He slid gloves onto his hands. He opened up the browser on the computer and checked the search history, hoping that Cutter hadn’t had time to delete it before he was chased out of the library. He was lucky. The history was intact. He saw a long list of Google search terms stretching back throughout the course of the day.
“When did Bike say he saw Cutter?” Frost asked.
“About two hours ago,” Eden replied.
Frost checked his watch and scrolled to a point in the history two hours earlier in the afternoon. He reviewed the search terms one by one. Most were innocuous, but then Frost saw a name among the search history:
Maria Lopes
And below it a similar search:
Maria Lopes San Francisco
He froze the screen where it was. Eden stared at it, too.
“You think Cutter did that search?” she asked.
“The timing is right,” Frost said. “Does the name mean anything to you? Do you recall Cutter mentioning a woman named Maria Lopes?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“The searches before and after seem to be unrelated. It doesn’t look like he clicked on any of the results he found. Either he didn’t find what he was looking for or he was interrupted before he could do anything more.”
“Or he knew what he needed as soon as he saw it,” Eden suggested.
Frost nodded. “True.”
“So who’s Maria Lopes?” she asked.
“If my gut is right, Cutter’s in the process of targeting his next victim. He knows who she is, or at least what her name is, but apparently, he doesn’t know much more than that. That’s interesting.”
He stood up and returned to the librarian named Wally. “I’m going to be calling for an officer to watch over that machine. And we’re going to need to have our forensics people study it in detail. In the meantime, we need to keep it off and unused. I don’t want anyone touching it. Okay?”
The librarian nodded. “Yes, of course. Anything you need.”
Frost returned to Eden. He switched off the machine. Next to him, another of the computers in the lab was open. “Let’s rerun the search on a different unit. I want to see what we get when we start looking for Maria Lopes in San Francisco.”
The two of them sat down at the computer, and Frost booted up the same browser and reentered the search term that Cutter had used. He was dismayed but not surprised by the number of results. There appeared to be numerous women with the same name around the city.
Eden reached out and put her hand over his on the computer mouse. “Let’s look at the ‘Images’ tab. If he clicked to enlarge a photograph, it wouldn’t show up in the history as a separate search. But maybe something will jump out at us.”
He felt the warmth of her fingers. She kept her hand there as she scrolled downward through an array of photographs.
“See anyone you know?” he asked.
“No. Do you?”
Frost shook his head. “I don’t.”
Eden took away her hand and rolled slightly backward on the chair next to him. “So what do we do? We don’t know which woman he was trying to find.”
“I need to talk to every Maria Lopes in San Francisco,” Frost replied. “At least the younger ones. One of them is in danger.”
“Cutter’s going to work fast, Frost. He won’t wait weeks this time. He knows you’re close.”
Frost knew that was true. Time was short. Even so, he was hoping that he was finally one step ahead of Rudy Cutter.
“He may suspect that we’re close, but he doesn’t know we’ve gotten this far,” Frost said. “That’s our advantage. We know his next move now. When he goes after Maria Lopes, whoever she is, we’ll be waiting.”
35
Rudy listened to footsteps echoing on the marble floor of the San Francisco Opera building. The lobby felt like a palace, with rows of Doric columns and brass-and-crystal lanterns hanging from an inlaid gold ceiling. People came and went, mostly in business suits, and their conversations made a constant, hollow murmur that hung in the air. There was a performance of Rigoletto scheduled for the evening, and that meant a wave of activity in the hours before the show.
He’d been here once before. That was decades earlier, not long after he and Hope had been married. Someone had given them tickets to Bellini’s Norma. He didn’t even remember who it was. They’d been underdressed because they couldn’t afford opera finery. He remembered feeling out of place, and he’d sat through the opera in severe discomfort, feeling assaulted by the screeching voices in Italian. He’d assumed Hope would feel the same way, but when he looked at her at one point, he saw tears running down her face.
He’d never even asked her what it was that affected her so much. They didn’t talk about things like that.
It wasn’t a good memory.
Rudy found what he wanted near the entrance to the theater hall. A printed program. He stuffed it in his pocket and turned around and exited the building onto the stone steps leading down to Van Ness. Colorful opera banners flapped in the light breeze over his head. The sun was already low, and the temperature was dropping. He headed to the street corner and crossed to the other side, where he sat down on the cold ground with his back propped against a sculpture outside Symphony Hall. From where he was, he could see the main steps of the opera building and the porte cochere for vehicles on the cross street.
The late-afternoon traffic jammed the intersection in every direction. Commuters were heading home.
He took the program out of his pocket and flipped through the pages to the listing of administrative staff. There were more people than he expected. Accountants, system administrators, music librarians, school-program coordinators, communication managers, marketers, and dozens of other people working behind the stage. He went through the list name by name, and he finally found her.
Maria Lopes. She was their assistant director of annual giving. A fund-raiser asking for money.
He was in the right place.
It was Friday. Maria was probably working. And it was almost the end of the day, which meant she should be leaving soon.
Rudy leaned forward with his arms on his knees, looking like a San Francisco street person with nowhere to go. Behind his sunglasses, he studied everyone leaving the opera building. It wasn’t easy. Dozens of people left simultaneously, heading in different directions. Trucks and buses blocked his view. He was far enough away to see both sides of the building, but the distance made it hard to distinguish each face. As the minutes passed, it also got darker.
Maria didn’t show.
Lights came on around him. Headlights blinded him as the cars passed. His vantage became useless. Most of the people who looked like office staff had been leaving through the side entrance on Grove Street, so he took a chance that Maria would do the same. He got up and crossed the street and staked out a new position near the wall of the opera building. It was after six o’clock now. He only had a moment to study each face emerging through the glass doors before they passed out of the lights and were lost on the dark street.
Six thirty came and went.
Then seven o’clock.
He began to think he was wasting his time. Either he’d missed Maria or she wasn’t at work. Then, through the nearest doors ten feet away, he spotted a profile that had a familiar cast. It had been four years, so he wasn’t sure, and the hair was much shorter than he remembered. The woman reached the sidewalk and headed away from him; she’d disappear soon. He had to make a choice. Stay or go.
Rudy followed her.
He remained half a block back, tracking her in and out of the crowd of pedestrians. The height was right. The walk was right. It might be Maria, but he couldn’t risk getting close enough to confirm it. She wore a leather jacket down to her ankles, and her shoulder-length hair was tucked under a purple beret. She led him directly east toward Market Street, and he guessed that she was heading for the BART station to catch a train. He was right.