“And this is me and Tabby! Aren’t we cute? This was just like a week ago. We were heading out to a party, pretty hot stuff, huh? Look at those smiles. See — like sisters! People talk about BFFs and don’t really mean it, but that’s me and her, for sure. Right, Tabby?”
Rudy didn’t listen to what the other barista said.
He’d found himself staring at the oversized button pinned below the collar of Nina’s T-shirt. Leaning closer to get a better look. At first, he’d thought he was imagining things. It was a vision, brought on by what he planned to do, a last little joke played on his brain by Hope’s ghost.
But it wasn’t. It was real.
Right there on the bedroom wall behind the photograph of these two girls was a sketch of a mother and child. He knew those sketches. He had dozens of them in a box in the garage at home. Hope had made them of new mothers and new babies ever since she’d started her work as an ER nurse.
The awful reality of it had gathered like a storm in Rudy’s brain. Hope had been in a hospital room with this girl on the day she’d been born. Hope had talked to her mother. Laughed with her. She’d probably held this child in her arms. She’d sketched her face and captured her forever. Hope had seen the beauty in this girl and the love her mother had for her. This girl had grown up in a family and lived with her parents and her siblings.
This girl was alive. Wren was dead.
It couldn’t be an accident that Rudy had found her. On that day of all days.
Something about the intersection of Nina and Hope had stirred a fury in Rudy where there had previously been nothing but hollow grief. This girl was a direct connection to Hope. It was like Hope lived on in Nina Flores. She was a perennial coming back year after year — a flower that needed to be yanked out of the ground and destroyed once and for all. Maybe, if he could do that, he could be free.
Rudy had walked out of that coffee shop a different man.
He’d still gone to the Giants game with Phil. He’d had his burger and his beer. But afterward, he hadn’t gone to the Golden Gate Bridge to throw himself to the hard surface of the water. Instead, he’d spent the night in the garage with a box from his past that he hadn’t opened in twenty-one years. The box was filled with the memories of his life with Hope. He’d tried for two decades to crush those memories, but now he realized that was a mistake. He wanted to remember. He wanted to strike back. He wanted Hope to feel what he felt, to have her know that he could kill, too. He could strip away someone else’s future, someone else’s dreams, just the way she’d done to him.
He’d found the copies of the sketches. All of them. Dozens of them.
Going through them, he’d found the one he was looking for. Gilda and Nina. Staring at it, he’d finally had a plan. For years, he’d had no way of taking revenge on Hope for what she’d done. Until that moment.
Gilda and Nina.
Two weeks later, when it was done, he’d come home and taken a match and burned the sketch into ash. That night, he’d slept all the way through from dark to dawn, not waking up at 3:42 a.m.
And he’d known that he wasn’t done.
The next year, he’d taken Rae Hart away from Hope. The year after that, he’d done the same with Natasha Lubin. He’d burned more sketches and watched the flames. It was as if Hope could feel the pain of what he’d done. As if she were on the other side of a window, silently screaming at him. It was the battle that never ended. Not while he was alive.
Rudy shivered.
Behind him, a wet finger of fog caressed his neck and passed in front of his eyes like a cataract. He didn’t have much time. Night was coming soon. There was barely an hour of daytime left, and the fog was already stealing it away. He lifted the binoculars and studied the house at the base of the hill. Lights shined behind the windows, and he could see clearly into Maria’s bedroom. She read a book as she lay on the bed, but her face was grim with tension. She showed no indication of getting ready to leave the house before dark.
Why wasn’t she running?
She always ran. She ran every day. And then he knew: Frost Easton had warned her. Scared her. She was staying home, changing her routine, because of him.
Rudy didn’t think he’d get a second chance with Maria. Everything would be different tomorrow. It was now or never, and he had to do something. He reached into his backpack and booted up his phone, and he dialed her number. Through the lenses of his binoculars, he could see her get up to answer the call. In his ear, he heard the mellow sound of Maria’s voice.
“Hello?”
“Ms. Lopes? This is Inspector Wolff with the San Francisco Police. I work with Inspector Easton.” Rudy’s tone was official but friendly.
“Oh, is there news?” Maria asked.
“Yes, there is. We were able to identify the woman that Rudy Cutter has been targeting, and the good news is, it’s not you. We’re calling everyone we talked to, in order to let them know they’re safe and don’t need to worry.”
“Oh my God, what a relief.”
“I’m sure it is. Inspector Easton sends his apologies for alarming you, but of course, we had to take every precaution.”
“Of course.”
“Have a good day,” he told her.
Rudy hung up.
He watched Maria, and he waited. She paced back and forth in her bedroom. She went to the window and stared out at the dark hills, and her face broke into a nervous smile, drained of fear. She looked almost giddy now. Then, just as he’d hoped, she began to change her clothes. She put on a tight-fitting, long-sleeved athletic shirt that had bold stripes. She found a pair of black shorts. She bent over and tied the laces of red high-top sneakers.
Maria was going for a run.
Rudy reached into his backpack to retrieve his knife. Watch this, Hope.
42
Maria knew the hills as intimately as a lover. She ran them every single day of her life. As she stepped out of her front door, the cool air from the ocean hit her with a bracing blow to the face. She felt dampness; rain would be coming overnight. She jogged down the steps to the street, where she did an elaborate series of stretches to loosen up for the trails.
The warning about Rudy Cutter from Inspector Easton hadn’t seemed real, but until the call came from his partner telling her she was safe, she hadn’t admitted to herself how much the threat had unnerved her. Now, she was keyed up and flooded with restless energy. It was almost too late to run — darkness was coming soon — but if she didn’t run, she knew she’d never sleep. She needed to do something normal after a day filled with crazy fear.
When she was done stretching, she studied the hills. They were lush green and bathed in gloom, with only a handful of trees looming over the densely matted vegetation like solitary soldiers. The cloud of fog had reached the summit of the ridge and was starting to spill into the valley. She wanted a demanding run tonight, on a trail that climbed sharply uphill toward the slope that overlooked Pacifica and the ocean. A hard, strenuous workout was the way to burn off her anxiety. She slid earbuds into her ears and kicked off the playlist on her Nano. Right now, she was obsessed with Ellie Goulding, so she listened to “My Blood” as she took off toward the park. With the music pounding, she couldn’t hear anything else around her.
Running was therapy to Maria. Some runners cleared their minds as they ran, thinking about nothing except their pace and their breathing, but Maria brought her whole life with her onto the trails. Right now, she thought about Jeremy. She was a wife, singer, actress, and fund-raiser, but more than anything, she was Maria Lopes, mother to Jeremy. He was her everything. The thought of being on Rudy Cutter’s list hadn’t scared her because of what might happen to herself. The heaviness in her chest was the unspeakable fear of missing her son’s life. Not seeing Jeremy grow up before her eyes. Not being there for school, sports, dances, and girls. Not seeing what he would do and where he would go in this world. His future was far more important than her own.