He sprinted for the building and threw himself inside. His flashlight reflected a shiny spattered blood trail across the debris on the stone floor. It led him under the rotting wooden timbers in the ceiling and toward a huge open window frame that was bordered with peeling green paint. In the next abandoned room, he saw a plastic mannequin, its body crusted with dirt, its head cut off, its arm pointed straight ahead, as if it were beckoning him.
He ran to the window frame and climbed through to the other side.
At the feet of the mannequin was Maria Lopes.
Seeing her, Frost felt his heart seize. Her blood was everywhere. Her blood made a lake. Rudy Cutter had slashed her throat deeply and ruthlessly. Frost ran to her and held her, but her eyes were closed, and each breath she drew was labored and long. He called 911; he alerted the paramedics and police; but he knew he was already too late. The hillside was too remote. There wasn’t enough time. He ripped the sleeve off his coat and wrapped her neck and applied pressure, but he was holding back a heart pumping its life into the cold air with each beat.
This woman, this lovely woman, had been alive when he met her hours earlier. A mother. A wife. And then, like the others, she’d crossed paths with Cutter, and he’d stolen all of it away from her.
It made Frost want to scream. It made him want to cry. He’d been too late for Katie. Too late for Jess. And now too late for Maria, too. Cutter had won again. He always won.
Frost murmured lies into Maria’s ears as the two of them waited in the dark ruins. It’s okay, hang on, help is coming, you’re going to be fine. But she wasn’t going to be fine. Her eyes never opened. All the while, her ragged breaths came further and further apart, until only a few minutes later, they stopped altogether. A breath went out; nothing came back in. The silence was awful as she died in his arms.
44
One of the other detectives at police headquarters gave Frost a new shirt to wear. He changed in the bathroom. His own shirt was soaked in Maria’s blood, and when he took it off, he saw that blood had seeped through onto his arms and chest. He cleaned himself at the sink as best as he could, but when he was done, he still saw remnants in the seams of his skin and under his fingernails. When he looked in the mirror, he saw gruesome red highlights in his hair.
It was already past midnight. The hunt was on. The police had converged on the missile complex at Sweeney Ridge, but Cutter was nowhere to be found. He’d disappeared into the sprawling hills. There were police helicopters overhead, shining spotlights on the trails, but he was either hidden in the forest or he’d escaped back to the city. Every cop in the Bay Area was looking for him.
Frost waited for Pruitt Hayden in the captain’s office. He’d already been waiting a long time. He hadn’t realized how tired he was until he sat down. The room was warm, and his head swam. He found his eyes blinking shut, and without realizing it, he drifted to sleep. In his dreams, he saw ten long, jewel-encrusted daggers dangling from his living room ceiling at home, tethered by silver threads, all of them dripping blood. He saw identical gleaming platinum watches on both of his arms, five on the left, five on the right, all of them set to 3:42 a.m.
A woman stood directly below each knife. All the victims. Nina, Rae, Natasha, Hazel, Shu, and Melanie. And now Maria, too — and Jess — and Katie. They seemed unaware of the lethal danger just over their heads. Slowly, one by one, as he shouted to warn them, the knives fell, burrowing into their skulls and vanishing. One by one, the women calmly lay down on his living room floor. With each victim, a watch disappeared from his wrist and appeared on the wrist of the woman at his feet. There was no rush. It was leisurely and horrible and silent. A knife fell. A victim died. His watch became her watch.
One, two, three, four, on and on. He couldn’t stop it.
Soon it was Maria’s turn. Maria in her red sneakers. He called out, but his voice didn’t make a sound. The knife fell, and she was gone. Then Jess. His deep track. She stared at him in the moody and intense way she always did, but she didn’t say anything. The knife penetrated her skull, like all the others. She sank to her knees, and she toppled sideways, and she lay still.
He had two watches left on his wrist, but there was only one victim left in the room. Katie.
His sister grinned at him. She held a pizza box and stared around with wide blue eyes at the Russian Hill house. She called out to him, in the familiar Katie voice he hadn’t heard in years.
“Hey, did you order this pizza? Because I think I’m in the wrong place.”
Frost tried to answer. He tried to scream at her: Go, go, go, go, go. But he was too late. He was always too late. He was too late for every one of them; they were all gone; they were all dead. The thread broke, and the knife fell. His pretty, sunny sister put down the pizza box carefully on the floor and then stretched out beside it, as if she were no more than a child taking a nap.
There was one watch left on his wrist. One knife dangling from the ceiling. But no victim. There was no one else in the room. It was supposed to be over, but he knew it wasn’t over yet. A voice whispered in his ear. He was alone in the room with the victims, but Rudy Cutter’s voice was in his head: You think you’ve seen it all, but horror can always get worse.
Frost started awake as he heard the rattle of the handle on the door behind him. He checked the clock on the wall. Nearly two hours had passed. Pruitt Hayden rumbled inside, as huge and threatening as a grizzly bear. The captain dropped heavily into his office chair and leaned forward.
“Sorry to keep you stuck in here for so long. I just got back to the office. How are you, Easton?”
“Fine, sir,” Frost replied, which wasn’t true. The bad dream clung to him and refused to go away. “Have we found Cutter?”
“No, but the man can only hide for so long. Someone will spot him.”
Frost didn’t share Hayden’s optimism. Cutter was smart, and he’d already proven that he could stay below the radar for days at a time. If he wanted to disappear, he could. If he wanted to strike again, he could.
Hayden read the skepticism in Frost’s face. “Cutter may not be back in prison yet, but he will be soon. That’s thanks to you.”
“It’s too late for Maria Lopes,” Frost said.
“I know that. I know you’re going to take that hard for a long time, but it’s not your fault. It wasn’t your fault with Jess, either.”
“It doesn’t matter whether it was my fault. If I can’t stop things like this, what the hell am I doing here?”
The captain sighed. He hauled his bulk out of the chair and went over to the window. Reflections of the city lights glowed on his mottled skin.
“You don’t think Jess said the same thing to me with every one of Cutter’s victims?” the captain said. “He was always one step ahead of her, and he finally broke her. She was a good cop who became a bad cop to get him behind bars. You played by the rules. That’s what we have to do, even when we lose people because of it.”
“I’ll feel better when we have Cutter in custody,” Frost said.
“Well, then let the rest of us do our jobs and find him. Go home.”
“Yes, sir.”
Frost left the office and headed straight to the elevators. There was nothing more to do here. He emerged outside the Mission Bay headquarters building into a cold, driving rain. He made no attempt to cover himself, and the rain soaked down over his hair and clothes. He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked two blocks to his Suburban. There were almost no other cars on the street. When he opened the driver’s door, he saw that the seat was covered in Maria’s blood. He stood there, staring at it, as the rain poured inside.