What You Don't Know

by JoAnn Chaney

  “No, I’m still working from down here.”

  “Oh, okay.” Ted pulls a ring of keys from his pocket and unlocks his office. “See you around.”

  “Hey, wait.”

  Ted pauses, looks at him warily.

  “I’m sorry about what I did,” Hoskins says. He doesn’t have any problem with apologizing, never has—even when he doesn’t mean it. But this time he does mean it. “I saw you at the crime scene, and I lost it. It’s not an excuse, but I’ve always had a hard time dealing with things connected to Seev—to that particular case I worked before. Not an excuse, but that’s what it is.”

  Ted’s lips move but no sound comes out. He looks at the clock on the wall, then at Hoskins.

  “My mom thinks I should quit,” he finally says. “After what you did to me.”

  “Don’t do that, man,” Hoskins says, taking a step closer. He stops, holds up his hands when Ted shies away. “You’re good at this job. You work hard, and everybody appreciates you. Don’t let my stupid shit get in your way. I promise nothing like that will ever happen again.”

  Ted sighs. “I like it here.”

  “Then don’t quit. I can call upstairs if you want, see if they’ll move me to the other side of the basement. Or maybe you could go upstairs, get a nice office with a window. But don’t quit because of what I did.”

  “What you did to me, was it like before?” Ted says. “When you got kicked out of Homicide?”

  Hoskins pauses, lowers his hands to his sides and folds them up into fists. Of course Ted would know about that, everyone does. Not like it’s a big secret.

  “Yeah, I guess it was like that time.”

  Ted looks down at the toes of his sneakers. Sighs again. There are some people who will hold a grudge their whole lives, coddle it, never spit it out, as if they’re holding a piece of steak in their mouth until the meat has gone gray and unrecognizable, a tasteless lump, but Ted isn’t one of those people. Hoskins can tell by the slope of his shoulders, by the crease between his eyebrows, that he wants to let things go back to the way they were before.

  “Okay,” he says. “Apology accepted. Honestly, I’ve been beat up worse by my brothers.”

  “Great.” Hoskins claps his hands together, and he’s glad to see that Ted doesn’t flinch away from the sound. “I’m glad you’re back, because I need your help with my damn computer.”

  Slowly, a smile spreads across Ted’s face.

  * * *

  “It’ll take me some time,” Ted says when he hears what Hoskins is looking for. “You can’t pull those up yourself?”

  “With the clearance I have now I can only look at cases that’ve been officially marked cold, or have been put under my authorization,” Hoskins says. “Some of the murder cases in the last five years, they’re still active. I just want to take a look.”

  “I could get in trouble for this, you know.”

  Hoskins raises his eyebrows.

  “And you could still get in trouble for snooping through Seever’s case files.”

  “Oops, guess that’s true,” Ted says. “Okay, what should I be looking for again?”

  “Unsolved homicides involving female victims within the state of Colorado. And send a request out to police departments in nearby states, see if we can have temporary access to their systems. Secondhand might’ve done some traveling, even lived somewhere else.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “You don’t want to be more specific? That might give us a lot of results. I can narrow down the search parameters if you have more.”

  Hoskins thinks of the missing fingers, the words on the wall. Those were things specific to Seever, but what if Secondhand had done it before, and they’d missed it, it’d been overlooked? What if Secondhand had been killing the same way for a long time, but he was tired of being ignored, so he’d only recently started going after victims associated with Seever, thinking they’d sit up and take notice? And they sure did, sat up like good dogs begging for a treat.

  “Wait. Female homicide victims who were found missing fingers,” Hoskins says. Seever had liked to do it, and so does Secondhand—and cutting off fingers wasn’t something that a killer would do randomly. No, it was a trophy for him, Secondhand probably would’ve done it each and every time, or not at all. “Start with that, but we might need to do another search if it doesn’t pull up anything.”

  “Missing fingers?” Ted grimaces, his hands hovering above the keyboard.

  “Yeah. Missing fingers. Seever did it to every one of his victims, and now Secondhand is too. I thought you read Seever’s case file.”

  “I didn’t get through the whole thing, a few pages in—it’s a big file. I didn’t have a clue about the fingers.”

  “We never released that detail to the public,” Hoskins says, grabbing a pencil and spinning it on the desktop, until it settles to a stop, the sharp lead tip pointing right at him, dead at his heart.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s gross. And sometimes it’s best to keep information back, in case you need to use it later.” Hoskins scoops up the pencil, drops it back into the cup, tip down. “Like now. Secondhand knows that Seever took their fingers, so he’s doing it. So he must’ve known Seever before, worked with him.”

  Ted rolls his eyes, crosses his arms over his chest.

  “What if Secondhand found out about these fingers some other way?” Ted asks.

  “How would he do that? We kept pretty closemouthed about it,” Hoskins says. “Made sure only a select few knew. And all those people still work for the department.”

  “Okay,” Ted says, rocking back in the chair. He’s got his thinking cap on, his tongue is sticking out one corner of his mouth, and it makes Hoskins want to laugh, but he doesn’t. Sometimes a good idea can come from the strangest place, even from a kid with tight-ass pants who wants to be called Dinky. “So let’s say everyone kept their mouth shut. It could’ve gotten out a different way. Someone might’ve hacked into our database. It’s happened before.”

  “When?”

  “A year and a half ago,” Ted says. “We were never able to figure out exactly what information was stolen. Seever’s file might’ve been something that was copied. It might be published on the Internet somewhere, for anyone to see.”

  “That happens?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Ted says, sitting up straight. “Man, you can find everything online. Crime-scene photos, autopsy reports. Everything. If you think something’s secret, you should search for it online. You’d be surprised.”

  “Have you searched for stuff on Seever?” Hoskins asks. God, he feels so old talking to Ted, not understanding half of what’s going on. It doesn’t seem like all that long ago that no one had a computer or a cell phone, and if you wanted information you went to the library, took a long stroll through the card catalog or the microfiche.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t find much. I can peek around some more if you’d like, see if I can find anything about this finger thing.”

  “That would be great,” Hoskins says, standing up and clapping a hand on Ted’s shoulder. It’s nice to have the kid back in the basement. “Good man. I’ll run out for lunch while you do this. Chinese all right?”

  * * *

  Ted’s still working at Hoskins’s desk when he gets back, and he groans and gratefully holds out his hands for the takeout box of lo mein.

  “You ever consider there might be something wrong with you?” Ted asks, waving at all the pictures on the wall, the case files Hoskins has torn apart and pinned up. “I don’t know how you can stand to work like this, with all these dead people watching you.”

  “That’s why I’m a detective, and you’re in IT,” Hoskins says. “You get anything back yet?”

  “Our system needs updating,” Ted says, sighing and ruffling his hair. “It takes so damn long to pull up anything, especially if it’s a wide search like this one.”

  “Oh, take your time,” Ho
skins says, sitting down and ripping open a pack of chopsticks. “It’s not an emergency, there’s just a serial killer on the loose and we don’t know when someone else will turn up dead. No big deal.”

  “Sarcasm hurts, you know?” Ted says, turning to glare at him. “I get it. I’m working as fast as I can.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh, you had a visitor while you were gone.”

  “Who?”

  “Your old partner. Loren?”

  “He should’ve called me.”

  “I told him that,” Ted says, jamming noodles into his mouth and slurping them down, making them vanish like hair down a shower drain. “He said he did.”

  Hoskins pulls his cell phone out of his pocket. Three missed calls, all of them from Loren. He hadn’t even heard it ring, and he had it cranked all the way up.

  “Did he say what he wanted?”

  “Nope. But he left that for you.” Ted points with his chopsticks at a package leaning against the wall beside the door.

  “What is it?”

  “He didn’t volunteer that information,” Ted says, carefully dabbing the corners of his mouth with a napkin. “This might be a surprise to you, but Ralph Loren isn’t exactly the friendliest guy around.”

  Hoskins snorts, drops into a chair, and grabs the package, holds it across his thighs. It’s flat and rectangular, taller than it is wide, and wrapped in brown paper. He jams his finger under the flap and rips it open, and then he must make some kind of alarming noise, although afterward he can’t remember doing it, because Ted jumps up, his face twisted with concern.

  “What’s wrong?” Ted says, but Hoskins can’t answer—he feels like a fist has been jammed down his throat, choking him. “What is it?”

  Hoskins hands him the package, he doesn’t want to hold it another second more than he possibly has to.

  “What the fuck is this?” Ted cries, revolted, but Hoskins can’t dredge up the words. His chest is tight, he feels like he might be having a heart attack, but he’s pretty sure it’s the horror of seeing this, of having cradled it in his lap. Loren has brought him a Seever painting, a Seever original. Hoskins hasn’t seen one since the Christmas after Seever was arrested, when a painting was delivered to the station, addressed to both Hoskins and Loren, and they’d set it up in the conference room, where it had sat for a week before it finally disappeared, because no one wanted to touch it. It was a clown, and he was pinned to a crucifix, tears running down his white painted cheeks as snow fell from the canvas sky. The clown had Seever’s face, and that wasn’t at all a surprise, because nearly every painting that came out of the prison those first few years had Seever’s face, as if he were trying to get free by sending his likeness out into the world.

  “It’s pretty good,” Chief Black had said. “I’m surprised he’s that talented.”

  “Yeah, maybe if I pull down my pants and bend over, you can poke a brush up my asshole and I’ll paint your portrait,” Loren said. He was glowering at the painting, and if he’d put his fist through the clown’s face, Hoskins wouldn’t have been surprised. Or upset.

  “You always gonna be a foulmouthed bastard?” Black asked.

  “Looks that way, don’t it?”

  “Hitler was a pretty good artist too,” Hoskins said, and Black made a noise in his throat and went back into his office, slammed the door.

  “Fuck a duck, kid,” Loren said, but he was grinning. “You sure know what to say to kill the mood.”

  Seever had taken up art not long after his arrest; he used watercolors and charcoals and paints, whatever he could get his hands on. Most of the work he put out was pleasant, nothing you’d expect to see from a killer—Sleeping Beauty in her bed, her hands folded sedately across her chest; a mountain stream; Seever himself, looking into a mirror and smiling. But Hoskins had heard that Seever created dark stuff too. Dead people and zombies and clowns, always there were the clowns, and this painting has a Seever-clown too, eyes smiling from those white greasepaint diamonds. And it wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the bunch of balloons the clown is clutching, but two of those balloons pulling on their strings and bobbing on the breeze aren’t balloons at all, they’re heads, decapitated heads, blood dripping from their raggedly cut necks. Those two heads, their eyes are white and blank and dead but they are smiling anyway, having a damn good time being pulled along on their strings—Look, Ma, no hands!—and any fool can see that one of those heads is Ralph Loren; Seever got every single detail right, from the mole on his forehead to the scar on his upper lip. Seever is good, he’s not fucking Michelangelo, but he’s good, and he’s good enough that Hoskins knows that the other balloon-head, the one that seems to be laughing, is his own.

  “Loren’s got a shitty sense of humor,” Ted says, holding the painting up so he can see it better, look at every detail. “This explains why he was all dressed up.”

  “In one of those fancy suits?” Hoskins asks, thinking of Loren playing dress-up, in his three-piece and glasses, but Ted shakes his head, confused.

  “No, he was in a clown costume,” Ted says, still looking at the painting so he doesn’t see the jolt Hoskins gives, how gray his face becomes. “Like the ones Seever used to wear, like the clown in this painting. He was laughing, said something about clowns getting away with anything. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Hoskins tries to stand up but his knees buckle and he drops back in the chair, dizzy, his head swimming like he’s been spun around a hundred times, a thousand, he’s come full circle and he’s back right where he started, where it all began.

  * * *

  “Where the hell is he?” Hoskins shouts. “Where did he go?”

  “I didn’t even know he’d left,” Jenna says, jumping to her feet and coming around her desk. She’s the girl who works the Homicide desk, answering phones and filing and making sure everything runs smoothly, she’s been around since before Hoskins was tossed downstairs, and she’s a vast improvement over the girl they had before, who was like one of those spiders curled up under a rock, waiting for some unsuspecting victim to wander by. That girl had accused the entire department of sexual harassment, said that she couldn’t perform her job, she needed a big cash settlement to feel better. It was a hell of a mess to clean up, but now they have Jenna, and she’s a good girl. “That’s nothing new, he’s always been that way.”

  “He didn’t say where he was going?” Hoskins asks.

  “No.”

  He pushes past Jenna and goes down the hall, rattles the knob on Loren’s office door. It’s locked, of course—Loren doesn’t like anyone in his personal space, he doesn’t want anyone going through his things. But the doors are a joke—flimsy and thin, and all Hoskins has to do is kick against the knob and it snaps back, the cheap plywood splintering. There’s a shriek from behind him—Jenna, with her hands clasped at the base of her throat—and a group of detectives gathered together, watching. None of them try to hold him back, or even talk him down from his rage; they watch, bright-eyed with interest. No one seems all that surprised at his anger—it’s almost as if they’ve been waiting for this to happen, they’ve been wondering when the shit was going to hit the fan. Most of them were around when Loren and Hoskins were partners, they’ve seen the arguments and the brawls, but even the new guys would’ve heard the stories.

  Why are you so upset? Ted had asked after Hoskins had opened the painting. I don’t understand.

  And Hoskins doesn’t understand why he’s so mad either, only that everything about this is wrong. This isn’t supposed to be about Seever, this is about a new killer, but somehow Seever’s back anyway, leering at him out of the painting, his name printed in the newspaper, everyone talking about him again. Hoskins thought he was done with Seever for good, but there was Loren, all dressed up in those three-piece suits, his hair slicked back with so much gel you could see the white of his scalp peering through, and Sammie, digging for more information and writing that damn article, getting people all worked up, even after h
e asked her not to. Loren and Sammie both thought Secondhand was connected to Seever, that he was finishing Seever’s work, but Hoskins thinks Ted might be right: Secondhand knows about the fingers, but it’s not through Seever directly. Secondhand isn’t connected to Seever, he’d seen an opportunity and jumped on it. He doesn’t think it’s Alan Cole behind the murders; Cole had put on his boogie shoes and split, he was already on the run, had been for years. Hoskins can’t imagine he’d be back in Denver, begging for the spotlight. No, whoever the Secondhand Killer is, he is doing it for the attention, he is doing it because he wants people to look.

  He is doing it to have his ego stroked.

  “Holy shit,” Hoskins says. He freezes after one step into Loren’s office. He feels like he’s been told there might be land mines under his feet, ready to blow him straight to hell. “What the fuck is all this?”

  It isn’t the view Hoskins notices first, the same good one he used to have from his office. No, what he first sees are the corkboards on the walls, barely visible because of all the papers tacked to them, the photographs. There are photos of Seever’s crawl space, of the victims being carried out, of Seever’s house. Some of them are newspaper clippings, but most are photos Loren must’ve taken himself and then printed. Hoskins takes another step into the room. There are autopsy photos and reports tacked up, he’s seen them all, he was there when it was all happening, those are burned into memory, but they’re still a shock to see. An unpleasant shock.

  And then there’s the painting, the original clown, nailed up over Loren’s desk, in a place no one could possibly miss it. Hoskins had always figured someone had thrown the damn thing away, but here it is, watching him. Smiling.

  “Fuck me,” Hoskins croaks, backing slowly out. Distantly, he realizes that his own office looks almost exactly like this, only his walls are made up of many different cases, but it doesn’t matter, it’s all shit in the end. Loren might be crazy, he thinks. But then so am I.

  He turns, feels the pinprick eyes of all the victims posted up on the wall following him. This office is giving him the creeps, and he wants to go outside, stand with his feet in the snow. He grabs for the knob, then sees what’s hanging on the back of the door and recoils. It’s a costume, satin fabric, half blue and half red, with a big ruffled collar and fuzzy yellow pom-poms sewn down the front instead of buttons. A clown suit. Always with the fucking clowns.