“What’s wrong?” Ted says, but Hoskins can’t answer—he feels like a fist has been jammed down his throat, choking him. “What is it?”
Hoskins hands him the package, he doesn’t want to hold it another second more than he possibly has to.
“What the fuck is this?” Ted cries, revolted, but Hoskins can’t dredge up the words. His chest is tight, he feels like he might be having a heart attack, but he’s pretty sure it’s the horror of seeing this, of having cradled it in his lap. Loren has brought him a Seever painting, a Seever original. Hoskins hasn’t seen one since the Christmas after Seever was arrested, when a painting was delivered to the station, addressed to both Hoskins and Loren, and they’d set it up in the conference room, where it had sat for a week before it finally disappeared, because no one wanted to touch it. It was a clown, and he was pinned to a crucifix, tears running down his white painted cheeks as snow fell from the canvas sky. The clown had Seever’s face, and that wasn’t at all a surprise, because nearly every painting that came out of the prison those first few years had Seever’s face, as if he were trying to get free by sending his likeness out into the world.
“It’s pretty good,” Chief Black had said. “I’m surprised he’s that talented.”
“Yeah, maybe if I pull down my pants and bend over, you can poke a brush up my asshole and I’ll paint your portrait,” Loren said. He was glowering at the painting, and if he’d put his fist through the clown’s face, Hoskins wouldn’t have been surprised. Or upset.
“You always gonna be a foulmouthed bastard?” Black asked.
“Looks that way, don’t it?”
“Hitler was a pretty good artist too,” Hoskins said, and Black made a noise in his throat and went back into his office, slammed the door.
“Fuck a duck, kid,” Loren said, but he was grinning. “You sure know what to say to kill the mood.”
Seever had taken up art not long after his arrest; he used watercolors and charcoals and paints, whatever he could get his hands on. Most of the work he put out was pleasant, nothing you’d expect to see from a killer—Sleeping Beauty in her bed, her hands folded sedately across her chest; a mountain stream; Seever himself, looking into a mirror and smiling. But Hoskins had heard that Seever created dark stuff too. Dead people and zombies and clowns, always there were the clowns, and this painting has a Seever-clown too, eyes smiling from those white greasepaint diamonds. And it wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the bunch of balloons the clown is clutching, but two of those balloons pulling on their strings and bobbing on the breeze aren’t balloons at all, they’re heads, decapitated heads, blood dripping from their raggedly cut necks. Those two heads, their eyes are white and blank and dead but they are smiling anyway, having a damn good time being pulled along on their strings—Look, Ma, no hands!—and any fool can see that one of those heads is Ralph Loren; Seever got every single detail right, from the mole on his forehead to the scar on his upper lip. Seever is good, he’s not fucking Michelangelo, but he’s good, and he’s good enough that Hoskins knows that the other balloon-head, the one that seems to be laughing, is his own.
“Loren’s got a shitty sense of humor,” Ted says, holding the painting up so he can see it better, look at every detail. “This explains why he was all dressed up.”
“In one of those fancy suits?” Hoskins asks, thinking of Loren playing dress-up, in his three-piece and glasses, but Ted shakes his head, confused.
“No, he was in a clown costume,” Ted says, still looking at the painting so he doesn’t see the jolt Hoskins gives, how gray his face becomes. “Like the ones Seever used to wear, like the clown in this painting. He was laughing, said something about clowns getting away with anything. What’s that supposed to mean?”
Hoskins tries to stand up but his knees buckle and he drops back in the chair, dizzy, his head swimming like he’s been spun around a hundred times, a thousand, he’s come full circle and he’s back right where he started, where it all began.
*
“Where the hell is he?” Hoskins shouts. “Where did he go?”
“I didn’t even know he’d left,” Jenna says, jumping to her feet and coming around her desk. She’s the girl who works the Homicide desk, answering phones and filing and making sure everything runs smoothly, she’s been around since before Hoskins was tossed downstairs, and she’s a vast improvement over the girl they had before, who was like one of those spiders curled up under a rock, waiting for some unsuspecting victim to wander by. That girl had accused the entire department of sexual harassment, said that she couldn’t perform her job, she needed a big cash settlement to feel better. It was a hell of a mess to clean up, but now they have Jenna, and she’s a good girl. “That’s nothing new, he’s always been that way.”
“He didn’t say where he was going?” Hoskins asks.