*
Idaho Springs is northwest of Denver, the first town on the map as the city disappears and the mountains crowd in. There’s not much to it—a handful of gas stations, a single supermarket, a few clustered neighborhoods of older homes. It’s a nice little town, but it’s the kind people pass straight through to get to the ski resorts, a town where no one really lives. Hoskins veers off I-70 once Denver’s nothing but a gritty haze on the skyline behind him, ending up on a two-lane road that snakes south, into an area where the homes and businesses peter out and the wildlife squeezes back in. He drives slowly, worried that another car might speed around the next blind curve, but there’s no one on the road, either in front or behind. It’s strange out here, Hoskins thinks. He doesn’t like it so much. He’s more comfortable with concrete and asphalt, buildings made of steel and brick. Not this. All these trees, crowded in so close there’s a solid wall of bark and leaves on either side, so thick you can barely see anything in the distance.
He eases slowly around a switchback in the road, pulls off on the packed dirt beside the blacktop, where two police patrols are parked, low and sleek, mean metal grilles attached to the fronts. Local cops, and the units look brand-new, but that isn’t much of a surprise. On the east side of Denver you had kids in rags, starving to death, but out here there was money. A hundred and fifty years before there’d been the gold rush, and then silver, and now there was skiing, tourism. Different delivery methods, but the same results.
He parks farther down, past the units, out of the way, and turns off the car. It’s colder out here than in the city, but there’s less snow on the ground, under the cover of all the pines and evergreens. A gray moth lands on the windshield, spidery legs ticking along as it walks. Hoskins smacks the flat of his hand against the glass, but it doesn’t move. Doesn’t even flutter its wings. He leans closer, trying to get a good look at its underbelly, and there is a metallic tap on his window, just beside his head, and he jumps, startled. The moth flies away.
“Roll it down,” the officer shouts, one of the locals, and Hoskins is bemused to see him make the cranking motion with his hand, because when was the last time he’d seen a car with one of those?
He opens the door instead, stands up. He’d gotten the phone call when he was leaving the hospital, he’d planned on going home and back to bed, but here he is, because another victim has been found, and it looks like another one belonging to Secondhand.
“Detective Hoskins?”
“Yeah.”
“Loren’s already here. He wanted me to wait for you, walk you out to the site.”
“Has he been here long?” Hoskins asks.
“About ten minutes.”
“Okay.”
“We got an ID on the victim,” the cop says. “James Galen. Jimmy, that’s what people called him. He was going to work, his mom said. Never made it there.”
“Did the kid know Seever?”
The cop shrugs.
“All right.” Hoskins sighs, zips his coat as high as it’ll go. “Let’s go take a look, see what we’ve got.”
*
The kid out in Idaho Springs had been found by a couple taking a walk, although from the looks of them, Hoskins thinks it was probably more likely that they’d parked and went looking for a quiet place off the beaten path to get high, maybe squeeze a little sexy time in. There isn’t much snow out that way, especially under the cover of all those trees, but the ground is damp and soft and spongy, and that’s where the couple had found Jimmy Galen, thrown onto a bed of wet pine needles, his arms and legs thrown out wide so he looks like a starfish.
And then there is Loren, dressed in a Seever-suit, a pair of glasses pushed high up on his nose, standing over the body, his hands perched on his hips. It is a Seever-pose, and Hoskins wonders how much Loren had practiced to get it down, if he stands in front of his bathroom mirror and works it.
“Left the clown suit at home this time?” Hoskins asks, and Loren laughs, a fat chuckle, then yanks up on the thighs of his slacks and kneels over the dead boy.
“His mom said he’s been gone a few days, but she said he’d done it before. Up and disappeared. That’s why she didn’t report it sooner. Said they’d been fighting about a car, and she figured he was mad,” Loren says. “He’s been gone for a few days, but dead less than twenty-four hours.”
“Any word on locating Cole?” Hoskins asks, curious. And hopeful that they’ll make an arrest soon, although he still doesn’t believe Alan Cole is their guy.
“I’ve got a team on it,” Loren says. “They’ll have him in custody real soon.”
“I guess we’ll just watch the victims pile up until then?”