What You Don't Know(42)

“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.