Red by Kate Kinsey

up again, just long enough to glare.
    “You’ll get the report when you get it,” he said. “Now let me do my job.”
    Hanson followed Griggs back upstairs, but his spirits sank with every step upward. The media was gonna love this. Even without the details of Roger’s diced penis and missing tongue, the case had already attracted a lot of head shaking from both the mayor and the chief of police. And now they had another victim. A very young, very pretty woman.
    “I need coffee,” Griggs muttered, stepping into the break room and reaching for the coffeepot. “Grab a filter out of the cabinet, would ya?”
    But Hanson ignored him. He was staring at the television mounted on the wall.
    “It’s a terrible, terrible thing when a decent, upstanding member of the community falls prey to a violent crime,” Milton Daubs, police chief, told Channel Six.
    “Christ,” Griggs groaned. “Bastard almost sounds sincere.”
    Griggs was right and wrong, Hanson thought. Daubs was a bastard. But he was also sincere. That was what made him so dangerous: his self-righteous sincerity.
    And his sincere foot was gonna land up their asses as soon as the media got wind of Robyn Macy’s murder.
    The only question was: who was going to say it first? Daubs or the press?
    Griggs said it first.
    “Well, buddy boy, I think we got a serial killer on our hands.”
     
    “What in the blazes did you say to her?”
    Milton Daubs always seemed to be wound tight as a jack-in-the-box just before it sprang, but today he was in rare form. He wasn’t a particularly big man, but his lungs were gigantic—and when he yelled, walls vibrated.
    Hanson looked not at Daubs, but at the big damned warning on the wall behind his head: Fear God and give glory to Him, for the hour of His Judgment is come .
    The cross-stitched Bible verse held a place of honor in the middle of Daubs’s vanity wall, surrounded by plaques, awards, and photographs of the chief shaking hands with important people. After all, they lived in the buckle of the Bible Belt, and the separation of church and state was only an ugly rumor started by communists and liberals.
    Staring at the wall was preferable to looking at the chief’s face, growing an ugly, splotchy red. A vein in his left temple, just under his receding hairline, was throbbing.
    “Look, we had to check it out.” Griggs jammed his hands in his pockets. “She lied to us about having lunch with her husband that day, and we had those hairs—”
    “Roger Banks and I went to college together,” Daubs thundered. “We played golf together. We were fraternity brothers!”
    Hanson nodded, all the while sending desperate telepathic messages to Griggs to shut up.
    “I sent him a Christmas card every year for the last twenty years! That means he wasn’t just a friend of mine, he was an old friend of mine, do you get that?”
    “Yes, sir,” Hanson said quietly. “And we’re very sorry for your loss.”
    “Don’t be a smart-ass with me! I don’t need your sympathy, I need you to find the bastard who killed him.”
    It was a measure of Milton Daubs’s sincere outrage that he’d used profanity. For Daubs, swearing belonged in the gutter with the criminals. He’d actually passed out memos asking everyone to watch their language in the squad room.
    “Yes, sir, I understand—”
    “What I don’t need is you two asking his wife stupid questions that will only upset her.” Daubs fell heavily into his chair behind the desk.
    Hanson wondered if Daubs knew that they mimicked him behind his back, the way he seemed to talk in italics. It wasn’t just when he was pissed off ; he talked this way all the time.
    “Marla is devastated . Just devastated . Roger was her world .” Daubs spoke in a more reasonable tone now, but Hanson knew better than to relax. “Now, tell me what you said to send her into hysterics.”
    “Hysterics” was an exaggeration. Sure, she’d been upset. People usually were when they were caught in a