I wasn’t following you.
Frost felt a sickness in his soul that he hadn’t felt since that day at Ocean Beach. A crushing fear. A wild despair.
He knew. He knew.
He heard another voice in his memory. This one was the voice of Gilda Flores, Nina’s mother.
Tabby and Nina were inseparable. Much like me and her mother. We were pregnant at the same time, and Nina and Tabby were first babies for both of us, so we went through it all together.
Frost snatched up the album of Hope’s sketches again. He wanted to be wrong. There was no way that Rudy Cutter could know the truth, no way he could realize that Frost had a vulnerability so deep that he could barely even acknowledge it to himself. He wanted to believe it wasn’t possible, but he was reminded again that fate was a jerk. Fate was a son of a bitch.
Don’t make this personal between us, Inspector.
Too late.
He flipped the fragile pages of the album. He saw the names inscribed at the bottom of each sketch. Dozens of names, spread out over several years. Mothers and babies. Mothers and daughters. Mothers and victims.
And there they were.
Catherine and Tabitha.
Cutter was going after Tabby.
45
Rudy sat in the old Cadillac, two blocks from the marina. He’d been here for hours, hypnotized by the rain, staring through the darkness and haze at the apartment building across the street. It was almost dawn on Sunday, but there wouldn’t be any sunrise today, just the gloom of black clouds. The only thing that helped him see was the streetlight overhead. The yachts in the harbor were invisible.
His clothes hadn’t dried. They were still a mess of rain, mud, and blood. He’d had a narrow escape from Sweeney Ridge. The cops had descended on the hills like locusts, and even in the fog, he’d barely eluded them on his way back to the parking lot at Skyline College. A helicopter searchlight had passed over the Cadillac only seconds after he’d ducked inside.
He wasn’t a fool. He knew he didn’t have much time left. Everyone was looking for him.
The street around him was empty in the rain. Above the boulevard trees, a light came on in the third-floor apartment, and a silhouette moved behind the curtains. He lifted his binoculars, but there was nothing to see. He’d already spotted Easton’s brother leaving two hours earlier in the dead of night, and after that, the windows had been dark. But not now. She was up. Weekends didn’t matter in the restaurant world. She’d be leaving soon.
Rudy reached behind him and grabbed a trench coat from the back seat. He took what he needed from his backpack. The Taser. The knife. The duct tape. And Maria’s watch, already smashed, its time stopped at 3:42 a.m. He secured them all in the right-side pocket of the coat. He was ready. He kept his eyes trained on the steps that led down from the apartment building plaza, and he waited.
It was strange. He no longer felt alive. The numbness that had dominated his life for so many years was back. When he’d slid the knife across the neck of Nina Flores, he’d felt a rush that must have been like shooting up with pure heroin. Hope was Nina; Nina was Hope. He’d finally been able to get revenge on his wife for what she’d done to their daughter. With each murder after that, the anticipation had built toward a perfect moment of violence. It became an addiction.
But now he felt empty. The rush was gone.
He’d thought, with Jess Salceda, that it was simply because she wasn’t part of the game. She was an outsider who’d trespassed where she didn’t belong. He’d assumed that it would be different with Maria, but it wasn’t. There was no high, no adrenaline, no vaulting sense of purpose. Killing her gave him nothing.
And yet he couldn’t stop himself. He needed the rush even more badly now that he couldn’t find it. He would do anything to feel that way again, even if it was only one last time for one last moment.
Up on the third floor, the lights went off again. The apartment was dark.
Rudy tensed, his eyes on the plaza steps. The rain kept coming in waves. The wind roared. He checked the mirrors and saw that he was alone on the street. It would take less than a minute for her to lock the apartment, go down three flights of stairs, cross the courtyard, and emerge onto the sidewalk.
As he waited for her, his backup phone rang.
Rudy thought about ignoring it, but he knew it was Phil. And Phil calling now meant trouble.
“This is a bad time,” he said, answering the phone.
“Where are you?” Phil asked.
“You know where I am.”
“You should split, man,” his brother said. “Now.”
Rudy briefly closed his eyes. Phil had always been the weak link, the one who would crack sooner or later. “What did you tell them?”
“Enough that they’ll be coming for you,” Phil replied. “You better get away from there while you can. Sorry.”
Phil hung up.
At that same moment, across the street, Rudy saw Tabby Blaine dash down the steps in the rain. Her red hair was a flame on the dark morning. She wore a belted purple raincoat down to her ankles. She turned away from the bay toward her car, walking easily in heels. It was now or never.
Rudy grabbed his coat. He got out of the Cadillac and shrugged the coat onto his body. He crossed the street and made his way to the sidewalk and settled in behind her. Leaves blew off the trees in the wind and scattered between them. The rain covered the noise of his footsteps. If she looked back, she would see him, but she didn’t look back.
Slowly, he increased his pace and closed the gap.
At the end of the block, she crossed the street, and he was off the curb before she reached the other side. He knew which car was hers. A red Saab. He could see it halfway up the block, squeezed onto a short patch of curb between two driveways. Inside the pocket of his coat, his hand closed around the grip of the Taser.
The rain blew into their faces. Rudy had to squint and rub his eyes to see. He was close behind her now, almost close enough to grab. She was at the bumper of the Saab, and she put a hand into her pocket. He heard the beep of the car doors unlocking as she yanked out her key fob.
Then everything happened at once.
Tabby’s phone rang. He could hear the ringtone playing a song. “Shut Up and Dance.” He was right behind her now, but she stopped as she answered the phone. He stopped, too. They were both on the street, immediately next to the Saab, but she didn’t know he was there.
“Hey, Frost,” Tabby said into the phone. “You’re up early.”
Simultaneously, another noise filled the street. The noise of sirens. Instinctively, Rudy looked back over his shoulder, and where the street intersected Marina Boulevard at the harbor, he saw a police car veer around the corner. And then another. And another. They converged at the apartment building, and as the police officers flooded from the vehicles, they already had their guns drawn in their hands.
In an instant, they spotted the Cadillac parked across the street. In the next instant, they surrounded it.
Rudy turned back. The police couldn’t see him two blocks away. Tabby was still on the phone, but she heard the sirens, too, and as she turned around, she saw him directly behind her. Her green eyes were smart and alert. She knew exactly who he was and why he was here. She opened her mouth to say something into the phone — a scream, a cry for help — but before she could say a word, he fired the Taser into her neck.
Her body lurched as the electricity jolted her. She crumpled, knees bending, and he grabbed her. Her phone spilled to the sidewalk, and he kicked it away. He scooped up her keys. It took him only a few quick seconds to yank open the front door of the Saab and stuff her inside, facedown. He bent over her body as rain poured in and clumsily pulled her wrists together and wound gray tape around to bind her hands behind her. She twitched, already beginning to recover from the electrical jolt. He slammed the passenger door shut and ran around to the driver’s side.