Another line, right through Corbin’s name.
He knows what Loren and his team are thinking—that the Secondhand Killer is doing this for some kind of gain. Financial, maybe. Or notoriety. Seever’s name held a lot of weight in Denver, any mention of him makes people sit up and take notice. But Hoskins had been inside Simms’s house, he’d seen her body. He’d seen the marks left on her, those bloody shoe prints on the carpet. And the words. Simms makes him think of the time he’d gone out to a place in Texas, a couple hundred acres where corpses were left out to the forces of nature, so doctors and detectives and anyone who had a good enough reason could go to see how a human body decomposes. They called it the body farm, which had struck Hoskins as a helluva awful name when he went out to visit. It sounded more like a strip club, and he doesn’t remember much from his time there, except for the dead woman laid out in a field of wildflowers, the hem of her dress fluttering in the breeze, the empty holes where her eyes had once sat pointed toward the sky. A cage had been put up around her, made out of chicken wire. To keep the animals out, someone had said. So she wouldn’t get dragged off.
“Every one of these bodies has something to tell you,” the guy in charge had said during the tour. “You just have to figure out how to listen.”
Hoskins has six photos of Carrie Simms saved on his cell phone, mostly extreme close-ups. Looking at them makes his head pound, and he thinks it might be time for a break, time to go outside and walk a few laps around the parking lot. There’s one picture of the gashes around her wrists, left by the twine that’d held her, another of the backside of her skull, caved in like a hollow gourd. One of her right hand, the last three fingers missing. The others are the same, except the final one; he must’ve taken it by accident when he was moving, because it’s blurry, like a painting done with watercolors and then smeared when still wet. It’s Simms’s face in the photo, and it’s blurred enough that she still looks alive, she almost seems to be laughing, or maybe she’s screaming.
What he thinks Simms is trying to tell him, what Loren and the task force are overlooking: The Secondhand Killer might’ve started out killing for some kind of gain, whether it’s financial or personal, but it doesn’t seem that way anymore. There’s only one thing he seems to be looking for now—pleasure. No one tortures a person for days unless they’re getting their rocks off, and there was a sort of frenzied glee in Simms’s murder. Hoskins closes his eyes, thinks of the toaster sitting on its side, dented and covered with hair and bone, blood. Whoever Secondhand is, he’s had a taste of pleasure, and now he knows he likes it. He raped those three women, tortured and murdered them, he was cruel about it, he made it last.
And he’s going to do it again.
There’s one more name on the list, ridiculous, but somehow not.
Jacky Seever.
*
“You know what I like about you, Paulie?” Seever said once. This was near the end of their time together, before the trial started and after Hoskins had gotten everything he could out of Seever, although it sometimes felt the opposite, as if Seever was the one wringing him like an old dish towel. “You understand. Not like Loren. You understand me.”
“I think you’re mixed up. I’m not here to understand you. I’m here because I have to be. This is my job.”
“I don’t know,” Seever said, smiling. “I think there’s a part of you that enjoys being in here with me.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“You ever jerk off to the stuff I tell you, Paulie?”
“What?”
“I see how you look when I talk,” Seever said. “I get the feeling you wouldn’t mind trying some of it yourself.”
“I’m not like you. I’d never do the things you’ve done.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure. You’ve got potential, I can see it.”
*
It’s important to establish a victim’s timeline, the days and hours and even minutes leading up to their death. This can be problematic, because you can’t always know what someone is doing. You can’t always know who they talked to, or what they were thinking, even technology these days can’t catalog every second of every minute of every hour of a person’s day, although Hoskins is sure Apple is working on that.
Like some of these cold cases he has on his desk. Murders that happened ten or twenty, thirty years before. It’s not as if he can pick up the phone and ask people where they were on a particular date decades before, or what they were doing. Time passes, people forget. Evidence is destroyed. And then, years later, those files end up on Hoskins’s desk.