What You Don't Know(20)
He didn’t.
“Are you offering me a doughnut because I’m a cop?” he asks.
“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that,” Trixie says, the smile dropping right off her face. There’re two scratches on her shoulder, deep ones. Could be from a cat, although they don’t look it. “I thought you might like one.”
He reaches through the window and touches her arm. It’s cold outside, and Trixie’s arms are studded with goose bumps. She looks unsure for a moment, and right below the uncertainty hovers another emotion: fear. He’s seen it plenty of times over the years, usually on women who get treated like punching bags by the men in their lives.
“I was kidding,” he says. “Sorry, bad joke. I’ll take the raspberry one, if you don’t mind.”
She smiles again, but it’s weak. He’d like to ask her out, to take her to dinner and maybe go to bed with her, to trace a finger down the length of her naked spine. But it’s not a good time to ask, it seems like it’s never the right time, but especially not when she looks like this, like he punched her in the belly, quickly, the ol’ one-two, knocked all the air from her lungs and left her green.
“Have a good day,” she says, handing him the doughnut wrapped in a napkin. When she leans over, he sees the tattoo on her hip, above the lacy waistband of her panties. Five-by-five, he thinks it says, that old way of saying that everything was all good, but he’s not positive, it’s blurred and sloppy, the ink gone purplish and soft.
“Thanks. See you in the morning?”
“Nah, I’ve got the day off.”
“Okay.”
He pulls into traffic, turns right, toward downtown. It’s still early, the sun’s barely out, but his cell phone is already ringing. He grabs it out of the cup holder where he leaves it, glances at the screen. It’s Loren. He doesn’t answer. They’re not partners anymore, it’s been nearly two years since their split, but Loren still calls him plenty. To shoot the shit, Loren says, but that’s a joke, because when did Loren ever just want to chat? Never, that’s the answer. No, Loren calls because he likes to remind Hoskins of what he used to have, what is now out of his reach. Or maybe he phones because he doesn’t have a partner anymore, there’s no one he can talk to these days. Loren’s been burning through partners left and right since Hoskins left, no one has ever been able to stand working with Loren and that hasn’t changed, something that Hoskins finds strangely comforting.
So Loren rings every few days to tell Hoskins about his caseload, what’s going on. Most recently, his calls have been about the two women who were pulled out of the reservoir two weeks before. Neither of them had been weighed down, the killer either hadn’t thought of it or hadn’t cared, but they’d been tied together with twine, looped around each of their necks, keeping them tethered, so they’d be found at the same time.
“Those gals used to hang out around Seever’s place before we arrested him,” Loren had said. “You remember those two? Said he’d hired them to weed the garden, to sweep his driveway?”
“No.” But of course Hoskins does, they’d interviewed those girls after Seever’s arrest, along with anyone else who’d been associated with Jacky Seever, and those two, barely out of high school, were walking dynamite. After the interview was over, when Hoskins stood to show them out, the two of them had come right up to him, one on each side, making a Paul Hoskins sandwich, and offered to meet him after work, to let him have them both in bed at the same time. Either one of them—or both—could’ve ended up buried in Seever’s crawl space, but neither seemed overly concerned about it, and he’d thanked them for coming in and showed them out, but he’d been sweating as he did it, trying not to look at their ripe bodies and their puckered mouths. Did he remember them? God.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, you do. These two were snatched off the street, they were kept alive for three days before they were dumped, Paulie. Tortured and raped. The bastard cut off their fingers, just like Seever used to do.”
“Coincidence,” Hoskins said. But he was sweating, shaking a little. That’s how news about Seever made him feel—like a nervous kid. “They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happens.”
“That suggestion makes you an asshole.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want to hear about Seever, or any of this.”
“You miss it. I know you do.”
“No, I don’t,” he’d said, but was that true? Yes. Sometimes. “Leave me the hell alone.”
It takes ten minutes for him to get to work, to the same building he’s been working in for the last twenty-two years. After Seever’s arrest, he got his own private office that looked out over downtown, one with big windows and a door with a lock. He was in that office for almost five years before he was told to pack it up and pound sand; he was punted off the eighth floor and down to the basement, to an office that’s dry and clean and decent, he’s lucky to still have a job, to still have a paycheck coming in, but it’s still the basement, down where you hide the things you no longer want to see but still want to keep around.
*
Everyone thought it would be Ralph Loren who eventually lost his shit, who’d end up being kicked out of the department for doing something stupid, because that was Loren’s jam, that was always what he did. There were rumors that before Loren had joined the Denver PD, when he’d been working undercover out in Miami—or was it Atlanta?—that some big-time drug dealer had pissed him off and Loren had shoved a bong so far up the guy’s ass that it’d ruptured something inside, and that’s how he’d ended up in Colorado, transferred halfway across the country for his own safety.