Broken fragments of white glass littered the sidewalk. The dome had been shattered.
She knew what that meant, because she’d been expecting it. He was here. And he was hunting her.
Jess made a slow, cautious circle. She heard something nearby. Breathing. A footstep. Or maybe the wind was playing a game with her brain. She followed the hedgerow beside her building, looking behind her with every step. She traced the entire square and then made her way into the center of the muddy grass. Her eyes adjusted, and she could see into the shadows. The trees loomed in front of her, with wide, empty arms and thick trunks. She could smell the remnants of her own cigarette.
Something rustled in the bushes behind her, and Jess spun around. A small animal streaked across the square, making her jump. It was a rabbit. She laughed at herself and realized that her nerves were frayed. She was alone in the park. The broken lights were the work of kids.
Jess turned around again.
Rudy Cutter stood in front of her.
A gasp of surprise spilled from her lips, but she was ready for him. Her hand slashed from the deep pocket of her coat, and in an instant, she jumped forward with an eight-inch kitchen knife at the end of her arm, the tip of the blade poised near the bulge in Cutter’s throat.
“Do you think I didn’t figure you’d come for me?” Jess hissed.
Calmly, he put up his hands, palms outward, and took a step backward from her. “Easy,” he said.
“You’re going to have to do better than that if you want to get at me, Cutter. I’ll cut your throat and not think twice about it.”
His face was as dead as a zombie’s in the darkness. His eyes receded into his skull, and his mouth was a grim line. “No, I don’t think you will. That’s not who you are.”
“Yeah? Don’t test me.”
“If you wanted to kill me, I’d already be on the ground,” Cutter said.
Jess didn’t lower the knife. “So what do you want? To gloat about beating me?”
“Actually, I feel bad for you, Jess. You’ve lost your job. You’ll probably be heading to prison. Trust me, you won’t like it there. Was it really worth it?”
“Yes, it was,” Jess said.
Cutter shrugged. “And yet here I am. Right back where we started. I’m free again.”
“We got four years with you nowhere near a woman.”
“At the price of your whole life,” Cutter said.
“I don’t care.”
“You must be disappointed in Frost Easton. He could have saved you, and he didn’t.”
“Frost does what’s right, even when he’s wrong.”
“So I hear. That’s why I picked him.”
“Watch out for Frost. He’s a better cop than me.”
“Really?”
“That’s right. You’re smart, but he’s smarter.”
“Then this should be interesting. Will he cheat like you did to win?”
“I hope you don’t expect me to apologize for not playing by the rules.”
“I don’t. The question is how far you’re willing to go to stop me.”
Cutter stepped closer again. His hands were still in the air, and she still had the knife poised at the end of her fingers. He bent down until the point of the blade pushed into the cartilage of his own windpipe. Any harder, and blood would flow. His black eyes locked with hers across the darkness.
“Do it,” he whispered. “You said you wouldn’t even think twice.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, here I am, Jess. Kill me. This will be your only chance.”
She felt sweat on her palm, and she was dizzy. Each of the faces of the seven victims flashed in her brain, echoing what he said: Do it. If he stayed free, there would be more bodies. All she had to do was jab the knife, thrust and rip. Sever his throat, watch him slowly succumb to death, exactly as he’d done to so many others. She didn’t care about the consequences for herself.
Do it.
Instead, Jess drew back the knife and secured it in her pocket again.
She’d finally found one line that she couldn’t cross.
Cutter didn’t say a word, but she felt his smug satisfaction, as if he knew her better than she knew herself. Even giving her the chance to kill him, he knew she wouldn’t take it. Just like he must have known that Frost would never throw that watch off the Golden Gate Bridge.
“Good-bye for now, Jess.”
Cutter backed away from her until he was at the fringe of the park. Then he turned without a word and melted into the night.
13
“Talk to me, Katie,” Frost murmured aloud.
His sister had all the answers, but she wasn’t here to tell him what had really happened to her.
Instead, Shack walked across the dashboard of the Suburban, put his front paws over the steering wheel, and shoved his wet nose against Frost’s beard. Shack had never gotten the message that cats weren’t supposed to like cars. He put up a fuss to accompany Frost whenever he left the house, and some days, Frost gave in and let the cat ride along with him.
It was nine o’clock in the morning on a cool, sunny day. He was parked in the heart of the flower-power area, near Haight and Clayton. Wild, psychedelic colors adorned the storefronts. He could buy hemp clothes, shop for original Grateful Dead LPs, and get any part of his body pierced and tattooed here. If he wanted a rainbow-colored cat, he could get Shack’s fur painted, too.
He was outside the hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Haight Pizza that had been serving up wood-fired pies with outlandish toppings since the Summer of Love. Frost had an artist friend, Herb, who’d grown up in that era and had a gallery a few blocks away. Herb swore he’d been to Haight Pizza on its very first day of operation in 1967. They made edamame pizzas. Sushi pizzas. Twinkie pizzas. If you knew the secret code word, you could get marijuana pizzas, too.
On a Thursday night six years ago, at eight thirty on March 10, Katie had scribbled down an order for a pizza delivery to a man named Todd Clary at 415 Parker. His address was half a mile away near the University of San Francisco campus. She wasn’t even supposed to make the delivery herself, but the other driver had been late getting back. It was dark when Katie left. Frost could imagine her bouncing out of the restaurant door in a T-shirt and jeans, long blond hair tied in a ponytail, Todd Clary’s olive-and-arugula pizza with garlic cream sauce balanced on her palm. She’d whipped away in her imperial-blue Chevy Malibu. Headlights on. Probably speeding.
And then — what?
It was a mystery.
Todd Clary never got his pizza. No one saw Katie or her Malibu again until Frost found her after midnight at Ocean Beach. Somewhere in that half mile, Rudy Cutter intercepted her and took her.
None of it made sense. The timing of the crime didn’t fit. The first of Cutter’s victims, Nina Flores, had been murdered in April, but after that, every other victim died in November. Except Katie. The police initially suspected a copycat, but they soon confirmed that the watch found on Katie’s wrist belonged to the previous victim, Hazel Dixon. There was no doubt they were dealing with the same killer and the same string of murders. But her death was a break in the pattern.
Why?
Frost scooped up Shack from the dashboard and put him in the passenger seat. He started the engine and headed west on Haight to retrace his sister’s steps that night. No one knew the exact route Katie had taken, but the shortest route was to take Haight until it ended at Golden Gate Park and then head north before cutting over to Parker. Katie was a city native like Frost, and she would have known the fastest route.