His father extended the envelope to him, and Frost took it. He opened the flap and slid out what was inside, and he used the glow of his phone to light it up. It was a handwritten packing slip describing the Tibetan fountain, and stapled to it was a cash register receipt. He read through the details and saw not just the date printed on the receipt, but the time.
March 10. 7:57 p.m.
“Dad, do you realize when she stopped at this store?” Frost asked. “This was after Todd Clary placed his order. She must have stopped there while she was making her last delivery.”
“Yeah, that’s what it looked like to me, too.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
“Cutter was in prison. I didn’t think it mattered anymore.”
Frost looked at the receipt again. This time, he noticed the name and address of the Tibetan gift shop where Katie had stopped, and he saw the next piece of the puzzle taking shape in his mind. It was a puzzle piece that didn’t fit.
“Do you know this shop?” he asked his father. “Do you know where it is?”
“I know it’s on Haight.”
“Yes, but the shop is four blocks east of the restaurant where Katie worked. It’s practically as far as Herb’s gallery.”
“So what?”
Ned was directionally challenged. Frost got his own sense of direction, which had saved him time after time during his taxi-driving days, from his mother.
“To get to Todd Clary’s place near USF, Katie should have gone west from the restaurant,” Frost told him. “By stopping at the gift shop, she was headed in the opposite direction of where she needed to deliver the pizza. That doesn’t make any sense. Where the hell was she going?”
23
“Are you the one who called me?” Jess asked the Asian bartender in the downstairs bar in Japantown. He had plucked eyebrows, and his eyelashes were as full as any model on the cover of Vogue. She thought about asking him what shade of lipstick he was wearing, because she wanted it for herself.
“I called you?” he replied. “Who are you?”
“You said a guy named Rudy had a message for me.”
He checked her out, and his lips bent into a smile. “Oh, you’re the girlfriend. Oh, sure. Well, sorry, your ex is long gone, and he’s not coming back. He left with a horny little thing.”
“When did they leave?”
“I don’t know. I lose track of time in here. An hour ago? It got busy, so I didn’t call you right away. Hey, as long as you’re here, you want to cry into a martini? I make a pretty sweet cosmo.”
Jess dug in her back pocket for a piece of paper, which she unfolded on the bar. “Is this the guy?”
The bartender picked up the file photo of Rudy Cutter. His soft eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What’s this about? Are you a cop or something?”
Jess reached for her badge by instinct, but her badge wasn’t there. The reality hit her for the first time that she wasn’t a cop anymore. That part of her life was over. She didn’t even know what she was doing here, putting herself in the middle of an investigation that no longer had her name on it.
“Do I look like a cop?” she asked him.
“Yeah, you do,” he replied, as if it were finally dawning on him that he’d made a mistake.
“Then answer the question. Is this the guy?”
“Yeah, that’s him,” the man replied.
“Does he still look like this?” Jess asked, stabbing the photo with a finger.
“Pretty much. He had a clean shave. No stubble. He was wearing a trendy fedora with a double brim in yellow. Sunglasses, too. Little rectangular sunglasses and a leather jacket.”
“His full name is Rudy Cutter. Does that mean anything to you?”
The man picked up the photo again and stared at it, and he looked as if his powder makeup were going to dissolve in a soup of sweat. “Oh, shit. That guy? That’s him?”
“That’s him.”
“I thought he looked familiar. Damn it, I knew I’d seen him before.”
“What did he tell you?” Jess asked.
“He said his girlfriend dumped him, and he was looking to hook up.”
“Did he?”
“Yeah, I told you, he left with a girl.”
“You also told me that you were the one who fixed him up,” Jess reminded him.
The bartender squirmed. His eyes darted back and forth. “Look, he asked for my help in finding a girl with the right attitude, you know? Someone looking for a party. He gave me fifty bucks to make an introduction.”
“And you found someone for him?” Jess asked.
“In here? It wasn’t hard.”
“You slip her anything?”
“What, like drugs? No! I may have made her drinks a little strong, but nobody complains about that.”
“Who was she?” Jess asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen her before. She’s not a regular.”
“Did she give you a name?”
“Maggie, I think. Or something like that. No last name. She paid cash for her first couple of drinks, and then this guy picked up the rest. No credit card. I’m telling you, I don’t know who she was.”
“Describe her,” Jess said. “How would I pick her out in a crowd?”
“You wouldn’t. She looked like a hundred other girls. Long brown hair, too much makeup, little black dress.”
“Did you eavesdrop on their conversation?” Jess asked. “Where were they going when they left?”
“A concert at the Fillmore. He had an extra ticket for Japandroids, and he was looking for someone to go with him.”
“Japandroids. Is that a real group?”
“Hell yes. Great rockers.”
“Did you actually see these tickets?” Jess asked.
“Yeah, he showed them to me. It wasn’t a con.”
“Do you remember anything else? Anything that would help me find this girl or where she lives?”
The bartender shook his head. “Look, if I’d recognized this guy, if I knew it was this psycho, I wouldn’t have helped him.”
Jess wanted to believe that, but she knew that money talked. A fifty-dollar bill erased most moral objections. She left the bar and jogged back up the steps to Post Street. Japantown was crowded with traffic and pedestrians hunting for sake and sushi. Across the street in the plaza, the Peace Pagoda was lit in green, looking like a giant laser weapon in some sci-fi movie. The night was cool, and drizzle gave a wet sheen to her trench coat.
She studied the faces around her, but she knew that Cutter was long gone, and he wasn’t coming back. Maybe he was at the Fillmore, or maybe the tickets were just a ruse to lead her in the wrong direction.
The only thing she knew for certain was that Cutter had paid the bartender to call her. He wanted her to chase him.
Frost found Jess standing next to a stoplight on Geary Street, across from the yellow-brick building that housed the Fillmore. A cigarette leaned out of her mouth, as usual, and her lips tilted downward into a perpetual frown. Her hair and skin glistened with rain. She had eyes that never seemed to blink, and they were focused on the doorway to the theater, where mist blew through the glow of a streetlight.
For up-and-coming bands, the Fillmore was the ultimate high. It meant you were playing the same stage where ’60s music royalty had been crowned. Grateful Dead. Jefferson Airplane. Santana. Even hardened rockers felt the awe.
“Did anyone remember seeing Cutter?” Frost asked Jess.
“No, I showed his photo around the box office, but nobody could pick him out. When you’ve got a few hundred bodies shoving to get close to the stage, you don’t see the individual faces.”