What You Don't Know(26)
“Hey, I guess I do need one thing,” Hoskins says. “Do you have access to old autopsy reports? I need stuff for the Grimly case, back in ’92, and I can’t figure out this damn computer.”
“I can get into anything in our database,” Ted says. He’s excited, now they’re on familiar ground. “You need some hard copies of it, or would an email be okay?”
“If you’ll get it to me on a floppy disk, that’d be great.”
Ted frowns.
“I’m pretty sure your computer doesn’t even have a port for a floppy—”
“I was kidding.”
“Oh.”
“An email would work,” Hoskins says. “I can print it out myself if I need it. And it’s not any hurry. Take your time.”
“Okay. Oh, hey, I just remembered—I was looking through the files on Seever, and he did some messed-up stuff,” Ted says, casually, although by his tone, it sounds like he’s been waiting to bring this up. That’s how people are, once they realize that Hoskins was one of the cops who arrested Seever, they think he’d like nothing better than to tell them all about it. If given half the chance, people would squeeze him for every bloody detail. “It’s really interesting, that he—”
“Who gave you permission to read through those?” he says angrily. “Those are classified files.”
I don’t think about Seever anymore, he’d told the department’s headshrinker a few weeks before. Not unless someone brings him up. But everyone always wants to talk about him. Like nothing else has happened in the world in the last seven fucking years.
A lot of detectives find themselves affected by a particular case, she’d said, toying with the bracelets on her wrists. They made a metallic chiming sound that put his teeth on edge. Especially with a larger-than-life figure like Jacky Seever, it’s normal to—
Didn’t you hear me? I don’t want to talk about him.
“Nobody gave me permission. But I know you worked that case, and—”
“Keep your fucking nose out of those files,” Hoskins says. “And just because I was on that case, doesn’t mean I want to rehash it with your ass.”
Ted blinks, and for a moment Hoskins is sure he’s going to cry, he’s still young enough for tears. He considers apologizing for a moment, then doesn’t. Better to let the kid figure out things on his own.
“All right,” Ted says. “Well, I’ll be back.”
“Okay.”
Ted looks at him one more time, sullenly, and disappears. A minute later, Hoskins hears the elevator doors slide open and closed, and then he’s alone.
*
“How’s he doing?” Hoskins asks. “Is he having a good day?”
He’s on the phone, calling home to check on his father. Good ol’ Joe Hoskins, who’d spent forty years as a floor supervisor down at the Brewery in Golden, who used to play poker every Tuesday with his work buddies and knew how to blow rings with his cigarette smoke, moved in with his only son in the early spring, when they decided he was no longer fit to live alone.
“He’s pretty clear today,” the woman says. Hoskins can’t remember her name. She’s the latest in the many women he’s hired to care for Joe, mostly retired nurses, someone to hang around during the day and keep the old man out of trouble. “He had eggs for breakfast. A cup of coffee.”
“Decaf?” he asks. If Joe has any caffeine, shit gets hairy, but they have to hide it from him. Replace his regular coffee with decaf without him seeing, dump most of the beer out of the bottles in the fridge and water it down with apple juice. It seems stupid, and it’s a lot of work and sometimes feels pointless, but those little tricks make it easier to live with Joe. That’s what his life has become these days—careful deception.
“Yeah,” the woman says, slowly, so Joe must be sitting right there, listening. He’s a different man these days, not the same father Hoskins had always known. Joe’s like a kid sometimes, childish and demanding, other times he is silent and angry. He’s not often sly, but when he is that worries Hoskins the most, when he looks in Joe’s eyes and can see the wheels turning, see some plan coming together. When his father looks like that it reminds him of Seever, before the arrest, when he thought he was invincible, that no one could ever touch him.
You hear about that gal who disappeared down in the Springs last year? Seever had said once, when he’d sauntered up to where Hoskins and Loren were parked, a cigarette stuck delicately between his pointer and middle fingers, the way a woman would smoke. Anyone ever find her?
They did find that girl, later, down in Seever’s crawl space, but it’d all been a good joke for Seever then, a real chuckle factory, as he liked to say. And Seever was sly, sly as a fox, as a goddamn weasel, and there were times when Joe would look that same way, like he had some tasty secret he was hiding, and Hoskins would feel a cold trickle of fear on the back of his neck, and he’d feel bad; it’s his dad, after all, but there’s something about that look that makes him afraid. And what else was he supposed to do? His father’s crazy, Joe’s losing his fucking mind and it isn’t his fault, it’s the shitty luck his DNA had dealt him, but he’s still his father.
Still, Hoskins sleeps with his bedroom door locked.