“I don’t need a new vase every time,” she says. “If you bring the flowers wrapped in paper, they’ll be fine.”
But he doesn’t listen, and keeps coming home with more glass vases, and she feels bad tossing them out with the trash, so she instead stacks them in one corner of the garage, in a careful pile. They get dusty there. Dirty. She doesn’t touch it, this precarious mountain of glass that grows bigger every week, but sometimes she goes out into the garage to look at it, the bottoms of her bare feet cold and dirty on the concrete, her arms crossed over her breasts. After the first few times, she noticed that spiders would climb inside the glass, not knowing that they’d never be able to get out again, that they’d end up dead at the bottoms, their legs crinkled up close to their bodies, the whole rest of the world right there, close enough to see, but still not close enough.
THE HUNT
HOSKINS
December 7, 2015
It’s quiet in the basement without Ted in the office next door, and it seems darker than usual. Probably a psychological thing. When he gets in there’s a manila folder on his chair; inside there’s a few handwritten pages of notes, done in Loren’s fancy Palmer script on unlined computer paper, and a yellow sticky note on top. Take a look? it says. This is the best the numbnuts on the task force could come up with. I’m out today, headed down to Pueblo. We got a call that Cole might be down there, hiding out.
Hoskins shuffles through the pages, runs his fingers down the cover memo, and laughs. Numbnuts, Loren was right about that. If the task force can’t come up with a better list of suspects than this, the whole damn city is in trouble.
The suspect is a man, the papers say. No shit. Age eighteen to fifty-five, which seems like a pretty big gap to Hoskins. Caucasian. A man with deep-seated sexual perversions and an inferiority complex, which Hoskins guesses covers most of the men living in Denver. After this is a list of suspects, men to check out. It’s a short list. Every investigation has to start somewhere, it’s not just something that happens; a case is built, brick on top of brick, until another door opens up and a new possibility is revealed. But these names—they’re a joke.
The first is Tom Bird, a local businessman in the running for the upcoming election for mayor. He’s been spending a lot of time shaking hands and kissing babies, and he’s done quite a bit of grandstanding about the crime rate in Denver, promising it’ll dip lower when he’s elected. Hoskins takes a pencil, draws right through this name. If Bird had gone to the trouble of murdering three women to draw attention to his platform, he should be running for the fucking president, not mayor.
Next is Pastor Jack Pelton, who’d spent the last twenty years playing big-time to the Bible thumpers in town, until he was caught in an undercover sex sting involving underage girls not long before. His church had given him the boot, but Pastor Jack was on the rise again, because everyone likes a repenting sinner. Church attendance always went up when people were scared, and could Pastor Jack be trying to throw a scare into Denver just to get more asses in the pews? Hoskins drew a line through this name too. There were easier ways to fill the collection plate.
Person of Interest Number Three: Frank Costello, Esq. Jacky Seever’s lawyer, who’d represented his client in court and collected his fee, but his business had gone down over the years. He’d had a good hike after Seever’s trial, and maybe that’s what he was looking for again—getting Seever’s name back out there would be advertising gold. But Costello is about seventy years old, and he’d broken his hip twice. Hoskins didn’t think the guy would be able to take down a toddler, much less a full-grown woman. Another strike.
Next is Dan Corbin, the editor in chief over at the Post. Circulation at the paper is down, hell, everyone knows that, the Rocky Mountain News had disappeared a few years ago and the Post looked like it was headed in the same direction. A huge story involving Jacky Seever, three dead women, with Sammie Peterson, former star reporter on the case—it was a wet dream come true for Corbin. But Hoskins has met Corbin—he’s a loser, the kind of guy who’d be too afraid to go skydiving so he’ll watch videos online about it instead. He was safe. A guy who’d deny that he ever jerked off and then go home and do it into a sock in the back of his closet. The kind of guy who’d spent his whole life hiding behind words.