by JoAnn Chaney
“From the way Seever was talking about you, I think he was hoping you’d come by for a conjugal visit.”
“Shut up,” she says, meaning to sound vicious, but instead her voice is too high pitched, they can probably hear the lie in her voice. She looks down, fiddles with her car key.
“Sounds like you and Seever had some good times,” Loren says. He isn’t going to let this pass, he’s going to keep picking at it like a scab. God, she hates him, standing there in his Seever getup, grinning like a fool. “He’s got some good memories of you saved up in his spank bank.”
“I didn’t think Seever would give you the time of day anymore,” Hoskins says to Loren. “And now you’re visiting him out at the prison?”
A slow smile blooms on Loren’s face.
“We’re good friends,” he says. “We have ourselves some nice, long chats. He’ll talk to anyone who’ll listen these days. About what he did, what he’d like to do. About her.”
“Stop,” Sammie says.
“Does it turn you on to see me looking like this?” Loren says, brushing off his shoulder. “Is that why you’re blushing? Getting all hot and bothered at the sight of your old fuck buddy?”
Sammie looks at him, horrified, and he drops a wink, slow and somehow indecent.
“What the hell is going on?” Hoskins asks, looking back and forth between the two of them. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, you didn’t know?” Loren asks. “I can’t believe she never told you. Of course, you might’ve thought twice about banging her if you’d known.”
“Known what?”
“Well, Jacky Seever knows Sammie pretty well. Biblically, you might say.”
“What?” Hoskins says, but she can already see the realization dawning on his face, slowly creeping in. He looks the way people do when they get bad news, when they’re told someone they love has died. The knowledge comes slowly, and then all at once, like an avalanche pouring down the side of a mountain.
“Seever and Sammie used to come together to perform acts of sexual congress. They were boinking. Shagging. Fucking. Whatever you want to call it.”
“Is that true?” Hoskins asks, looking at her, and it doesn’t matter what she says, he already believes it. And the worst of it isn’t the truth—it’s the look on Hoskins’s face, the horror of the truth. She cringes away from the way he’s staring at her—like she’s dog shit stuck to the bottom of his shoe.
“It was a long time ago,” she says weakly. “When I worked for him.”
“Don’t worry, Paulie,” Loren says. “She was boning Seever long before you came around. But I’ve heard that when you have sex with someone, it’s like you’re going to bed with everyone they’ve ever fucked. Isn’t that gross? Imagine rolling around with Seever’s naked body pressed up against you. God, that makes my stomach turn.”
“Black told me to come here and help, not to listen to your shit,” Hoskins says, pushing past her and Loren, heading for the back of the house. “I’ll meet you inside.”
There are others back there, she can hear their voices, low and hushed, because it’s dark outside, it’s getting late, and they’re trying to be mindful of the neighbors, even in the face of a murder investigation.
“Don’t worry. Paulie’s a big boy,” Loren says, watching Hoskins walk away. “He’ll get over it.”
“You’re such a bastard,” she says.
“And you shouldn’t be here.”
“Why’re you dressed up like Seever?” Sammie asks. “What’s going on?”
Loren looks down, as if he’d forgotten about the suit he was wearing.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he says, pulling the silver watch from its pocket and swinging it jauntily on the chain. “Maybe you would like a ride on the ol’ baloney-pony, so I can pass the story on to Seever? Let him do some vicarious living before he meets his maker?”
“Go to hell.”
“And you should go home.”
“I came to talk to Hoskins. I’m not leaving until I do.”
Loren looks at the house, in the direction Hoskins disappeared, considering.
“You’re gonna have a long wait.” Then he walks away, leaving her standing alone in the middle of the street. Farther down, a van pulls up, and a man jumps out with a big camera propped up on his shoulder, followed by a woman holding a microphone. It won’t be long before the street is crawling with media, every reporter in the city will be looking for a story. It’s a race against the clock now, so she scrambles, unlocks her car, and fumbles around in the dark, searching for a pen and paper. She’s going to find out what’s happening, even if it means standing out in the cold all night.
HOSKINS
“Why’re you doing this now?” Hoskins asks when Loren joins him in the yard behind the house. They’re standing ankle-deep in snow, looking at the house, at the police swarming in and out. “You never did that shit for Seever before.”
“I never had a chance last time,” Loren says. “We didn’t have to hunt for Seever at all, he was practically dumped into our laps. You should see how the ladies drop their panties at the sight of these suits. Especially my powder-blue one.”
“Very dapper,” Hoskins says dryly, but he knows Loren’s not giving him the whole truth, he’s holding something back. Loren doesn’t do anything without a reason, and he must think Jacky Seever is connected to all this, otherwise he’d be in his own clothes, without all the shitty gel in his hair. But Loren isn’t going to come out and say what’s going on, Hoskins knows him better than that—no, Hoskins will have to figure it out on his own.
“Since you’re here, you might as well take a look,” Loren says, generously. He hooks a finger into the tiny pocket sewn onto his vest. The same way Seever used to do it. “I shouldn’t send you home without at least getting a peek of what’s going on. For old time’s sake, you know?”
“Yeah, right,” Hoskins mutters, following Loren as he steps out of the snow and onto the sidewalk. The crime scene isn’t in the main house but the tiny building behind it. It’s a guesthouse, a few hundred square feet built so the owner could take a tenant, make some extra income. The victim is just inside, but it doesn’t feel right to call her the victim; this is Carrie Simms, this isn’t like coming to a crime scene and seeing a stranger, someone you don’t know, someone you’ll never know. It’s easy if you don’t know the victim, if you don’t recognize the freckle on the bridge of their nose or the amber color of their eyes, those little things can be easily dismissed if you haven’t seen them before. A corpse you don’t know is nothing. Less than nothing. It is something to study, to examine, to look over for evidence. It is stiff limbs and fingernails gone black and brittle, it is hair and blood and skin and organs, everything swept neatly into separate compartments, because it isn’t a person anymore, just a body. A thing. But this is different, because he knows Carrie Simms, he’d recognize her voice if he heard it, he remembers how she laughed. This feels wrong somehow, seeing a girl he once knew like this, curled up on her side like a shrimp, her mouth filled with blood that’s gone clotted and black. She could be sleeping, except for the awkward angles of her arms. And the blood. Oh, all the blood. It’s not suicide, no, Carrie Simms didn’t do this to herself. This is murder, cold-blooded and vicious.
“Looks like most of it occurred in the bedroom. How do you think she ended up in here?” Loren asks. He’s standing in the doorway that leads from the kitchen and out into the yard, out on the concrete stoop, the toes of his loafers barely on the other side of the door’s transition, he’s pulled a pack of cigarettes out and sticks one between his lips. “Dragged?”
“You don’t have some ideas of your own?” Hoskins asks, pulling a pair of gloves from his pocket and smoothing the latex over his hands, making sure to work it down into the valleys between his fingers. He hasn’t been at a crime scene in a long time, but he’s still got the old habits, still keeps the trunk of his car stocked with everything he needs. “I thought you were le
tting me look around outta the kindness of your own heart.”
“Don’t bust my balls, Paulie. I ain’t in the mood.”
“Then tell me what I want to hear.”
“What’s that?”
“Tell me that you need me,” Hoskins says. “Tell me you need my help with this.”
Loren looks at him, quickly, to see if Hoskins is joking. He’s not. He wants to hear those words come out of Loren’s mouth, because Loren does need him, Chief Black knows it, Hoskins knows it—hell, even Loren knows it—but it’s one thing to know it, and another to say it out loud. It was true what he told Black—Loren’s a good detective. Maybe the best there is. But Ralph Loren is also a wild card; he needs someone to rein him in the way a naughty boy needs a strict mother, otherwise things get fucked. Like this. Loren’s dressing like Seever, picking up his behaviors, his quirks. The smoking, keeping that long cigarette pinched between his pointer and middle fingers, and the way he puckers his lips to blow the smoke out at the sky. Hoskins has seen Loren play this game of dress-up before, on a few other cases, but it was never this bad. This shit gives him the willies, to see Loren mimic Seever so effortlessly, so it doesn’t look like an act at all. If Loren had a partner, someone who’d noticed this, they would’ve sounded an alarm, raised some questions. But Loren works alone, he does what he wants.
“You love to have me by the balls, don’t you?” Loren says. He’s sweating, even though it’s cold outside and there’s snow on the ground, there are beads of sweat standing on his forehead, on his upper lip. “You’re like a fucking woman. You never quit your nagging.”
There is something terribly wrong here, because the Loren Hoskins knows would never act like this. Sweating and shaking, with a constipated look on his face. Wanting help, but not able to ask for it. The old Ralph Loren would’ve told Hoskins to go fuck himself, he would’ve laughed right in Hoskins’s face, flipped him the double bird. Loren’s sucking on that cigarette like it’s a pacifier, watching Hoskins with something like—desperation? It can’t be, but there it is, no one else might see it but Hoskins does, he was partners with this man for fourteen years—not friends the way some partners were, they never hung out after work and had beers and watched football, but in some ways he knows even more about Loren because of that distance that always existed between them. He can see that Loren’s out of control, he’s in some deep shit, he’s right on the edge of a bottomless hole. The kind of hole you fling yourself into, and you never, never make it back out again.
“I’ll give you a pass this time,” Hoskins says. “You won’t get so lucky again.”
Loren laughs roughly, shakes his head. Doesn’t look at his old partner, who’s now his partner again, but Hoskins thinks there might be some relief in that laugh, relief in the line of his shoulders. Or maybe he’s imagining it. You can never be sure with Loren, the same way you could never be sure with Seever. Two men, wrapped so deep in themselves that you can never know what’s true and what’s not, unless you’re watching closely.
And Hoskins, now that he’s seen Loren like this, he’s paying attention.
Loren asks everyone to clear out for a few minutes, so Hoskins can take a look around, and they’re all huddled in a tight circle, out in the dry cold by one of the silent patrol units, smoking their cigarettes. There are cops and technicians and photographers. The medical examiner. How many people does it take to solve a murder? As many as you can get. Someone had brought out a thermos of coffee, and Hoskins sees the steam wisping into evening sky before he ducks into the house, and he wishes he could be out there with them, shooting the shit, or in his basement office, nose-deep in an old file. Looking at the mess of it all, reconstructing the last few moments of Carrie Simms’s life, he’s reminded of how much he misses this work, and how much he hates it.
There’s blood mashed into the carpet, a trail of it leading from the single bedroom before forming a small pool around Simms. Most of it had probably soaked through the carpet and into the pad beneath, and then into the concrete. It would always be there, it’d never go away. They’d have to destroy the house to get rid of it for good.
“Judging by the marks, I’d say she crawled,” Hoskins says. “She was probably out of it. Trying to get away. Running on survival instinct.”
“Crawled out of the bedroom and into the kitchen.”
“Yep. And he was following her. Watching her struggle.” Hoskins points at the bloody shoeprints. Most of the prints are in the wake of the blood trail, dried and messy. But there are two prints, off to one side and out of the way, like the guy had stepped clear of the mess, tried to get a good seat. He was a spectator. “They look about a size eleven. If you run them through the system, I’d guess they’re running shoes you can get at any mall in the country.”
“She lost a lot of blood.”
“Yeah, she did. A lot of it before she died. I’d bet he finished her with the toaster over there. You see it? There’s blood and bone fragments smeared all over it. A lot of hair. He got tired of watching her struggle, started hitting her over the head until she was dead.”
“Christ on a cross.”
“No shit.” Hoskins doesn’t chew gum. Instead, he sticks a ballpoint pen in his mouth, and gnaws on the end until it’s too warped and broken to work anymore.
Hoskins stands up, his knees popping. Simms’s hair is thrown over her face, and he’s thankful for it. He’s seen plenty of dead over the years, but there’s always something awful about it, that final death grimace. Her left arm is thrown forward, her pointer finger stuck straight out, like she was trying to get them to look at something, although there’s nothing there except a blank wall. Her right arm is tucked under her body, out of sight. She’s wearing a white sleeveless undershirt, and one of those sweatshirts that zips up the front, but it’s pulled open and hanging loosely from her thin shoulder. It’s almost flirty. Sexual. Her bottom half is naked, except for a pair of ankle socks that had once been white but are now a rusted brown from all the blood. There are marks around her wrists, red swatches cut deep in the flesh. Rope burns, but most likely twine judging by the width of the lashes. There are bruises all up and down her limbs, cuts in her skin.
“It was twine on the other two, right?” Hoskins asks.
“Yep.”
“How long’s she been dead?”
“Rigor’s passed, so about twenty-four. Not much more, though. We’ll have a better idea when we get her on the table.”
“Rape?”
“Oh, definitely.”
There’s a cut screen, a window that’d been jimmied open. Whoever he was, he’d crawled in and found Simms. Maybe she’d been sleeping, or in the shower, and he’d gotten in without her knowing. The last time anyone had seen Simms was four days before, when she’d gone to class at the community college. She hasn’t been dead long. So she’d been alive the last three days, trapped in her own home, wishing she were dead while cars drove by on the street, while people walked their dogs, not very far from where she was. And she’d known what was coming, because she’d been through it all before, with Seever.
Christ.
Hoskins picks his way carefully around Simms, giving her a wide berth, careful not to put his foot down in any of the blood. He takes his cell phone out, snaps a few pictures. It’s an old habit, he’s always done it, years ago it was with the bulky old camera he carried around with him, and now with his cell, but it’s the same, he does it without thinking, and Loren doesn’t protest. He stands back, lets Hoskins do his thing.
Simms looks so small on the kitchen floor, so thin and fragile. He remembers the first few victims being carried out of Seever’s crawl space. One of the boys had a woven bracelet around his wrist, something he’d probably braided for himself out of parachute cord, and that’s what made it real for Hoskins, that’s what made it worse. Because that boy had once been alive, he’d once decided that wearing a bracelet was cool, he’d played with it when he was nervous or excited, he’d spun it around his wris
t until his skin was raw.
“She’s had some fingers cut off,” Loren says casually, pulling the pack of cigarettes from his pocket and tamping them against his palm even though he’s already got one in his mouth. “Just the way Seever used to do it.”
“She’s not missing anything on her left,” Hoskins says.
“It’s her other hand. Seever got the pinkie. This guy got two more.”
“I want to see it,” Hoskins says, and Loren motions to the group out in the yard. Two of the technicians break off, set down their coffees, and slip on latex gloves. They ease through the kitchen, step around Hoskins, careful because it’s so tight, so close. They’re both young and professional, their faces blank, even as they hoist Simms up off the floor and onto the stretcher they’ve brought in. Good at their job. There’s a loud sucking noise when they lift her, because the blood doesn’t want to let her go, and Hoskins turns away, fights back his rising gorge. He’s been to dozens of crime scenes, hundreds, and it doesn’t much matter—that kind of shit will always be gross.
Hoskins grabs Simms’s right hand by the wrist, gently, holds it up so everyone can see. The hand is purplish-red and swollen, filled with blood from being trapped under the body. The pinkie is gone, but that’s nothing new, that’s how Simms came to them. Seever had already taken that part of her. Hoskins counts the fingers once, then again, even though it’s not necessary. Simms only has two fingers now, the pointer and the thumb. Her fingers make the shape of a gun, he thinks. A smoking gun.
He slowly lays her hand beside her and turns away, rubs the back of his wrist against his eye, watchful of his gloved hands, covered in the muck of death. He needs some coffee, or a nap. And he needs to call home, check on Joe, make sure the nurse is still there.