Frost stared at the photograph again. He figured that Rudy Cutter must have been twelve years old at the baseball game. He mugged for the camera the way kids do. There was nothing in his face to suggest the man he would become. It would take decades for the evil to emerge.
“Help me understand your brother, Phil,” Frost said.
“Why should I?”
“Because deep down, you know he’s sick and he has to be stopped.”
“You want to stop him? Go find a watch and hide it in the ceiling like your friend did. She did it right here, you know, at the top of the stairs. She slipped it in behind the smoke detector.”
“I’m not defending what Jess did,” Frost replied, “but what Rudy did to her was a hell of a lot worse.”
“I already told you. Rudy was with me.”
Frost shook his head. He couldn’t shake the man’s lies. “If you won’t tell me about Rudy, then tell me about Hope. I know what she did to their daughter. I can only imagine how that affected Rudy.”
Phil hissed between his teeth. “Hope. What a freak show.”
One of the other framed photographs on the wall showed Rudy holding a baby in his arms. Half the picture had been torn away, leaving a white space inside the frame. Frost suspected that Hope had been in the picture and that Phil had excised his sister-in-law from his memory.
“You didn’t like her?”
“She was trouble. Like Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde. You never knew what you were going to get with Hope. One minute she’d be juiced, running around with so much energy you just wanted to unplug her. Then she’d go into a dark place, and nothing could pull her out. When she got like that, she was a witch. I mean, she’d scream at Rudy. Ugly, ugly stuff. She’d hit him, too. She slashed him with a knife once, right across the chest. He still has the scar.”
“A knife,” Frost said. “Knives come up a lot with them.”
Phil was cool, not reacting to the verbal jab. His rheumy eyes didn’t blink. He kept smoking.
“I don’t know why Rudy picked her,” he went on after a long silence. “Rudy was a good-looking guy. Still is. He could have done better than Hope. You ask me, she manipulated him. She knew how to pull his strings. If he ever talked about divorce, she’d go crazy, crying about how she couldn’t live without him. You talk about husbands abusing wives? This was a wife abusing her husband. She was an awful piece of work. Freaking psycho.”
“And Wren?”
Just like that, tears gathered in Phil’s eyes. He was an uncle who still missed his niece. “Aw, Wren, she was an angel. I’m telling you, that little girl had sunshine in her face. I don’t care what you think of my brother or what you think he’s done. He loved that girl. If she needed blood, he would have slit his own wrists to save her.”
“So what really happened?” Frost asked.
Phil’s face hardened. His eyes had a grim, faraway look. “Docs said Hope had a bad case of PPD. Bipolar, too. They’ve got lots of buzzwords, but if you ask me, she was just evil. She was jealous of Wren. Jealous of this sweet, beautiful girl, not even a year old. The baby got all the attention from Rudy. Hope just wanted to take her away from him. That was all it was. She couldn’t stand to see Rudy happy. So she smothered her own daughter and then killed herself like a coward.”
The dog on the floor roused from his slumber and growled. Phil snapped his fingers to quiet him.
“At 3:42 a.m.,” Frost said.
“Let’s just say it was the middle of the night.”
“What happened to Rudy after that?” Frost asked.
“Rudy? He stopped.”
Frost was puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“Life stopped for Rudy that day. Time stopped. Everything stopped. It was like he was frozen, you know? He quit his job. He was an underwriter, and he was good at it — the guy is wicked smart — but he couldn’t stomach it anymore. All the people who knew what had happened, all the sad stares, it was too much. He got some nothing job in data entry at B of A, where no one knew about his background. He moved in here with me. He just — stopped. He never started again. Not for years. Not until—”
Frost stared at him. “Not until?”
Phil didn’t say a word, as if he’d already said too much. It didn’t matter. Frost knew exactly when Rudy Cutter had come to life again.
“Not until he met Nina Flores,” Frost said.
31
Eden Shay was waiting on Frost’s front steps when he arrived back at his Russian Hill house. She had her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped tightly together in her lap. She wore no makeup today. Her black curls looked flat. He grabbed Shack, who was sleeping on the front seat of the Suburban, and sat down next to Eden on the steps. She inched away from him.
“You heard about Jess?” Frost asked.
She nodded without looking back. “Sorry. I know she meant a lot to you.”
He didn’t reply. He noticed the way Eden kept space between them now. She was the opposite of Tabby. She didn’t reach out, take his hand, or hug him.
“Do you want to come inside?” he asked her.
“Sure.”
Frost led her up the steps. Inside, he put Shack down, and the cat scampered away and disappeared. Normally, Shack stayed close whenever someone was in the house, as if he needed to be part of the conversation, but not today. Frost heard him thunder up the stairs to find his favorite spot in the closet.
Eden wandered to the bay window. She was subdued. She opened the door and went out to the patio, and she stood at the railing, where the hillside fell off below her and the city stretched down toward the waters of the bay.
He came up beside her. “What’s wrong?”
“I think you should quit what you’re doing. Don’t go after Cutter. Let the other detectives do it.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s dangerous,” she said. “Doesn’t what happened to Jess prove that to you?”
He didn’t think this had anything to do with Jess. “What’s going on, Eden?”
“Cutter found me.”
He reached out for her shoulder, but she drew away. It was as if she were back in the basement in Iowa, recoiling from any touch, suspicious of every man. “Are you okay?”
“No. I’m not.”
“Did he threaten you?” Frost asked.
“He didn’t need to. He knew how to find me. He knew where I was living. I got the message. If I didn’t help him, I’d be next.”
“What did he want?”
Eden’s head turned, and she stared at him now. “He wanted to know about you.”
“Me? What about me?”
“Everything. What I’d found out about you. What you knew about him and this case. He wanted to know if you’re getting close.”
“It doesn’t feel that way,” Frost said.
“Well, maybe you’re closer than you think. The point is, you’re getting in his way, and he doesn’t like it. Jess got in his way, and you saw what he did to her. That’s why you should stop.”
“I’m not going to stop.”
She shrugged. “No, I didn’t think you would.”
“What did you tell Cutter about me?”
“I told him to go to hell,” Eden replied.
He wondered if that was the truth. Eden was complicated. She’d built relationships with the men on both sides of this case. Him and Rudy Cutter. It was impossible to know where her loyalties lay, other than with herself. Her book came first. He also realized that he needed to keep her close to him so he could watch what she was doing.
“Do you think he’d come after you again?” he asked her.
“I live in a security building. He can’t get close to me.”
“He already did,” Frost said. Then he made a risky decision. “Do you want to stay here with me for a few days?”