That’s Rudy Cutter.
But no one recognized him. He was safe.
He made his way back to the library elevators, where he waited impatiently, pretending to stare at the paintings on the wall. With a musical ding, one of the elevators arrived, and he studied his feet and wiped a hand over his face to hide himself as the people inside got out. When the car was empty, he stepped inside, but as he did, he threw a last glance at the open interior of the library’s fifth floor.
Not far away, the black man with the patch-covered jean jacket and the Alcatraz cap sat in an overstuffed armchair, staring right at Rudy over the top of a motorcycle magazine.
33
“Why are you stopping here?” Eden asked as Frost pulled to the curb on Haight in front of a Tibetan boutique with Asian lanterns and brass-and-turquoise jewelry in the store windows. The bright paint on the trim was the color of sunflowers. Like seemingly every other business on Haight, its neighbor was a tattoo parlor.
“Quick detour,” he replied.
They were heading for the house where Hope Cutter’s mother lived near the Stonestown mall, but he wanted to stop here first. This was the gift shop where Katie had purchased a ceramic fountain as an anniversary gift for their parents. It was probably the last place anyone would have seen her alive. And the shop was in the opposite direction of where she should have been headed with Todd Clary’s pizza.
He explained to Eden what his father had told him. She studied the storefront with a little frown on her face.
“It’s not really so strange, is it?” she said. “We’re only a block past Masonic, and you can get through the Panhandle there. She could have turned around and headed north after she stopped at the shop.”
Frost shook his head. “A U-turn? On Haight? Good luck with that. Come on, you know what the traffic is like around here. Even going around the block would probably have added ten minutes at that time of night. The next cross street that cuts through the Panhandle is Baker, and by then, she would have been half an hour away from Todd Clary’s place. Katie was a little scattered, but she was a native, like me. She wouldn’t make a mistake like that.”
Eden pointed at the boutique window. “The shop closes at eight o’clock. You said the receipt was dated right before eight, right? Maybe she remembered that she needed to get a gift for your folks just as she was heading out to make her delivery. She dashed over here to buy something before the store closed.”
“Okay, but why make a special trip? She had two more days before their anniversary. She could have gone to the shop on Friday or Saturday. The only reason to stop was if it was right on her way. And it wasn’t.”
“So what happened?” Eden asked. “What are you thinking?”
Frost tried to put himself inside his sister’s head again. He tried to picture what she was doing on that last night. What she was thinking. Where she was going. He could imagine her in her car, singing along to the radio. The smell of the pizza on the seat next to her would have made her open the windows. He was familiar with all of the evidence from that night, but the evidence didn’t help him. Katie hadn’t made or received any calls or texts after she left the pizza joint. She was on her own.
“Katie broke the pattern,” he said. “It was March, not November. She was the only victim other than Nina Flores who wasn’t murdered in November.”
“But the police ruled out a copycat, didn’t they?”
“Yes, it was definitely Cutter. Katie was wearing Hazel Dixon’s watch on her wrist when I found her. And then Katie’s watch showed up on Shu Chan in November, so we know he took it from her. This was Cutter, but somehow Katie’s murder was different from his other crimes. I want to know why.”
He got out of the Suburban and went around to the sidewalk. Eden got out, too. The street was crowded. Tourists window-shopped. A double-decker sightseeing bus passed behind them. Haight was like a museum now, an artifact of what the ’60s had been. It looked real, but it wasn’t. The hippies had been replaced by technology yuppies, who were the only ones who could afford the city anymore. The customers getting the tattoos made a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, plus stock options.
He smiled, seeing one of Herb’s three-dimensional sidewalk paintings two stores down from the boutique. Herb’s paintings filled the Haight-Ashbury area, pointing tourists to his gallery a few blocks away. This one showed a young Jerry Garcia playing guitar, and it appeared to rise off the pavement so realistically that people detoured around the painting to avoid bumping into him.
“I’ve been searching the wrong streets for years,” Frost said as he looked up and down the block. “I followed every route from the pizza joint to Clary’s place a dozen times, but I went the wrong way. I assumed that Katie headed west, which is what she should have done. Except she didn’t. I never checked the streets going this way.”
“What were you looking for?” Eden asked.
“Any place where Katie and Cutter might have intersected. I studied his life. I studied his credit-card receipts. I did the same with Shu Chan, because I figured he might have been targeting her already. There was nothing that would have put them in the same area.”
Eden shook her head. “East, west, it doesn’t really matter, does it? If you’d found a connection close to here, it would have jumped out at you. A few blocks wouldn’t have made a difference.”
“You’re right about that.”
He stared at the boutique door. It was easy to picture Katie rushing inside before they closed, with the hot pizza in her car. She’d spot the Buddha fountain immediately; maybe she’d already seen it in the window. It was the perfect gift for their mother. She would have haggled over the price, but not much. Katie wasn’t a bargainer, and she didn’t have time to negotiate. She would have scribbled down their parents’ address for the delivery, probably had to write it out again so they could read it, and then she would have dashed back to her car to head in the opposite direction to Todd Clary’s place.
It still didn’t make sense to him.
“I always assumed that Katie stumbled onto Cutter on the delivery route,” Frost told her. “She saw something she wasn’t supposed to see.”
“That makes sense,” Eden said. “So maybe Shu Chan was in the Asian boutique that night, and Cutter was watching her. If Katie saw him near Shu, that would explain everything.”
Frost nodded. “I thought about that. And you’re right, it’s probably what happened, but it doesn’t explain everything.”
“Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t explain why Katie was in this store that night to begin with,” Frost said. “That’s what I don’t understand. She shouldn’t have been here at all.”
The owners of the Tibetan boutique didn’t recognize the photographs that Frost showed them. Katie Easton, Rudy Cutter, and Shu Chan were all strangers to them. They didn’t remember the purchase or delivery of one ceramic Buddha fountain six years earlier. It was a dead end.
Frost put it out of his mind for now and headed for Stonestown.
Hope’s mother, Josephine Stillman, was in her mideighties. She still lived in the same little white house on Eucalyptus Drive that she and her husband had purchased in the ’60s. She was one of thousands of elderly house orphans in California who enjoyed low property tax rates because of Prop 13, as long as they never sold their home. So they stayed put year after year, watching their net worth grow on paper. Josephine’s three-bedroom matchbox was probably worth two million dollars now.