HOSKINS
He goes straight to his car when Sammie drops him off, sits behind the wheel and watches what’s going on. The crowd has mostly dispersed, driven away by the lack of excitement, but there are still plenty of cameras, lots of media. Lots of cops going back and forth on the property, pairs of them walking down the street. They’re going to be at it all night, going door-to-door through the whole neighborhood, asking every resident for their whereabouts, if they’d seen anything suspicious. There is a process to catching a killer. There are steps. They’ve secured the crime scene; now it’s time to find a witness. That was always the part Hoskins hated the most—pounding the pavement, ringing doorbells and trying to coerce people to remember things. Most people walk through life wearing blinders; they don’t see much besides what’s in front of their own face, but it has to be done, because there’s always a chance that someone saw a strange car parked out front, or a guy they hadn’t seen around before.
And there will be more cops inside, he knows, taking photographs and dusting for prints and looking for any bit of evidence they can, because it’s almost impossible for a perp to not leave behind DNA, unless they’re incredibly careful. And this guy—he was careful, he’d kept Simms locked up with him for days and no one had suspected a thing, but maybe he hadn’t been careful enough. Loren had said the last two victims—Abeyta and Brody, Hoskins had to remind himself, because it’s so easy to think of them as bodies—had both been raped, but the medical examiner hadn’t been able to pull anything off them. The guy could’ve used a condom, or their time in the water had washed everything clean. But this time it might be different, and he’d left something they could run through the database and hope for a match. But it might not matter if they find his DNA, because even if the guy left a fucking bucket of semen on the front doorstep, if they don’t have him on file already, it’ll be a wash. It’s hit or miss, Hoskins thinks. Sometimes worth the trouble, but not typically a lot of help in making an arrest.
A part of him wants to stay, to get back into the thick of things right away, but he’s spent so much of the last few years running from Seever that he can’t. Even if he tried, he doesn’t think he’ll be any more use tonight; it’d be best to go home, to nurse his sore head and bruised face, come back to the investigation in the morning, when he’s thinking straight, when he can do the job right.
*
When he gets home, Joe’s asleep on the couch, a melting bowl of ice cream balanced on his lap. “He’s been hiding tuna cans again,” the caretaker woman says before she leaves. “He’s been digging in the trash and hiding them in his room. He won’t even let me wash them out first.”
Hoskins gets a trash bag and goes to his father’s room, and the smell of fish hits him, overpowering the musky aroma of old man. The empty cans are stacked in the closet, starting in the farthest corner, where the suit his father used to wear to church hangs, wrapped in clear plastic and knotted at the bottom, to keep the ends from dragging. There are dozens of them—when did Joe have a chance to eat this much tuna? Hoskins gets on his knees, starts putting the cans in the bag, trying to be quiet about it, so by the time Joe realizes what has happened these flat tins will be far away, buried under a mound of other garbage.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Joe’s voice scares the hell out of him, the same way it did when he was fifteen and had brought a girl home with him, and they’d been in his bedroom, fooling around, because Joe shouldn’t have been there, he usually worked late into the night, but he came home early that day, Hoskins never found out why, and he caught the two of them in the middle of their funny business. He’d stormed into the bedroom, shouting, and he’d put the girl out of the house, but gently.
“I’m throwing all this junk away.”
“Get out.”
“You can’t live like this.”
“I’m a grown man. I’ll live any way I damn well please.”
“These have to go, Dad.”
“No.”
Joe’s eyes are shining, he’s breathing hard. He’s never been a violent man, never used his fists or was mean, is hardly ever rude or angry, but Hoskins thinks he might be ready to fight now, that there’s a good chance the two of them will end up on the floor, rolling around, swearing and punching, all over a bag of cans, their insides smeared with drying tuna.
“I need those, son,” Joe says, instead. There’s no fight in him, none at all, and Hoskins realizes that the shine in his eyes isn’t anger, it’s tears, because he’s ready to break down. “Please.”
“Why? It’s nothing but trash.”
Joe sits on the foot of his bed—not sits, really, but more of a sink, slow-motion and graceful, and he’s crying, thin old-man tears that run down his face and over his huffing lips.