He’d been in Homicide for all of a day when he pulled Loren as a partner. Luck of the draw, he was told, although later he’d find out that it was because no one else could stand to work with him, even though he was a good detective, he had more arrests under his belt than anyone else.
“You like being a cop?” Hoskins had asked him once, not long after they’d started working together. They were sitting in Loren’s car, parked behind a dry cleaner, eating tacos. Loren turned to look at him, bewildered, and Hoskins turned red. It was a stupid thing to ask, like something a second-grader would ask the cop coming to talk about Chester the Molester and stranger danger, but he had to know. “I mean, you seem pretty good at it.”
“I fucking hate it,” Loren said immediately.
“Then why do you do it?”
“Because I’m good at it,” Loren said, the ghost of a smile hanging around his hard mouth. Hoskins didn’t care much for that smile.
“So? I’m sure you’re good at other things.”
“Nope. This is it.” And Hoskins knew that a person could be good at something and also hate it, but after a while he realized that Loren loved police work, really got off on it, no matter what he said. It wasn’t serving the public and helping his fellow man that did it for him, and it wasn’t that he got to put one over on the dipshits of the world and parade around like a hero. And it certainly wasn’t the money, because cops make shit; teachers and cops, cleaning up everyone’s messes, got the shaft in the payroll department. No, for a guy like Loren, it’s not about the money or anything else.
It’s about the hunt.
Like one of their early cases together, looking for a man who’d raped and killed three women in their own homes in the middle of the day. There were no signs of break-in, no leads to go on, nothing. It took Loren some time to get going, three women were dead before he got geared up, but then it was on, on like Donkey Kong, and the hunt started. Hoskins had never seen anyone operate the way Loren did, had never even heard of it; it wasn’t so much investigating as it was transforming, the way an actor, a good one, will become the character they’re playing. Loren didn’t do it very often, but when he did, when he hunted, he was all in, all or nothing. He changed his clothes, his voice, his habits, everything, so he became the person they were looking for. Loren called it getting in his head, but to Hoskins it seemed like more of a metamorphosis. A butterfly struggling free of a cocoon and spreading its wings for anyone to see.
Sometimes it was guesswork, sometimes they had nothing to go on, like that early case with the women killed in their homes. But Loren was watching, he was taking in everything, waiting until it felt right. And then he bought a suit at a department store and borrowed a Lexus from a local dealership, and he made Hoskins wait in the car when he went up to a nice house in a fancy neighborhood, not unlike the ones where each of the dead women had been found. A woman answered his knock, a housewife who was home alone, her kids were at school and her husband at work, and Loren had smiled and asked to use her phone because his cell had gone dead and he was late for an appointment. And even though Loren had the face of a rabid bulldog the housewife had taken one look at his nice suit and the Lexus parked at the curb and she’d let him in, had even closed the door behind him. Because money talks, even when its mouth is shut tight. And Loren could’ve done anything behind that closed door, he could’ve raped and killed the woman, or sat down for tea, but instead he called Hoskins, who pulled his vibrating cell from his pocket and stared at it for a moment, with the same expression he would’ve had if he’d pulled out a poisonous snake.
“This is how he’s doing it, Paulie,” Loren said, his voice pleasantly low through the phone’s speaker. Hoskins tried to imagine what was going on inside, if the woman was standing by, waiting for him to finish his call, but Hoskins thought she’d probably turned her back, gone into the other room, wanting to be polite, even if it was her own home. “He doesn’t have to break in. They let him in. Invite him in.”
And Loren was right, he always was, they went knocking on doors again and a neighbor of one of the dead women came forward and said they did remember seeing a white car in the neighborhood around the time of the crime, a late-model Audi, something like that, and the man behind the wheel was handsome, with good hair. I didn’t think about him before, the woman said, spreading her hands and shrugging. I guess he didn’t look like a criminal.