“How’d you get hurt?” he asks, taking the coffee she’s holding out to him. “It looks bad.”
“I tripped,” she says, looking away. A lie, he knows. Over the years he’s come to understand that there are clumsy women, but not as many as anyone would have you believe. The cut on Trixie’s face wasn’t made by the tub or a door, or whatever other foolishness she’d try to make him believe if he pressed her. That was done with a hand, something with a ring on it, a big stone, probably, flat and dark, the kind that glitters meanly and will have blood dried into the prongs.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Would you tell me if you weren’t?”
She smiles at that, and the dimple on her chin makes an appearance. It makes him think of the girl in the closet, killed by her own mother. She’d had dimples in her school picture, the one the news had run, the same one that’d been blown up and framed for her funeral. He rubs a finger down the bridge of his nose.
“Probably not,” she says, and that’s also like the dead little girl, because she’d never said one word, she’d gone to her first-grade class every day and never once asked for help, never once said anything was wrong. No one suspected a thing, she was smiling until the very end and then she was dead. “I’m fine.”
He pulls away from the window and parks in a spot where he can still see the shop, he can see Trixie leaning out the window and passing out the cups of coffee. He has a headache, and at first he thought it was from lack of caffeine but now he thinks it’s because of everything. Loren and these new murders, Trixie and the cut on her face and the girl in the closet and Seever, because everything leads back to Seever, at least for him it does, and maybe it’ll be that way forever.
SAMMIE
“What the hell is this Secondhand Killer business?” Sammie says. She should be getting ready for work, putting on her makeup and fixing her hair, but she can’t focus, because Corbin has run her article like he promised, but he’s also made a few of his own additions, and added Chris Weber’s name to the byline, as if they’d worked on the piece together, like they were partners. She’d called Corbin first thing, let the phone ring until he finally picked up. “I didn’t put that in.”
“I did,” Corbin says. “Actually, it was Weber’s idea.”
“Weber?”
“Yeah, he’s been trying to come up with a nickname for this guy. You like it?”
“No,” she says, trying to keep the angry tremor out of her voice. “If I’d known you wanted a name for this killer, I would’ve come up with something myself.”
“Listen, I wanted to run the piece this morning, and I needed something fast. Weber had already worked it up. What’s the problem?”
She bites her lip. Corbin’s amused, she can hear it in his voice, but she might be pushing her luck. It’s the first piece she’s had published in a year, maybe it’s better to let it go. It’s not so much about the name, although it’s bad—you might as well call him the damn Sloppy Seconds Killer—it’s because Weber came up with it.
“I was surprised,” she says. “You ran my stuff—does this mean I’m back on staff?”
“You have a week to get me another piece,” Corbin says. “I’d take something sooner, if you could crank it out that quick. But I’ll need it soon—Weber’s got a lot of stuff lined up. Enough to print daily.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I’m going to call you a freelancer for now. Prove yourself, I might bring you back on. Do this right, there’s an empty office down the hall from mine—it could be yours.”
“I don’t give a shit about having an office.”
“I’ll remember you said that. Weber’s been on the phone all morning, told me he’d scored an interview. Something good, I guess.”
She looks at the clock, dismayed. She has forty-five minutes to get to work, and then she’ll be stuck there for at least six hours. She’d call in sick and spend the day pulling together another article, but she can’t afford to. They have bills to pay, they need to eat. That’s the problem with chasing a dream, she thinks. Reality is always right behind you, nipping at your heels. And its teeth are sharp.
“A week?” she says. “Okay. You’ll have something in a week. Less than a week.”
*