Finally, he got in and closed the door. The gusts of wind made the truck shiver. He listened to the hammering on the roof. The nightmare was still vivid in his brain, and he actually checked his wrist to see if the last platinum watch was still there. But it wasn’t. This was the real world. In the real world, victims didn’t simply lie down and go to sleep the way they did in his dream. They died slowly, choking, gasping, as you whispered to them and held them in your arms.
Now he knew how Jess died.
Now he knew how Katie died.
It was almost as if Rudy Cutter was teaching him a lesson. You already saw death up close. You need to see the dying, too.
Frost reached into the back seat and grabbed the photo album of Hope’s sketches. In the aftermath of Maria’s murder, he’d neglected to bag it and bring it inside to be logged as evidence. He thought about going back to the building now, but he couldn’t drag himself out of the truck in the rain. It could wait until morning.
He flipped through the early pages. He knew what he was looking for. The sketch of Maria Lopes as a baby, held by her mother, was a third of the way into the album. He stared into Maria’s innocent eyes. She was a baby on her first day of life. Welcome to the world. Thirty-two years later, she would bleed out in the abandoned shell of a missile station. It was a good thing she didn’t know her fate back then, because fate was a jerk. Fate was a son of a bitch.
Go home.
He was still tired, but he wasn’t ready to go home yet. He wondered if Eden was in the house. Waiting for him. Sleeping in his bed. She was a lover, but she was also a writer, and he wasn’t ready to talk to a writer yet. He didn’t want to have his thoughts taken down so that he could read about them in a book someday. He’d avoided reading the part of Eden’s manuscript that dealt with Katie, because he didn’t want to see the reality of her murder in black and white. He didn’t want to know how Eden dealt with it, how she described it, and what she’d said about him. The brother who found the body. The brother who became a cop. The brother who let the killer go and then hunted him down. He was no hero.
Frost drove aimlessly through the city. He didn’t have a destination in mind. It was as if he had to search every street corner for Rudy Cutter, as if he could cover every inch of San Francisco on his own. Eventually, he realized how pointless it was. His hands turned the wheel block by block and chose a new destination for him without engaging his brain. He found himself on 280 heading south through the pouring rain, at a time of night when the freeway was mostly empty. He got off near Balboa Park and wound through the jumble of city streets to the neighborhood where Phil Cutter lived.
The house was dark, but he didn’t think Phil was asleep.
There was a squad car on the street, just in case Rudy showed up here. Frost showed his badge to the cop in the car, and he knew that he looked like a sight. The borrowed shirt didn’t really fit. The back of it was soaked with blood because of the blood in his car. He was wet to the bone. Even so, the cop didn’t ask any questions. He probably figured Frost was planning to beat the hell out of Phil to get answers about his brother.
Phil obviously thought so, too. When Frost rang the bell, Rudy’s brother kept the chain on the door and didn’t invite Frost inside.
“It’s the middle of the night!” Phil barked. “What the hell do you want? I already told the other cops I don’t know where Rudy is. I haven’t seen him. You think he’s stupid enough to come here? This is the last place he’d go.”
“Do you know what happened tonight, Phil?” Frost asked quietly.
“I don’t care what happened. It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“Your brother killed another woman,” Frost snapped. “Can you live with that?”
Frost couldn’t help remembering how this had all started. Phil had left him an anonymous note. Can you live with a lie?
“Quit hassling me, man. What Rudy does has nothing to do with me.”
“If you helped him, we’ll put you in jail, too.”
“I didn’t do a damn thing,” Phil replied.
“Then why were you following me?”
“I wasn’t following you,” the man replied.
“I saw your Cadillac, Phil. You were outside the restaurant on the Embarcadero last night. You took off when I started across the street.”
“So what?” Phil asked. “Is that a crime? You going to arrest me for making an illegal U-turn?”
“What did Rudy want to know about me? What did you tell him?”
“Nothing.”
Frost shook his head. “Where were you this evening?”
“Home. Alone.”
“Did Rudy call you? Did you help him get away?”
“I was here,” Phil rasped, his voice cracking. “I told you. I didn’t go nowhere.”
A rattling cough bubbled out of Phil’s throat. His eyes looked sunken and gray. He was a skeleton, dressed in black shorts and a black tank top. Alcohol breathed like fire from his mouth, along with the same bitter cigarette smoke that Frost had smelled whenever he crossed paths with Phil. Frost realized that the man was telling the truth. He hadn’t gone anywhere tonight. He’d been home. Smoking. Drinking himself into a stupor.
Frost looked at the empty street, then at the garage. Last time he’d been here, the garage door had been open, and the inside was a dumping ground for years of broken equipment and debris. There was no room for a car.
“Where’s your Cadillac, Phil?”
The man shrugged. “In the shop.”
“Yeah? Which one?”
“Somewhere over on Mission.”
Frost leaned into the crack of the door. He was inches from Phil’s face. “Rudy’s got it, right? You met him somewhere, and you let him take the car. That’s how he got to San Bruno.”
Phil didn’t say a word, but the squint of fear in the man’s eyes was enough to convince Frost that he was right. Rudy was in the Cadillac. He grabbed his phone to call in an update on the search, and he started down the steps. He was done here. He was done with Phil turning a blind eye to what his brother had done.
But as he turned away from the front door, he heard Phil mutter something behind him, in a burst of shock and surprise.
“Holy hell.”
Frost turned back. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Phil replied quickly, but the man swallowed hard and stared down at the cracked concrete on the porch.
Frost realized that the back of the white shirt he’d borrowed was covered in Maria’s blood. Phil couldn’t handle seeing it. It was one thing to know that your brother was a murderer. It was another thing to see the victim’s blood, only hours after she’d died.
“Yeah, that’s what he does,” Frost said softly. “He cuts their throats. You can’t believe how much blood there is.”
Phil’s left eye twitched. He breathed loudly through his nose.
“Is there anything you want to tell me?” Frost asked him.
Phil opened his mouth, but then he clamped it shut. Frost waited, wondering if the man would break, but Phil stayed stubbornly silent. Eventually, Frost hissed in frustration and went back down the steps. He had the door of the Suburban open when Phil finally shouted at him through the sheets of rain.
“Hey.”
Frost looked up. Phil had come out of the house onto the porch. His hands were on his hips. Wind buffeted his tall, skinny frame.
“Hey, I wasn’t lying, man,” Phil called. “I wasn’t following you.”
Before Frost could ask any questions, Phil turned around and stormed back inside and slammed the door shut. Frost got into the Suburban and sat in the darkness of the truck, with the rain pounding on the windshield. He replayed what Phil had said in his head, and he heard the emphasis on that last word.