in swirls of psychedelic paint, dominated by two huge, staring blue eyes above the door. The chambered glass-block windows didn’t allow him to look inside. A sign over the painted eyes advertised palm readings, incense, herbal medicines, and erotic gifts.
The neon sign above the windows glowed with the word open. Frost knew there was no way this store would be open in the middle of the night. Someone was waiting for him.
He pushed open the black front door, went inside, and closed it behind him. Dozens of flickering candles lit the dim interior. The shop smelled of vanilla. An odd assortment of merchandise shelves filled nearly every square foot, forcing him to squeeze past ceramic Buddhas, strings of lights shaped like red peppers, Mardi Gras plastic beads, origami-style paper fans, and lifelike mannequins dressed in peekaboo lingerie. He saw a narrow desk for the cash register, and behind it, a tiger-striped curtain led to a back room.
Frost called out, “Hello?”
He waited. No one answered.
He tried again, louder. “Hello? Is anyone here?”
Finally, the curtain swished, but he didn’t see anyone walk into the shop. Then a voice at the level of his knees surprised him. “You must be the cop.”
Frost looked down. A little man stood beside the register desk, barely four feet tall and at least seventy years old. He was completely bald, with a head as brown as saddle leather and gray muttonchops worthy of a nineteenth-century politician. He wore a royal-blue silk kimono, embroidered with a gold dragon, and red slippers with a beaded floral design.