She starts the coffeepot, sits on the sofa. The Christmas tree is still in the box, pushed halfway under the coffee table, winding pieces of packing tape holding it all together. She nudges it farther under the table with her toe. They usually put up the tree on Thanksgiving, opening up the boxes of ornaments they’ve collected over the years and snapping the plastic branches together, but somehow they’d forgotten it this year. They’d eaten their turkey and stuffing, and the can of cranberry sauce with the ridges still cut into the jellied sides, the same as they always did, but instead of putting up the tree they’d gone to bed, and a few days had passed before Sammie remembered what they’d forgotten. It’s hard to start a tradition, to create a thing you come back to every year, but it’s so easy to let it go. To give up and let it disappear, like it’d never existed at all.
She picks up the phone, calls Dean. No answer. Calls the art gallery, following up on her lead. It goes straight to voicemail. Calls the county jail and police department and Hoskins’s cell, wanting an update, but there’s either no answer or no one will cooperate. There’s nothing more frustrating than sitting in your own home, punching numbers on the phone and expecting results and getting stonewalled. She doesn’t have anything else to do but sit and wait; she can’t leave because Dean might come back, but she should go, she still needs a piece to turn in to Corbin and there’s no story here in the four walls of her own home.
All of it pisses her off, Dean and Corbin and Weber and Hoskins and the whole situation, and the tree’s still in its box, just to top it all off. If Dean were here they could put it up right now, but he’s not, because he’s angry at her for something she didn’t even do.
A text comes in, makes her phone beep and she lunges for it, snatches it up. It’s from Dean.
I’M MARRIED TO A WHORE, it says, and that’s all, because Dean knows it would hurt her, that single word, he’d called her that once before, during their weekly session of couples therapy, and she hadn’t cried but she’d been upset, and now it makes her furious, because she didn’t do anything and she can’t even explain herself; she knows that if she tries to call or text him she’ll be ignored.
The coffee machine beeps to let her know it’s done, but she ignores it and goes back to the bedroom, yanks on a pair of jeans and boots, a sweater. She’s not thinking of the Secondhand Killer or Hoskins or Corbin or how she needs to head to work soon—she’s so angry that everything else has been booted from her head, she can’t focus on anything else except that one word, whore, that’s what her husband thinks she is, and maybe she’ll have to prove him right, so he can see that she doesn’t care what he thinks, she’ll show him.
HOSKINS
He’d spent the night in a cell at the jail, lying on a thin cot that’s hanging from a freezing concrete wall, and dreamt of Sammie. This isn’t unusual, because he dreams about her a lot, but it’s never like this—usually Sammie is laughing or fighting with him, or holding his dick, sliding it slowly into her mouth—but this time Sammie is dead, she’s on the floor and her skull is smashed in on one side, so her head has the misshapen look of a deflated basketball, and it’s not just blood oozing out of her head but yellow stuff too, and when he sees that several of her fingers have been cut away Hoskins opens his mouth to scream, but then there’s a hand on his shoulder, shaking him awake, and it’s the same cop who apologized for arresting him, Craig, and his eyebrows are drawn together over his hawk nose, worried.
“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.”