He sits behind his desk, flips on the table lamp that he brought from home, because the overhead lights aren’t enough down here, not if you need to actually work. The batteries in the wall clock must’ve died the night before, the hands are frozen at twelve and one. He fires up his computer and opens a file folder. Shuts it. He hasn’t been able to stop thinking about what Loren had said the day before: I hope this guy knows how much time we’re spending on his ass. Make him feel good, stroke his ego.
Hoskins turns away from the computer and picks through the pile of folders on his desk, shuffles through some pages. He ends up looking at one of the oldest cold cases they have on file in Denver—1952, a young woman left a cocktail party to run an errand and disappeared. She was found dead a month later, nearly thirty miles away. There are notes scrawled in the margins, left by other investigators over the years, some of them faded away to almost nothing. Hoskins runs his finger down them, tracing his nail along the words. There’s one that catches his eye, about halfway down on the right, written in blue ink. Based on this, I don’t think it’s his first rodeo. There’s an arrow beside this, pointing at a typed sentence from the medical examiner, stating the body had been carefully washed before being dumped, probably in water mixed with bleach. And that note was right on; it probably hadn’t been that killer’s first rodeo, he’d known what to do to keep from getting caught, nearly sixty years had gone by since then and the cops had never arrested anyone in connection to the murder. He was either dead by now or a very old man, and he’d stayed free because he’d known what to do, he’d probably honed his technique over several murders. His first kill had probably been sloppy, but he’d learned from it. Seever had done the same thing. His earliest victim had suffered a head wound, but she hadn’t died from it—the examiner thought she might’ve been buried before she was actually dead; she’d been smothered in the avalanche of crawl-space dirt shoveled over the top of her because Seever was still inexperienced, he’d probably been scared and nervous, but he’d learned, oh yes he had, and quickly, the same way a dog will learn not to piddle on the floor when you smacked him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.
And that was the thing, wasn’t it? This Secondhand Killer—and it seems like that’s what he’s going to be called, whether any of them like it or not—was careful, he was thorough. He hadn’t let anyone see him, and he hadn’t left much, or anything, behind, although the tests are still being run on the samples they’d taken from Simms. He was good, very good; some people might say he was lucky, but over the years Hoskins had come to understand that a person makes their own luck, especially if that person is a killer.
He turns to the first page of the file, looks at the photo of the woman who’d disappeared in 1952. She had dark hair and big eyes. A lush mouth filled in with lipstick, probably red, although he couldn’t tell in the black-and-white photo. Whoever killed her had been experienced. He’d done it before. And maybe, he thinks, it’s the same with the Secondhand Killer. Maybe he’d killed, and then he’d switched gears and decided to go after people connected to Seever, he’d even started doing it the way Seever did it. Why?
Because he wants his ego stroked.
Lots of killers crave attention, for people to sit up and notice them. They do it for the blood, they do it for the sex, but it’s also driven by the ego. It sounds like some crazy Freud shit, but it’s true. There was the Zodiac Killer out in California, BTK in Kansas, both had sent letters to the police, they’d taunted and teased, because they wanted the attention, like a kid screaming for candy. And Secondhand was sending them messages too, because he’d chosen to mimic Seever, but he wasn’t hiding the victims like Seever did—no, he was leaving everything out for anyone to see, because he wanted them to notice. He didn’t want to be caught, oh no, he wanted to stay free and keep doing what he was doing, but he wanted everyone to be talking about him, he probably went to bed at night smiling because he was so damn satisfied.
Hoskins taps on his keyboard, wakes his sleeping computer back up. He’ll comb the database of unsolved murder cases involving a female victim that happened in the last five years, possibly even less. The last two years. There wouldn’t be too many—Denver is still a safe place to live, not safe enough to keep your doors unlocked at night, let’s not get crazy, but safe enough. He waits, hoping the computer will get its ass going, but it just sits there with a half-loaded page, not doing anything, even when Hoskins tries to reboot it.
“I need a few things, it won’t be long,” Ted says, and Hoskins looks up in time to see the kid walking past his office door, his cell phone stuck against the side of his head. He hadn’t expected to see Ted anytime soon, he’d figured the kid would still be at home, but this is good, he wants to apologize, to clear the air, and besides, he needs his help. “Give me two minutes.”