The Voice Inside.
He turned to the prologue of Eden’s book, which started with the first meeting of Nina Flores and Rudy Cutter in the coffee shop at the Ferry Building. He could hear Eden’s voice in his head, like the narrator of an audio book, as he read what she’d written. He liked her quirky style and insights. She looked for unusual details, the fragments of a life that told you who a person really was.
With Nina, it was the fluffy brown hair piled on her head like a chocolate ice cream cone and dripping down the sides of her face. That image summed up Nina. Sweet but a little messy.
With Cutter, it was the melted ice in his latte, the way he stayed and stayed at the coffee counter long after his cold drink had turned warm. In Eden’s hands, the ice slowly sweating into the coffee became a scene out of a horror movie, as something grotesque and dark took shape inside Cutter’s head.
Frost spent an hour reading before he put aside the manuscript pages.
He realized that Eden had a good eye for the things about a crime that were important. Her first chapter cut to the heart of everything. This mystery had begun right there in the Ferry Building. The chain started with Nina Flores, and typically the oldest link in the chain was the easiest to break.
Was Cutter already thinking about murder when he met Nina? No. You don’t hand your credit card to a girl you were thinking of killing a few days later. So what happened between them in the coffee shop that electrified Rudy Cutter? Twenty years had already passed since Cutter’s wife murdered their daughter, and as far as anyone knew, he had never been a violent man. And then came Nina, a girl he’d never met, a pretty, innocent girl on her twenty-first birthday. Cutter met Nina, and suddenly he pried open his coffin door like a vampire discovering the night.
Why?
Why did Cutter sit there and make his plans to murder Nina as the ice melted in his drink?
Frost didn’t see any answers in Eden’s book, but she had given him a place to start. He went back to the third page of the manuscript, where he’d underlined a passage:
Days later, weeks later, years later, nobody at the coffee shop remembered Rudy. Nina’s best friend, Tabby Blaine, prepared his order, but she didn’t notice anything about him other than iced latte, dark roast, extra ice, no straw. How was he dressed? No idea. Was he angry, happy, sad? Not a clue. Rudy didn’t make an impression. To Tabby, to everybody he met, Rudy was an invisible man.
Tabby Blaine.
Tabby wasn’t just Nina’s childhood friend, she was also Nina’s coworker.
His brother was dating a woman who had been there at the exact moment when the destinies of Nina Flores and Rudy Cutter collided.
17
By ten o’clock at night, the food trucks of SoMa had closed their windows, and the customers were gone. Even so, Frost knew that Duane typically stayed late into the night, cleaning up from dinner and prepping for the next day’s lunch menu. More often than not, his brother slept in his truck.
But he didn’t usually sleep alone.
The street food park was located in the shadows of the 101 freeway, in an area of warehouses and parking lots. The guard at the gate knew him and rolled back the barbed-wire fence to let him inside. Every time he came here, the food trucks were different, but Duane’s Asian-Mediterranean fusion truck was one of the anchors, always in the same place at the back. The smells of dinner lingered around him, from shawarma to fish tacos.
The truck was locked up tight, but he heard Duane’s voice and a woman’s musical laughter. When he rapped his knuckles on the door, Duane answered it, smiling, but his smile was quickly replaced by a scowl.
“What do you want, Frost?”
“Hi to you, too. Can I come in?”
“Depends. Do you have a warrant?”
“That’s funny, Duane.”
Frost climbed inside the truck. He squeezed past his brother, who was wearing shorts and a T-shirt that read “Keep on Truckin’.” Duane squirted a thick orange liquid into his mouth from a plastic bottle. His brother had a bizarre fondness for carrot juice.
Tabby sat on the floor at the other side of the truck, with her bare legs and bare feet stretched out. She looked at home wherever she was. She had a beer bottle in her hand, her red hair was mussed, and so were the buttons on her clothes. The zipper on her skirt was partly undone. He’d obviously interrupted something.
“Sorry to barge in on you two,” Frost said.
“If you want dinner, you’re too late,” Duane said. His brother leaned close to his face and smelled his breath. “Pop-Tarts? Really?”
“The care packages have been a little skimpy lately.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been busy. You could learn to cook, you know.”
“Shack has a better chance of learning to cook than me,” Frost replied.
Duane took another squirt of carrot juice and didn’t say anything more. He was still angry. Frost kept stubbornly silent, too. Tabby stood up with a sigh and rebuttoned her blouse. She shoved her feet back into flats. If she was waiting for the two of them to grow up, Frost could have told her that wasn’t going to happen.
“Duane Easton, apologize to your brother right now,” Tabby snapped.
“For what?” he protested.
“For being a dick.”
Duane opened his mouth to defend himself, but then he shrugged in resignation. It didn’t take much to break the ice between the two brothers after an argument, but they typically needed outside help. “Well, that’s fair. Sorry, bro.”
“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Frost replied. “I sprang the whole Rudy Cutter thing on you, and I did it badly. Believe me, I don’t like it, either.”
“Have you talked to Mom and Dad?” Duane asked.
“Not since the hearing. I need to call them.”
“They’re flying in from Tucson tomorrow.”
“What? Why?”
Tabby answered from the back of the truck. “The family support group is getting together on Saturday. With Cutter getting out, we all thought we needed to talk about what was going on.”
Frost felt guilty again, as if this were his fault. “Where are Mom and Dad staying?”
“With the Holtzmans,” Duane replied. “Near our old house.”
“Are they pissed at me like you are?” Frost asked.
“No, they’re not. And listen, bro, I’m not mad. It was just a shock.”
Tabby walked over and slung an arm around Duane’s waist. Her green eyes were flirty. “Okay, Beaston Boys, this is all very sweet, but speaking for myself, I’m still pretty horny, and the only way this is going to work out is for one of you to leave. Now, who’s it going to be?”
For the first time in his life, Frost saw Duane at a loss for words. He began to think his brother had genuine feelings for this girl, and he could see why.
“Actually, Tabby, I wanted to talk to you,” Frost said. “It won’t take long.”
“To me?” she answered. “The plot thickens. About what?”
“Nina.”
Her face fell. The innuendo disappeared. “Oh. Of course. Sorry, here I am being inappropriate, and you’re in the middle of dealing with—” She stopped, and she looked up at Duane with an apology on her face. “I’m going to let Frost steal me away for a couple minutes, okay?”
“Sure. Yeah.” Duane clapped Frost on the shoulder. “I’ll work on the care packages, bro.”
“Thanks.”
Frost descended the steps from the food truck, and Tabby followed behind him. The night air was cool, and she shivered. In the pale glow of the streetlights, her red hair looked darker, like mahogany. She still had a beer bottle in her hand. It was empty, but she played with it uncomfortably between her fingers.