“I am. My name’s Frost Easton.”
The man pushed himself off the bench. He extended a hand, which Frost shook. “Robbie Lubin. Tash — Natasha — was my sister.”
“Katie was mine,” Frost replied.
Robbie dug in the pocket of his jeans, and his hand emerged with another cigar. “Want one?”
“No, thanks.”
“Tash always gave me a hard time about cigars. She said they stank. So naturally, I smoked them around her whenever I could.”
Frost smiled. “That sounds about right.”
Robbie gestured at the house. “The whole group-hug thing has never been my style. I prefer to grieve in my own way.”
“Me, too.” Frost tried to remember what he’d heard about Natasha’s brother. “Someone told me you were from Minnesota. Is that right? Or am I thinking of someone else?”
“That’s me,” Robbie told him. “I live in a suburb of Minneapolis called Maple Grove. I work for Medtronic. My parents can’t understand what I’m doing out there. They think of Minnesota as the frozen tundra.”
“I have some Minnesota roots of my own,” Frost said.
“Oh?”
“Well, if you believe my mother, they were taking a cross-country driving trip while she was pregnant with me, and they were debating baby names. Apparently, they were passing through Southern Minnesota, and they saw a highway sign pointing to the town of Easton in one direction and the town of Frost in the other. ‘Frost Easton.’ My mother took it as a sign from the universe.”
“I like it.” Robbie sucked on the cigar and blew out a cloud of smoke.
“So was Natasha older or younger?” Frost asked.
“Tash was four years younger than me.”
“Same with me and Katie.”
“Were the two of you close?” Robbie asked.
“Best friends since we were kids. We hung out together all the time. How about you?”
“As kids, not so much,” he replied. “I was a science geek. Tash was into athletics. A basketball player. She was freaky tall, like our dad. We did our own thing in those days, but that changed when she went to college. I was doing an internship at Medtronic, and as luck would have it, Tash got recruited to the U of M basketball team. So she moved in with me. We lived together all four years she was in school. At that point, we became super close.”
“But then she moved back to California?” Frost asked.
“Right. The winters out there weren’t for her. She hated them. And I think she felt bad having both of us so far away from our parents. I’m glad Mom and Dad had those couple of years with her living at home again. You know, as things worked out.”
“Yeah.”
Robbie studied him from behind his bright-red glasses. “You’re the cop, right? The one who found the watch?”
Frost nodded.
“My parents aren’t fans of yours,” Robbie told him. “They thought you should have kept your mouth shut. For what it’s worth, I told them they were wrong. I’m in a business where you can’t take shortcuts, and I don’t approve of anyone who does, even when they do it for the right reasons.”
“I appreciate that.”
“I can only imagine what an agonizing choice it was for you. You’re not a disinterested observer.”
“No.”
“Do you have a picture of Katie?” Robbie asked.
“Sure.”
Frost pulled his phone out of his pocket and called up the screen-saver photo he used. It showed him and Katie on a beautiful summer day at Alcatraz, the year before she was killed. Her head leaned against his shoulder; she had a big smile; and her hair was sunny blond. That was how he liked to remember her.
Robbie took a long look before handing the phone back to him. “You two look a lot alike.”
“Everyone says that,” Frost agreed. He added, “Do you have a picture of Natasha?”
“Of course.”
Frost had seen many pictures of Natasha Lubin over the years — including horrible ones from the crime scene — but he knew that Robbie was looking for an opportunity to show off his sister. That was what siblings did. Robbie pulled out his own phone and scrolled through a long series of pictures to find the one he wanted.
“This is us in my apartment in Minneapolis,” he told Frost, “when Tash was a senior.”
Frost turned the camera sideways to make the landscape image bigger. It was a sweet shot. Natasha was in her yellow basketball uniform, with long dark hair tied into a ponytail. She towered six inches over her older brother. Robbie looked younger and skinnier, with longer black hair but the same glasses. The two of them mugged for the camera, fighting playfully over the basketball that Natasha held in her big hands. They were obviously in Natasha’s bedroom; Frost could see basketball trophies lined up on a bookshelf behind them.
“You’re right, she was really tall,” he said.
“Six four,” Robbie replied. “And you can bet she reminded me about that every time I saw her.”
“Of course she did,” Frost said, smiling.
He was about to hand the phone back to Robbie Lubin.
And that was when he saw it.
He stared at the picture and squinted to make out the details. At first, he didn’t realize what he was looking at, but when he did, chills ran up and down his body. With his thumb and forefinger, he enlarged the photograph, not to look at Natasha and Robbie, but to zoom in on the bookshelf behind them. There, on the shelf, beside the basketball trophies, he could see a small picture frame no larger than five-by-seven inches.
Enlarged, the image was blurry, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t wrong about it. Inside the picture frame was the puzzle piece that had eluded Jess for years. Inside the picture frame was the answer. The connection. The motive. The reason why all those women had to die. Behind that sliver of glass was the evidence that would put Rudy Cutter back in prison for the rest of his life.
“What is that?” Frost murmured, pointing at the screen with his finger. “Where did it come from?”
Robbie leaned in to see what Frost was looking at. “Oh, the sketch? Mom gave that to Tash when she turned eighteen. It’s just a little portrait of Mom holding Tash as a baby when she was at the hospital. Tash thought it was pretty cool. I still have it on the wall in my place in Minnesota. It’s a little reminder of her.”
Frost kept staring at the sketch in the frame.
It was a drawing of a mother with a baby in her arms. The sketch was roughly done, but by a talented hand. He could recognize Dominika Lubin, younger, glowing with triumph and exhaustion. Her eyes beamed at her child, at the new life she was holding. And the baby had her own eyes closed, asleep and at peace in a new world. The sketch must have been done within hours of Natasha’s birth.
He saw the label inscribed underneath the portrait: Dominika and Natasha. Below it was Natasha’s birthdate.
“Do you know who made this sketch?” he asked.
Robbie shrugged. “Sorry, no. Honestly, I don’t even know where Mom got it. Why?”
Frost didn’t answer. He already knew who the artist had to be. He knew, because he’d seen an almost identical sketch in the bedroom of Nina Flores, and it was obviously done by the same hand. He’d seen that same sketch of Nina Flores somewhere else, too. It was clearly visible in the background of the photograph of Nina and Tabby that Nina had worn as a button on her twenty-first birthday.
Anyone looking at the photograph, anyone who knew what that sketch was, would have recognized it, even in miniature. Seeing it, seeing the technique, Frost realized that he’d seen the same artist’s work in the self-portrait over the fireplace in Josephine Stillman’s house. That was partly why the painting had seemed so oddly familiar to him. It wasn’t just the face. It was the style.
Rudy Cutter would have recognized it, too.