Rudy decided it was time to go.
He went to the sink in the woman’s small kitchen. He put a stopper in the drain and filled the basin, and then he found a large container of salt in one of the cabinets and emptied it into the water. Using his fingers, he swirled the water around. He grabbed the laptop and slid the machine into the salty bath. When a few minutes had passed, he retrieved the laptop and carefully dried it with a dish towel, so there was no evidence of tampering. He pushed the “Power” button. Nothing happened. The laptop was dead. He replaced it carefully in the exact place he’d found it, matching the rectangle of dust on the bookshelf.
Through the apartment window, dawn crept over the city.
He began quietly opening drawers in the bedroom where the woman slept. He found a pair of mini binoculars that he tucked into his backpack. He checked her closet and found a men’s wool cap, probably left over from a previous one-night stand. He took it. In a zippered compartment in one of the woman’s purses, he found three hundred dollars in cash. He shoved it into his pocket.
Rudy went into the kitchen. He found the drawer where she kept her cutlery, and he selected one of the steak knives inside, with a serrated blade. She wouldn’t miss it. He held it in his hand, feeling the handle, running a finger along the dull side of the steel. It brought images into his brain. Memories. He thought about what it would feel like again, after so long.
He wandered back into the bedroom. The woman — What was her name? Wendy? — was still asleep. She was on her side. Long hair spilled over her face. Her neck was exposed, showing off the ridges of her ligaments and the swell of her trachea. Inside, under the skin, arteries pumped blood to her brain. He stood over her, with the knife in his hand. He lay the flat of the blade against her pretty neck as she slept. One flick of the wrist was all he needed. It was tempting, but he had to be patient. He didn’t have much longer to wait.
The woman made a noise, almost like a moan in her dreams. He removed the knife from her skin and secured it in his backpack. As he watched, she shifted onto her back, and the sight of her body brought a twinge of arousal. He thought about waking her up and having sex again, but he couldn’t indulge himself. Not now.
Instead, silently, he let himself out of the apartment and wandered down the steps to the street.
He counted the hours. Tonight it would begin again.
19
When Frost needed to find someone in San Francisco, he turned to an unofficial network of homeless people and street performers known as Street Twitter. The way into the network was through his best friend, Herb, who was clued into everything that was happening in the city.
Wherever Herb went, he drew a crowd. Typically, Frost found him near one of the city’s sightseeing bus stops, painting three-dimensional sidewalk illusions that had made him a tourist attraction in his own right. At seventy years old, he was Mr. San Francisco. He’d spent his youth in the pot-drenched, pill-popping ’60s, and he’d reinvented himself in every decade since then. He’d been a microbiologist. A four-term city councilman. And now a famous street artist. For the most recent Bay Area Super Bowl at Levi’s Stadium, he’d done a three-dimensional painting of Dwight Clark making “The Catch” in the 1981 NFC Championship Game. Herb had his own gallery on Haight Street and regularly held classes for aspiring artists.
Today, as usual, a crowd gathered around Herb, but he wasn’t painting. Instead, he sat on a tall chair in the open courtyard of the Palace of the Legion of Honor, posed in front of Rodin’s The Thinker. Like the sculpture, he was hunched in meditation, and like the sculpture, he was naked, except for a discreet loincloth draped between his wiry legs. Gold glitter flocked his skin, and a rainbow of beads adorned his long gray hair. A photographer swarmed around him, taking pictures.
“Performance art, Herb?” Frost asked, standing below him.
Without breaking his pose, Herb replied from the chair, “Magazine photo shoot.”
“Ah.”
Herb’s eyes flicked to the dark sky and then to the photographer. “Are we about done here, young lady? If it rains, this glitter is going to become paste, and I’ll be scraping it out of some very awkward places. Plus, I need to teach a class at my gallery in about an hour.”
“Yes, I have what I need,” she replied.
“Thank heavens. Frost, toss me that robe, okay? These tourists all have cameras, and I really don’t want my bare backside showing up on Snapchat.”
Frost chuckled and threw a black satin robe to Herb, who carefully slipped it over his tall, scrawny body and climbed down to the glistening marble floor of the courtyard. His friend limped as he stretched the kinks out of his muscles. Herb retrieved a canvas bag and slipped old-fashioned black glasses over his face. The bag also yielded an urn of coffee, and he poured himself a cup.
“How do I look?” Herb asked.
“Like a cross between Egyptian pyramid art and Madonna on her last tour.”
“Exactly what I was going for.”
As the crowd dispersed, the two of them drifted toward the white columns lining the museum courtyard. They had a bubble of privacy around them, but Frost spoke softly.
“Rudy Cutter has gone off the radar,” he murmured.
“So I hear.”
“It’s urgent that we find him as soon as we can. Jess thinks he’s already targeting a new victim. Can you help?”
“Of course, I’ll do what I can,” Herb replied. “Actually, I put out an alert to the network yesterday, because I figured you’d be looking for him. However, Cutter seems to be skilled at not being found.”
“No sightings?”
“Nothing at all, which is unusual.”
“Well, if anything comes in, let me know right away.”
“I will.” Herb added after a pause, “I’m sorry about Jess. What she did was egregious, but I don’t like seeing a smart, tough cop lose her career like this.”
“I wasn’t crazy about being the one to turn her in.”
“Of course. Have you talked to her?”
“Yes, I saw her last night.”
Herb knew all about his history with Jess. “I know you didn’t come looking for my advice, Frost, but—”
“Don’t worry, nothing happened between us,” he said, anticipating the question.
“Good. It’s better that way. To paraphrase what a wise young man said to me once, she’s not your Jane Doe, Frost.”
Frost rolled his eyes because he was that wise young man, and Herb liked to tease him about it. It made him think of his college days at SF State fifteen years earlier, when he and Herb had met for the first time. Back then, Frost had been a loner trying to figure out the world and not doing a very good job of it. His one point of pride had been getting a degree without any debt, so when he wasn’t in class, he was out on the streets, driving a taxi.
One September evening, near midnight, he’d received a call for a pickup at city hall. He arrived at the mammoth domed building on Van Ness to find a fifty-something man stretched out on his back on the steps, wearing a ’70s-era powder-blue three-piece suit. When the man staggered into the back seat of the cab, he’d brought an aroma of pot so overwhelming that Frost had been forced to open all the windows. Herb wasn’t his name, but that was the nickname he’d had for most of his life, and it was richly deserved.
Herb had nowhere to go; he just wanted company. They’d spent the next seven hours, until dawn, driving around the city. Although Frost was a San Francisco native, Herb had given him a tour unlike anything Frost had experienced before. As they left city hall, Herb had told him about seeing Dan White on November 27, 1978, and hearing the shots that had killed Harvey Milk. He took Herb to the Haight and heard stories of flower power and the Summer of Love from someone who’d lived through it. Herb talked about Jonestown. Joe Montana. The 1989 quake. AIDS.