Found You by Mary Sangiovanni Page A

things, to hearing things. Maybe (“ Boys … people like you, they can’t be cops. It isn’t right, son. They’d never accept …”) his parents were right. Maybe guys like him (“ Son, if they found out …”) really weren’t cut out for police work.
    That under-part of his thoughts was bullshit. He knew it—intellectually and in his heart, he knew it. Maybe thirty years ago, when his uncle worked for theBloomwood County Prosecutor’s Office, maybe then people would have thought that his being gay would make him a bad police officer. Hell, maybe some people might think it now. But even at four years old Steve had been tottering after his speeding Tonka trucks, wearing his uncle’s police hat, giving tickets to his teddy bears, and having shoot-outs behind the big easy chair, long before anything about sexuality mattered. Letting closed-minded homophobes hinder him from doing a job he thought he could do and do well just didn’t seem like an option.
    Especially if no one had to know. He was a cop before he was…anything else.
    But his being stress-crazy…maybe that was bullshit, too. Maybe. Sure it was. The files proved it. He’d found them shoved at the bottom of one of Detective DeMarco’s desk drawers.
    When he’d gotten to one labeled “Feinstein, Maxwell—Suicide,” Bennie Mendez had swooped down out of nowhere, it seemed, and snatched the file out of his hand.
    “Anita never was good about the filing,” Mendez had said in an almost apologetic tone, and, not seeming to know what else to say—or maybe, afraid Steve would ask questions—he turned on his heel and walked back to his desk. Steve had seen that he locked the file in his own bottom desk drawer and pocketed the key, glancing up once to offer Steve what he seemed to hope was a nonchalant grin.
    Steve didn’t ask questions. He was new, but he was aware that some things were strictly need-to-know policematters. You had to earn your way into the information, if you ever got to have it at all.
    But the other files, the ones that had been rubber-banded with the Feinstein file, Steve still had. Some instinct dictated that just for shits and giggles he ought to leave them be in the bottom drawer until Mendez and his partner, that Italian guy, left for the day. But now there was a lull, and no one was around, so he pulled them out to look at them.
    The first was a hom i cide, a woman named Debbie Henshaw from Plainfield, who’d been killed up in Lake Hopatcong, house-sitting at her sister’s place. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and stomach, and most of the skin of her face had been removed. Someone had gouged out her eyes and filled the sockets with the ashes of burnt paper. She’d been a pretty young girl, freckled and blonde and small-boned.
    The mess in the pictures barely looked human.
    A neighbor had found her with half of her white blouse torn off. Someone carved a word into the pale skin beneath her breasts. Very much like the case of the missing guy and the strips of skin that spelled out HOL. And exactly like the Kohlar case, with the word HOLLOW written in blood….
    Good God . The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
    He flipped open another file. A woman named Savannah Carrington had been found dead on her back patio with several shards of glass in her neck, arms, torso, and legs. The impossible odd angles of some of the shards indicated a hom i cide rather than a suicide.People didn’t stab themselves in the back, down to the spinal cord. The report indicated the police searched both her front yard and back yard and the neighboring properties to either side but found nothing significant other than a cracked (but unbroken) glass table from one of the neighbors’ patios. Yet there were huge pieces of glass in her face, chest, back, and abdomen. Glass glittered all over the lawn, glass glinted up from the bottom of the in-ground swimming pool. The photo in the file showed her slumped against the sliding glass door,