“Tell me that you need me,” Hoskins says. “Tell me you need my help with this.”
Loren looks at him, quickly, to see if Hoskins is joking. He’s not. He wants to hear those words come out of Loren’s mouth, because Loren does need him, Chief Black knows it, Hoskins knows it—hell, even Loren knows it—but it’s one thing to know it, and another to say it out loud. It was true what he told Black—Loren’s a good detective. Maybe the best there is. But Ralph Loren is also a wild card; he needs someone to rein him in the way a naughty boy needs a strict mother, otherwise things get fucked. Like this. Loren’s dressing like Seever, picking up his behaviors, his quirks. The smoking, keeping that long cigarette pinched between his pointer and middle fingers, and the way he puckers his lips to blow the smoke out at the sky. Hoskins has seen Loren play this game of dress-up before, on a few other cases, but it was never this bad. This shit gives him the willies, to see Loren mimic Seever so effortlessly, so it doesn’t look like an act at all. If Loren had a partner, someone who’d noticed this, they would’ve sounded an alarm, raised some questions. But Loren works alone, he does what he wants.
“You love to have me by the balls, don’t you?” Loren says. He’s sweating, even though it’s cold outside and there’s snow on the ground, there are beads of sweat standing on his forehead, on his upper lip. “You’re like a fucking woman. You never quit your nagging.”
There is something terribly wrong here, because the Loren Hoskins knows would never act like this. Sweating and shaking, with a constipated look on his face. Wanting help, but not able to ask for it. The old Ralph Loren would’ve told Hoskins to go fuck himself, he would’ve laughed right in Hoskins’s face, flipped him the double bird. Loren’s sucking on that cigarette like it’s a pacifier, watching Hoskins with something like—desperation? It can’t be, but there it is, no one else might see it but Hoskins does, he was partners with this man for fourteen years—not friends the way some partners were, they never hung out after work and had beers and watched football, but in some ways he knows even more about Loren because of that distance that always existed between them. He can see that Loren’s out of control, he’s in some deep shit, he’s right on the edge of a bottomless hole. The kind of hole you fling yourself into, and you never, never make it back out again.
“I’ll give you a pass this time,” Hoskins says. “You won’t get so lucky again.”
Loren laughs roughly, shakes his head. Doesn’t look at his old partner, who’s now his partner again, but Hoskins thinks there might be some relief in that laugh, relief in the line of his shoulders. Or maybe he’s imagining it. You can never be sure with Loren, the same way you could never be sure with Seever. Two men, wrapped so deep in themselves that you can never know what’s true and what’s not, unless you’re watching closely.
And Hoskins, now that he’s seen Loren like this, he’s paying attention.
Loren asks everyone to clear out for a few minutes, so Hoskins can take a look around, and they’re all huddled in a tight circle, out in the dry cold by one of the silent patrol units, smoking their cigarettes. There are cops and technicians and photographers. The medical examiner. How many people does it take to solve a murder? As many as you can get. Someone had brought out a thermos of coffee, and Hoskins sees the steam wisping into evening sky before he ducks into the house, and he wishes he could be out there with them, shooting the shit, or in his basement office, nose-deep in an old file. Looking at the mess of it all, reconstructing the last few moments of Carrie Simms’s life, he’s reminded of how much he misses this work, and how much he hates it.
There’s blood mashed into the carpet, a trail of it leading from the single bedroom before forming a small pool around Simms. Most of it had probably soaked through the carpet and into the pad beneath, and then into the concrete. It would always be there, it’d never go away. They’d have to destroy the house to get rid of it for good.
“Judging by the marks, I’d say she crawled,” Hoskins says. “She was probably out of it. Trying to get away. Running on survival instinct.”
“Crawled out of the bedroom and into the kitchen.”
“Yep. And he was following her. Watching her struggle.” Hoskins points at the bloody shoeprints. Most of the prints are in the wake of the blood trail, dried and messy. But there are two prints, off to one side and out of the way, like the guy had stepped clear of the mess, tried to get a good seat. He was a spectator. “They look about a size eleven. If you run them through the system, I’d guess they’re running shoes you can get at any mall in the country.”
“She lost a lot of blood.”