“So Cutter’s dead,” Eden said. “It was all over the news.”
“Yes, he is. You must be relieved.”
She looked at him strangely. “Relieved?”
“You can finish your book now.”
“Oh. Sure.” She eyed the kitchen behind her. “Can I make you breakfast?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You say that now, but you haven’t tried my hot-and-spicy scrambled eggs.”
She wandered in her bare feet into the kitchen. He watched her, unable to move. She retrieved eggs from the refrigerator and frowned at the expiration date, but began to crack them into a bowl anyway. She opened his cabinets and found whatever chili spices he had — which probably dated back to Shack’s original owner — and opened the jars. She dug up a pan and swirled some oil in the bottom.
“Do you want to talk about yesterday?” she called to him. “I understand if you’re not ready. You need time.”
When he didn’t answer, she glanced over her shoulder.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
Frost got up from the sofa. He walked over and stood at the entrance to the kitchen. “Do you remember Robbie Lubin?”
Eden’s eyebrows arched curiously. “Sure. He’s Natasha’s brother.”
“I seem to recall you telling me that you visited him in Minnesota when you first started researching the case for your book.”
“You recall correctly,” Eden replied. Her voice was light but wary. “I told you, I always do my homework. Why?”
“When you visited Gilda Flores back then, she showed you Nina’s bedroom, right?”
“Of course. You know that. What’s this about?”
Frost tried to ignore the roaring in his head. He wanted to be dead inside; he wanted to feel nothing. But that was impossible. This woman had come to him, and he’d let her into his life. He’d given her everything she wanted. He was attracted to her. He’d slept with her. And all along, she’d been manipulating him. All along, she’d hidden the truth.
His instincts had told him from the beginning not to trust her. He should have listened to the voice inside.
“This is about the fact that you solved the Golden Gate Murders seven years ago,” Frost said. “You knew that Rudy Cutter was the killer before anyone else did.”
The curiosity, the playfulness, the innocence all vanished from her face, which became a mask of icy calm. He read her expression. In an instant, she realized that he’d figured it all out. She was already wondering how far he’d gone and what he could prove.
“What are you talking about, Frost?” Eden asked, giving nothing away.
“Hope’s sketches. The mothers and daughters. That’s the connection that ties all the victims together. Well, except Katie, but you already know that, don’t you? Jess never figured out Cutter’s pattern, because she never saw more than one of Hope’s sketches. I assumed that no one did, but that’s not true. You saw the sketches. You saw one on the wall in Nina’s bedroom, and you saw another one when you visited Robbie in Minnesota.”
Eden shrugged. “If I did, then obviously, I missed it. Or I didn’t appreciate the significance.”
“You? No, you wouldn’t have missed a detail like that. No way. I can only imagine the adrenaline you must have felt. How hard was it to keep the truth to yourself? To keep the excitement off your face so Robbie didn’t suspect? You saw that sketch, and you knew you had the clue that would break the whole case open.”
Eden turned off the heat on the stovetop. She rinsed her hands, and then she turned around and leaned back against the kitchen counter. Her face showed nothing at all. No secrets. No guilt.
“Frost, are you out of your mind?”
“I get it. You don’t think I can prove it. Maybe I can’t. But as smart as you are, I still think you left a trail. At first, I couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t have taken this straight to Jess. That would have been the right thing to do, but it wouldn’t have been much of a story, would it? No, the real story for a writer like you would be to find the killer yourself. And that’s what you did. I imagine you talked to people at the hospitals to track down Hope. Did you lie and say that you had a sketch of your own? Maybe your mother died recently and it would mean so much to you to find out who did that little portrait? It probably wasn’t too hard to make the connection. Did you talk to a few retired nurses? Did you bribe someone in HR to run some personnel searches for you? Someone’s going to remember you asking all those questions, Eden. Count on it. We’ll get your e-mail and phone records, too. I don’t know exactly how you made the breakthrough, but sooner or later, you found Hope’s name. And of course, once you did a little research on Hope, you found your way to Rudy Cutter. He would already have been stalking Hazel Dixon by then. And meanwhile, you started stalking him.”
Eden couldn’t hide her hostility now. He was backing her into a corner, and she didn’t like it there.
“If I’d learned Rudy Cutter’s name, I would have given it to the police,” she said.
Frost shook his head. “No. Not you. This was the ultimate opportunity for a writer like you. You could be embedded with a serial killer. You could get inside a murderer’s head while he was still committing his crimes. Even your brother had never done anything like that.”
“You should be a writer yourself,” Eden snapped. “You’re quite the storyteller.”
“I’m curious, how exactly did it work?” Frost went on, ignoring her denials. “Did you approach Rudy and tell him what you knew? Did you make a deal with him? You’d keep his secret if he let you follow along with everything he did? After all, that was the same deal you made with me. How far did it go, Eden? How far did you take it? Were you with him as he stalked Hazel Dixon? Were you actually there when he slashed her throat? Did he let you watch?”
He looked into her eyes, and he knew he was right. She’d been there. She’d been part of the crime. And from that moment forward, she could never go back. She’d become an accessory to murder.
“I think I should go,” Eden said.
“You’re not going anywhere. Not until you tell me about Katie.”
“I’m sorry, Frost. I know you’ve been under a lot of pressure lately, but you’re delusional.”
“Did I ever tell you about Katie’s handwriting?” Frost asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Her handwriting was awful. Terrible. She’d write things down, and she couldn’t even read them herself.”
“So what?”
Frost walked over to the dining room table on the other side of the kitchen. He came back with the receipt from Haight Pizza, which he’d secured in an evidence bag. “Recognize this?”
Eden did. Her eyes widened in shock but only for a split second before she regained her control.
“What is that? Where did you get it?”
“Phil Cutter paid us a little visit overnight. Apparently, Rudy decided a while ago that if he was going down, he was going to take you with him. So Phil dropped off this receipt for me. It’s the receipt Katie wrote to take a pizza to Todd Clary at 415 Parker. The trouble is, by the time the pizza was ready, she didn’t remember the address, and she misread her own handwriting. See what the address actually looks like? She didn’t go west from the restaurant to 415 Parker. She headed east on her way to 415 Baker.”
Eden said nothing. Nothing at all.
“And guess who was living at that address back then?” Frost went on. “You.”
He reached over to the counter behind her and picked up the copy of Eden’s memoir he’d retrieved earlier. He held it up and showed her the author photo on the back cover, which she knew only too well.