“Hey, I didn’t expect to see you here,” Hoskins says, standing in the office door. Ted freezes, then slowly looks over his shoulder. If a person could look like a scared rabbit caught in a snare, that person would be Ted. “I’m glad I caught you.”
“I thought you were working upstairs,” Ted says, turning full around. There’s a clean white bandage crossed over an eyebrow, and a ring of purple bruises around his neck. The whites of his eyes are red from burst blood vessels. Hoskins winces, touches his own face. His upper lip is swollen, his nose sore, and there’s a lump on the back of his head, but Ted looks worse, and it’s bad because he was the one to do this.
“No, I’m still working from down here.”
“Oh, okay.” Ted pulls a ring of keys from his pocket and unlocks his office. “See you around.”
“Hey, wait.”
Ted pauses, looks at him warily.
“I’m sorry about what I did,” Hoskins says. He doesn’t have any problem with apologizing, never has—even when he doesn’t mean it. But this time he does mean it. “I saw you at the crime scene, and I lost it. It’s not an excuse, but I’ve always had a hard time dealing with things connected to Seev—to that particular case I worked before. Not an excuse, but that’s what it is.”
Ted’s lips move but no sound comes out. He looks at the clock on the wall, then at Hoskins.
“My mom thinks I should quit,” he finally says. “After what you did to me.”
“Don’t do that, man,” Hoskins says, taking a step closer. He stops, holds up his hands when Ted shies away. “You’re good at this job. You work hard, and everybody appreciates you. Don’t let my stupid shit get in your way. I promise nothing like that will ever happen again.”
Ted sighs. “I like it here.”
“Then don’t quit. I can call upstairs if you want, see if they’ll move me to the other side of the basement. Or maybe you could go upstairs, get a nice office with a window. But don’t quit because of what I did.”
“What you did to me, was it like before?” Ted says. “When you got kicked out of Homicide?”
Hoskins pauses, lowers his hands to his sides and folds them up into fists. Of course Ted would know about that, everyone does. Not like it’s a big secret.
“Yeah, I guess it was like that time.”
Ted looks down at the toes of his sneakers. Sighs again. There are some people who will hold a grudge their whole lives, coddle it, never spit it out, as if they’re holding a piece of steak in their mouth until the meat has gone gray and unrecognizable, a tasteless lump, but Ted isn’t one of those people. Hoskins can tell by the slope of his shoulders, by the crease between his eyebrows, that he wants to let things go back to the way they were before.
“Okay,” he says. “Apology accepted. Honestly, I’ve been beat up worse by my brothers.”
“Great.” Hoskins claps his hands together, and he’s glad to see that Ted doesn’t flinch away from the sound. “I’m glad you’re back, because I need your help with my damn computer.”
Slowly, a smile spreads across Ted’s face.
*
“It’ll take me some time,” Ted says when he hears what Hoskins is looking for. “You can’t pull those up yourself?”
“With the clearance I have now I can only look at cases that’ve been officially marked cold, or have been put under my authorization,” Hoskins says. “Some of the murder cases in the last five years, they’re still active. I just want to take a look.”
“I could get in trouble for this, you know.”
Hoskins raises his eyebrows.
“And you could still get in trouble for snooping through Seever’s case files.”
“Oops, guess that’s true,” Ted says. “Okay, what should I be looking for again?”
“Unsolved homicides involving female victims within the state of Colorado. And send a request out to police departments in nearby states, see if we can have temporary access to their systems. Secondhand might’ve done some traveling, even lived somewhere else.”
“That’s it?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“You don’t want to be more specific? That might give us a lot of results. I can narrow down the search parameters if you have more.”
Hoskins thinks of the missing fingers, the words on the wall. Those were things specific to Seever, but what if Secondhand had done it before, and they’d missed it, it’d been overlooked? What if Secondhand had been killing the same way for a long time, but he was tired of being ignored, so he’d only recently started going after victims associated with Seever, thinking they’d sit up and take notice? And they sure did, sat up like good dogs begging for a treat.
“Wait. Female homicide victims who were found missing fingers,” Hoskins says. Seever had liked to do it, and so does Secondhand—and cutting off fingers wasn’t something that a killer would do randomly. No, it was a trophy for him, Secondhand probably would’ve done it each and every time, or not at all. “Start with that, but we might need to do another search if it doesn’t pull up anything.”
“Missing fingers?” Ted grimaces, his hands hovering above the keyboard.