What You Don't Know(71)
*
Ted’s still working at Hoskins’s desk when he gets back, and he groans and gratefully holds out his hands for the takeout box of lo mein.
“You ever consider there might be something wrong with you?” Ted asks, waving at all the pictures on the wall, the case files Hoskins has torn apart and pinned up. “I don’t know how you can stand to work like this, with all these dead people watching you.”
“That’s why I’m a detective, and you’re in IT,” Hoskins says. “You get anything back yet?”
“Our system needs updating,” Ted says, sighing and ruffling his hair. “It takes so damn long to pull up anything, especially if it’s a wide search like this one.”
“Oh, take your time,” Hoskins says, sitting down and ripping open a pack of chopsticks. “It’s not an emergency, there’s just a serial killer on the loose and we don’t know when someone else will turn up dead. No big deal.”
“Sarcasm hurts, you know?” Ted says, turning to glare at him. “I get it. I’m working as fast as I can.”
“Okay.”
“Oh, you had a visitor while you were gone.”
“Who?”
“Your old partner. Loren?”
“He should’ve called me.”
“I told him that,” Ted says, jamming noodles into his mouth and slurping them down, making them vanish like hair down a shower drain. “He said he did.”
Hoskins pulls his cell phone out of his pocket. Three missed calls, all of them from Loren. He hadn’t even heard it ring, and he had it cranked all the way up.
“Did he say what he wanted?”
“Nope. But he left that for you.” Ted points with his chopsticks at a package leaning against the wall beside the door.
“What is it?”
“He didn’t volunteer that information,” Ted says, carefully dabbing the corners of his mouth with a napkin. “This might be a surprise to you, but Ralph Loren isn’t exactly the friendliest guy around.”
Hoskins snorts, drops into a chair, and grabs the package, holds it across his thighs. It’s flat and rectangular, taller than it is wide, and wrapped in brown paper. He jams his finger under the flap and rips it open, and then he must make some kind of alarming noise, although afterward he can’t remember doing it, because Ted jumps up, his face twisted with concern.
“What’s wrong?” Ted says, but Hoskins can’t answer—he feels like a fist has been jammed down his throat, choking him. “What is it?”
Hoskins hands him the package, he doesn’t want to hold it another second more than he possibly has to.
“What the fuck is this?” Ted cries, revolted, but Hoskins can’t dredge up the words. His chest is tight, he feels like he might be having a heart attack, but he’s pretty sure it’s the horror of seeing this, of having cradled it in his lap. Loren has brought him a Seever painting, a Seever original. Hoskins hasn’t seen one since the Christmas after Seever was arrested, when a painting was delivered to the station, addressed to both Hoskins and Loren, and they’d set it up in the conference room, where it had sat for a week before it finally disappeared, because no one wanted to touch it. It was a clown, and he was pinned to a crucifix, tears running down his white painted cheeks as snow fell from the canvas sky. The clown had Seever’s face, and that wasn’t at all a surprise, because nearly every painting that came out of the prison those first few years had Seever’s face, as if he were trying to get free by sending his likeness out into the world.
“It’s pretty good,” Chief Black had said. “I’m surprised he’s that talented.”
“Yeah, maybe if I pull down my pants and bend over, you can poke a brush up my asshole and I’ll paint your portrait,” Loren said. He was glowering at the painting, and if he’d put his fist through the clown’s face, Hoskins wouldn’t have been surprised. Or upset.
“You always gonna be a foulmouthed bastard?” Black asked.
“Looks that way, don’t it?”
“Hitler was a pretty good artist too,” Hoskins said, and Black made a noise in his throat and went back into his office, slammed the door.
“Fuck a duck, kid,” Loren said, but he was grinning. “You sure know what to say to kill the mood.”
Seever had taken up art not long after his arrest; he used watercolors and charcoals and paints, whatever he could get his hands on. Most of the work he put out was pleasant, nothing you’d expect to see from a killer—Sleeping Beauty in her bed, her hands folded sedately across her chest; a mountain stream; Seever himself, looking into a mirror and smiling. But Hoskins had heard that Seever created dark stuff too. Dead people and zombies and clowns, always there were the clowns, and this painting has a Seever-clown too, eyes smiling from those white greasepaint diamonds. And it wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the bunch of balloons the clown is clutching, but two of those balloons pulling on their strings and bobbing on the breeze aren’t balloons at all, they’re heads, decapitated heads, blood dripping from their raggedly cut necks. Those two heads, their eyes are white and blank and dead but they are smiling anyway, having a damn good time being pulled along on their strings—Look, Ma, no hands!—and any fool can see that one of those heads is Ralph Loren; Seever got every single detail right, from the mole on his forehead to the scar on his upper lip. Seever is good, he’s not fucking Michelangelo, but he’s good, and he’s good enough that Hoskins knows that the other balloon-head, the one that seems to be laughing, is his own.