What You Don't Know(70)

“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?”