What You Don't Know(96)
“Wake up,” he says, shaking harder. “You’re having a bad dream. Wake up.”
Hoskins sits up, his head swimming.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s time for you to go,” Craig says. “Your bail’s been posted. Here, I brought you some water. You look sick as a dog.”
*
“Where have you been?” Ted is in his face the moment the elevator opens onto the basement. “I must’ve called you twenty times.”
“Thirty-one, actually,” Hoskins says, going straight into his office and tossing his paper sack of belongings onto the desk. Ted is right behind him. “I spent the night in jail.”
“You were arrested?”
“I didn’t stay for the five-star accommodations.”
“Why were you there?”
“It’s not important. What’s been going on here?”
Ted eyes him with what seems to be pity. Looks at his wrinkled slacks and the blood still smeared into his knuckles, and it looks like he has more questions, but instead he presses his lips together in a disapproving line.
“I searched online for mentions of Seever, about him cutting off his victim’s fingers.”
“What’d you find?”
“Nothing,” Ted says. “I must’ve looked through thousands of links and images about Seever, and none of them mention fingers.”
“Dammit,” Hoskins says, sitting at his desk, heavily. He got sleep, but it wasn’t great, and he can feel his bones creaking in protest as he moves. “I was sure you’d find something.”
“Well, there is this one website I’ve heard about—lots of crime-scene photos, torture porn. People sell the real nasty stuff to that site for big bucks. But I wasn’t able to check it out.”
“Why not?”
“You have to pay to be a member. And I don’t have my own credit card—my mom gets all the statements. And if she knew I was looking at that kind of stuff, she’d kill me.”
Hoskins blinks. Waits for Ted to say he’s joking, but the kid’s dead serious. In his twenties, afraid his mom will catch him doing something naughty.
“Just curious—do you go to any porn sites?”
“Only the free ones,” Ted says warily. “Do you want this website or not?”
“Yeah, what is it?”
“It’s called alltheprettyflowers.com. Spelled like it sounds.”
Hoskins raises an eyebrow.
“And this is a website where we’re going to find something that might lead us to Secondhand?”
“Yeah,” Ted says. “Lots of websites give themselves an innocent name. So if someone’s going through their browsing history, it doesn’t stick out.”
“But it shows up as a porn site on your credit card statement?”
“Yeah.” Ted grins sheepishly. “I found that one out the hard way. I won’t even tell you how pissed my mom was.”
“All right, what was the site again?”
Hoskins’s phone rings, and he holds up a single finger—wait one second.
“Hello?” he says, frowning. “Hello? Is someone there?”
There’s a long moment of silence, and then Loren is there, sounding irritated.
“That was fucking weird. The damn thing didn’t even ring.”
“Loren?”
“Yeah. So you’re out, I guess? Back at work?”
“Yeah.” Hoskins closes his eyes, presses down on his eyelids until there are flashes of purple. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Well, I spent this morning getting together the cash to bail you out,” Loren says, sounding amused. “Nice one, by the way. I always like to see a douchebag get his ass kicked for beating on a woman. How’s the girl doing?”
Hoskins sighs, rubs his knuckles on the underside of his chin. He’d certainly given Trixie’s boyfriend a few broken bones and some bruises to teach him a lesson, but Trixie hadn’t seemed all that appreciative about it. She’d demanded that Hoskins leave, she’d been crying, the tears and snot mixing on her face.
“She’s fine,” Hoskins says. “But I get the feeling she didn’t want my help.”
“That’s a woman for you—blowing cold one second, hot the next. Or even worse—not blowing at all.” It’s a joke, a bad one, but Loren doesn’t laugh. Neither does Hoskins.
“Why’d you disappear yesterday?” Hoskins asks. “You walked off that scene, and no one knew where you’d gone.”
“Yeah, I like it like that,” Loren says. “Don’t send guys out to follow me again, Paulie. It won’t ever end the way you hope.”
“Enough of this shit!” Hoskins shouts, suddenly furious. He sees Ted flinch back. “You’ve been acting crazy, Loren. You need to tell me what’s going on. Right now.”
“Alan Cole is dead. He died last year, I just got confirmation. Heart failure.”
“What?”
“It’s not Cole, Paulie. It’s Sammie.”
“Leave her out of this.”
“Can’t. Ever since she showed up at Simms’s, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her.”