But the same man parking his car near the site where another victim had been abducted and killed? Jess didn’t believe in coincidences.
For a year, she’d hunted for evidence tying Cutter to the murders. For a year, she’d followed him, hoping to catch him stalking his next victim. And still Melanie Valou died. Even with the police breathing down his neck, Cutter had managed to kill again and leave no physical evidence behind to connect him to the crime.
Not until Jess found Melanie’s watch hidden in Cutter’s ceiling.
Frost dangled the watch in front of his eyes the way a hypnotist would. He thought about the message Copernicus had given him.
This is Melanie Valou’s watch.
Frost didn’t want to believe it. He didn’t want to think about what it would mean if that was true. This was only a ruse. A game. The Golden Gate Murders had been put to bed four years earlier with Cutter’s conviction. The victims and their families had justice. Katie had justice. No one would thank him for raising questions now. All he would do was bring back the pain for everyone.
And yet.
It was the watch that had put Cutter behind bars. Without Jess finding the watch, Cutter would never have been arrested, never been found guilty.
The other watch — the one you guys found — was the fake.
The cops planted it.
If that was true, then Jess was the one who had planted it.
Frost climbed out of the Suburban and slipped the watch inside his pocket. He felt mist on his face. His black jacket offered little protection against the roaring wind. He crossed an empty plaza past the welcome center and followed a ramp that led him toward the bridge deck. He walked quickly, with long strides. Traffic streamed from the Marin Headlands, emerging like ghosts out of the fog. As he reached the bridge itself, the bay water opened into a dark expanse two hundred feet below him. The gusts intensified, blown through the narrow passage from the Pacific. Pinpoint lights swept the city skyline and the East Bay, and the brighter lights over the railings threw his shadow at his feet.
He was alone on the crossing. He wondered if the drivers who spotted him thought, Jumper. Dozens of unhappy souls went over the edge to their deaths every year. The bridge was a magnet for the lonely and the desperate.
Beside him, the mammoth main suspender cable rose toward the first tower. He continued until he was over deep water and stopped midway between the lights, where he was mostly invisible. He leaned on the railing and looked down. His brown hair, which was normally slicked back over his head, blew into his face. His skin felt raw.
He dug inside his pocket and cupped the watch in the palm of his hand.
All he had to do was let the watch slide down between his open fingers. No one would see. No one would know. Seconds later, the watch would strike the bay. It would sink slowly, like a dead leaf in the wind, settling toward the bottom. The deepest area of the bay was here, more than three hundred feet from surface to sand. The watch would never be found, never raise ugly doubts about the evidence in Rudy Cutter’s trial. The mystery would drown with it.
Frost wasn’t the only one who knew about the duplicate watch. Obviously, someone else had already found it and led him to it. Whoever that was might raise questions about how the second watch had gone missing, and he’d have to offer excuses. He’d lost it. It was stolen. Someone might suspect there was more to the story, but without the watch itself, no one would ever be able to prove that the watch Jess had found in Cutter’s house was a fake. The story of the Golden Gate Murders would end here, atop the Golden Gate Bridge. There was a satisfying irony in that.
He felt the watch in his hand. In the darkness, he could barely see it. It was featherlight, weighing almost nothing. Let it go. Let it fall. One meaningless speck in the sea. A minute passed, and he still held it, his hand outstretched, nothing but water below him. Then two minutes. Then ten. Over the eastern hills, the sky flushed as dawn inched closer. He was running out of time.
Frost shook his head. Jess had always called him a Boy Scout. The cop who played by the rules. It wasn’t a compliment. On his first day, she’d told him about “the line.” The line between going by the book and taking shortcuts. It was a line that every cop faced sooner or later, when he had to decide if the end justified the means. Sometimes doing the right thing meant a criminal going free. Sometimes doing the wrong thing saved lives.
He remembered how Jess had described it to him: The line’s not one color, not easy to see, no way to know which side of it you’re on. If a lawyer or politician thinks you’re wrong, you might end up out of a job, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t cross it when you have to. If all you want is your fricking pension, go be a bus driver or something.
For Frost, this was the line.
The easy thing, the smart thing, was to drop Melanie Valou’s watch into the deep water. Standing there, numb with cold, hearing Jess’s voice in his memory, he realized that he couldn’t do it.
Can you live with a lie?
That was the question, and the answer was no.
He closed his fingers around the watch and returned it to his pocket. Like a jumper who’d thought better of it, he walked back off the bridge.
3
“Ms. Valou?” Frost asked.
The raven-haired woman at the restaurant Zazie looked up from her organic granola and her copy of the New York Times. The morning was cold enough to see your breath, but she sat outside with only a lightweight jacket and an espresso to warm her. Her legs were bare below her knee-length skirt.
“Yes?” she replied, her accent thick and French. “May I help you?”
“My name is Frost Easton. I’m a homicide inspector with the San Francisco Police. The doorman at your building said I could probably find you here. I was hoping we could talk for a couple minutes. It’s about Melanie.”
Camille Valou’s face showed a hint of anxiety. Five years had passed since her daughter’s murder, but five years was nothing. Her dark eyes had a permanent sadness. Her pale-pink lips made a thin, emotionless line. “Sit,” she told him.
Frost took a chair opposite her as Camille neatly folded her newspaper. She nodded at a waitress through the window, who appeared in a flash to take Frost’s order. He shook his head, but Camille was having none of that.
“You must have something,” she said. “Please, it’s my treat.”
“Coffee,” Frost said.
“Oh, that is not breakfast. You’re a busy, important man. You need to eat. Bring him the Avignon scrambled eggs, Suzy.”
“That’s really not necessary,” Frost said.
Camille shrugged. “Life is about more than what’s necessary. And more espresso for me, Suzy, please.”
The waitress smiled and disappeared.
Camille still had espresso left in her cup, and she took the last sip and dabbed at her mouth with a napkin. She was intelligent. He could see it in her stare as she watched him, making calculations about his intentions. He’d seen many photographs of Melanie Valou, and he could see the resemblance between mother and daughter. Camille was in her midfifties, matchstick thin, with sharp, bony lines outlining her white face. She was pretty and elegant. Well dressed. Manicured nails. Her black hair, a little too black for her age, was cut short in a deliberately messy style. Her appearance didn’t scream of money, but people with money didn’t need to advertise it.