“You still sucking dick to make your deadlines?” Loren says. He’s chewing gum, smacking it in his jaws, enjoying it. “I can’t believe how fast you media assholes get the word out. It’s like bleeding in the ocean—you just have to wait, the sharks’ll show up sooner than you’d think.”
“What the hell is all this?” she asks, pointing at the suit, the hair. She doesn’t like Loren, never has, but this puts him in a whole new light. She’s always thought there was something off about Loren, and Hoskins had told her about his tricks, that he liked to dress up like his suspects, that his investigation style was strange, but it’s one thing to hear about it, and another to see it. She can’t get her heart to stop racing in her chest, or her hands to stop sweating, even though she knows this isn’t Seever standing in front of her, her brain knows it, only the rest of her body won’t listen. “What kind of sick fuck are you?”
“Oh, I love to hear a pretty lady talk dirty,” Loren says. “Make me bend over and grab my ankles, and I’ll bark like a dog for you.”
“God, you’re disgusting.”
Hoskins hasn’t said anything yet, he still looks pale and shaken, like he’s seen a ghost. Maybe he has.
“Want to see what a disgusting dog I can be?” Loren drags the word out, rolling it over his tongue, so it’s more like daaawg. A disgusting daaawg.
“I don’t want to lose my breakfast, thank you,” Sammie says. “Your costume is quite enough.”
“There won’t be a problem with you losing anything, if you take it up the—”
“Jesus Christ, enough,” Hoskins says. There are two spots of color high in his cheeks, bright red. He’s angry, she can tell by the color and the glitter in his eyes, and she also knows that Loren bugs the shit out of Hoskins, that they have the kind of explosive relationship that only the PD would get behind, because they’re both good cops, so wouldn’t pushing the two of them together make a dream team? “It’s too early to have to listen to this bullshit. Can you both shut up?”
“Same old Paulie,” Loren says, dropping a hand onto Hoskins’s shoulder. “I missed you, padnah.”
“Isn’t this sweet?” Sammie asks, looking back and forth between the two. “I hate to break up the reunion, but I do have some questions—”
“Oh, I thought you knew,” Loren says, giving Hoskins’s shoulder another squeeze. “When you dump a guy, you stop getting whatever information you want for your shitty articles. So buzz off, lady.”
“Get off me,” says Hoskins, shrugging out from under Loren’s hand. “Don’t touch me.”
Loren frowns, pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose in a gesture so much like Seever that she stares at him for a long moment, fascinated. He’s good; he must’ve spent time practicing it, standing in front of the mirror and analyzing himself, wanting to be perfect. But it makes her wonder what kind of man mimics the appearance and gestures and voice and everything of a man who was best known for being a monster.
“You didn’t have any trouble finding the house, did you? You been out here before, Paulie?”
“What?”
“Where were you yesterday? Around this same time?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Just wanting to clear you as a suspect. A man can never be too careful.”
“Chief Black called me,” Hoskins says. His face is beet red. “He asked me to come out here. To help you out.”
“The fuck he did,” Loren says. “I don’t need anyone’s help.”
“Call Black, then. Tell him that. I’d be happy to head home, right now,” Hoskins says, crossing his arms over his chest. But he’s staring at the house, hard, and Sammie thinks he’s dying to get in there, to see what’s going on. To put on his Sherlock hat and poke around. “I’ve got plenty of other things I could be doing.”
“Did someone else get murdered?” Sammie asks, and the two men look at her, as if surprised that she’s still there. “Is that what’s going on? Is it someone else connected to Seever?”
She doesn’t have anything to take notes on, and that’s a damn shame, she thinks, because there’s something going on here, and she doesn’t see any news crews around, not yet. She’s first on the scene, but she’s unprepared. It won’t happen again.
“Paulie, tell your girlfriend to go home,” Loren says. Hoskins’s face is pointed at the house, but he keeps glancing at Loren, like he’s afraid to look away for too long.
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Is Seever somehow orchestrating these murders from prison?” she asks.
“Jesus,” Hoskins mutters, scuffing his shoe against a dirty pile of snow. “That’s what we need in the paper. A conspiracy theory about Seever playing puppet master from death row.”