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.”
“Stop it.”
“When I visit Seever, he talks about Sammie all the time. Not his wife, not any other woman. Just Sammie. And did you know Seever paints her? I flashed around Sammie’s picture at the prison, a few of the guards recognized her from the paintings he does. They said she’s usually naked in the pictures. Sometimes she’s dead.”
“Where are you going with this, Loren?”
“I guess Seever’s wife got her hands on one once, and just about shit her pants. Now, after he paints Sammie, they throw them in the garbage. Destroy them.”
“I had no idea,” Hoskins says, fishing out his wallet and handing it to Ted, who’s pushed him gently to one side so he could get on the computer. Alltheprettyflowers.com. The page that pops up is simple—a cartoon gravestone, RIP, with a single white daisy sprouting from the patch of grass in front of it. It makes him think of Seever in a clown costume, a daisy pushed into his lapel.
“Seever’s obsessed with Sammie, and it got me thinking, because Secondhand’s obsessed with Seever. At least, that’s what it looks like.”
“And now you’re obsessed with her?” Hoskins is watching as Ted types in his credit card information—two hundred dollars a month, it says, plus a termination fee when he cancels—scrolls through the terms of use, inputs a username and is finally in. The site is simple, nothing special, there aren’t even ads running up and down the sidebars, until Ted clicks on the search tool in the top right corner and types in two words: Jacky Seever.
“I’m saying, Sammie’s the common denominator in all this,” Loren says, and Hoskins hears both this and the whir of his computer as it loads thousands of images onto the page, pumping everything the site associates with Seever onto his screen. Some of the pictures don’t have anything to do with Seever at all, but most do. “She wrote about every one of the victims for the Post before, and now all of them are dead. She was fucking Seever. Her career took off because of what he did.”