What You Don't Know(37)
It’s about the hunt.
Like one of their early cases together, looking for a man who’d raped and killed three women in their own homes in the middle of the day. There were no signs of break-in, no leads to go on, nothing. It took Loren some time to get going, three women were dead before he got geared up, but then it was on, on like Donkey Kong, and the hunt started. Hoskins had never seen anyone operate the way Loren did, had never even heard of it; it wasn’t so much investigating as it was transforming, the way an actor, a good one, will become the character they’re playing. Loren didn’t do it very often, but when he did, when he hunted, he was all in, all or nothing. He changed his clothes, his voice, his habits, everything, so he became the person they were looking for. Loren called it getting in his head, but to Hoskins it seemed like more of a metamorphosis. A butterfly struggling free of a cocoon and spreading its wings for anyone to see.
Sometimes it was guesswork, sometimes they had nothing to go on, like that early case with the women killed in their homes. But Loren was watching, he was taking in everything, waiting until it felt right. And then he bought a suit at a department store and borrowed a Lexus from a local dealership, and he made Hoskins wait in the car when he went up to a nice house in a fancy neighborhood, not unlike the ones where each of the dead women had been found. A woman answered his knock, a housewife who was home alone, her kids were at school and her husband at work, and Loren had smiled and asked to use her phone because his cell had gone dead and he was late for an appointment. And even though Loren had the face of a rabid bulldog the housewife had taken one look at his nice suit and the Lexus parked at the curb and she’d let him in, had even closed the door behind him. Because money talks, even when its mouth is shut tight. And Loren could’ve done anything behind that closed door, he could’ve raped and killed the woman, or sat down for tea, but instead he called Hoskins, who pulled his vibrating cell from his pocket and stared at it for a moment, with the same expression he would’ve had if he’d pulled out a poisonous snake.
“This is how he’s doing it, Paulie,” Loren said, his voice pleasantly low through the phone’s speaker. Hoskins tried to imagine what was going on inside, if the woman was standing by, waiting for him to finish his call, but Hoskins thought she’d probably turned her back, gone into the other room, wanting to be polite, even if it was her own home. “He doesn’t have to break in. They let him in. Invite him in.”
And Loren was right, he always was, they went knocking on doors again and a neighbor of one of the dead women came forward and said they did remember seeing a white car in the neighborhood around the time of the crime, a late-model Audi, something like that, and the man behind the wheel was handsome, with good hair. I didn’t think about him before, the woman said, spreading her hands and shrugging. I guess he didn’t look like a criminal.
So they brought out a sketch artist, and the neighbor did the best she could, although Hoskins thought “handsome with good hair” wouldn’t get them anywhere, it was about as useful as being told the guy was wearing fucking pants, but the drawing and description of the car caught someone’s attention, and they arrested a guy a week later, a polite young man with a good job who drove an expensive car and liked to hurt women; his DNA matched that left at the scenes, the timelines matched, and it was case closed, everything was neatly sewn up. All because of Loren and his spooky ability, and his love of the hunt.
Hoskins never thought he’d be working in Homicide, never thought he’d be side by side with Loren again, and he’d thought he didn’t care so much, that being in the basement, eight hours a day, five days a week thumbing through dusty old files and plugging them into the computer wasn’t bad, but now, cranking the key in his car and listening to the engine labor in the cold, he thinks there’s a good chance that he misses the hunt too.
*
When Hoskins pulls up in front of the house where Carrie Simms’s body has been found, where Loren is running his investigation, he wonders if he might still be in bed, if this might be the most realistic dream he’s ever had. It’s the silent, flashing blue-and-red lights of the patrol units, and the steady, fast thump of the blood through his head. He hasn’t been at a crime scene in a long time; he thought it might never happen again. That’s what happens when they kick you out of Homicide—you can kiss that job goodbye. There’s no coming back from the grave until you’re resurrected for being a good detective, for doing your job right. Rewarded for his merits, although Hoskins wonders if this might be a punishment in disguise.
But it’s not only being here. It’s also the woman coming his way, who’d pulled in behind him and immediately climbed out of her car without bothering to turn her headlights off. At first, he thinks it must be one of the neighbors, home from work and wanting to know what’s going on, but there’s something familiar about the way she swings her arms as she walks, the tilt of her face up toward the sky. And then the woman pushes through the shadows and stops in front of him, her face lit by her car’s headlights so she looks like a ghoul.
“Holy shit,” he says, not bothering to keep his voice down. What’s the point? She’s got to know how surprised he is. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
Sammie Peterson. It’s been seven years since he last saw her, when he’d tried to force her into making a decision, and that was a mistake, because she’d chosen her husband over him. It’d pissed him off, being passed over like that, so he’d gone to her house and knocked on the door; he’d known she was inside but she still wouldn’t answer, so he’d sat in his car, the engine off while he broiled in the afternoon sun, waiting. Hoskins likes to think he’s a good guy, rational, but every man has a point when the wires get crossed and things go bad, very bad, and that was his point, because he loved Sammie—hell, he didn’t love her, he was in love with her. So he’d waited until her husband came home, and Hoskins had told him everything, standing out on the sidewalk while the sprinklers ran and some neighborhood kids pedaled by on their bikes. Told Dean how he’d been fucking Sammie, how she’d basically worshipped his cock, how she’d taken it up the ass and in the mouth and in any position he wanted, how she’d loved it, how she’d begged for it. And Dean hadn’t said anything at all to any of it, just shifted from one foot to the other until Hoskins was done and then went inside and shut the door firmly behind him. He’d been expecting Dean to argue, to fight him, something, and he’d gone home disappointed. But after that he’d started letting go, stopped driving past her house and thinking about her, except sometimes, when he’d wake up with a thudding headache and no memory of his dreams, but he’d know, somehow, that they’d been about Sammie again.