HOPPER’S CABIN
HAWKINS, INDIANA
“The third?”
Hopper looked down into his coffee mug. It was empty already. One mug drained and he’d only just gotten started. He was going to have to pace himself.
Across the table from him, El shook her head, her mouth a lopsided curl of confusion. Hopper stood and headed toward the coffeepot in the kitchen.
“Yeah, that was the third one,” said Hopper, topping himself off. “We’d been working the case for almost two months at that point. Two murders the same, that forms a pattern, and clearly we’re looking for the same person. But three murders turns it into something else—that was when we really knew we had a serial killer to catch.”
El’s eyes narrowed in concentration. “Like…breakfast?” she asked, drawing the word out, uncertain.
Hopper dropped back into his chair. “Oh, no, not ‘cereal.’ Serial.” He spelled it out for her. “A serial killer is…well, it’s someone who kills a lot of people.”
“Like Papa?” she asked.
Papa?
Then it dawned on him. She meant Brenner—Doctor Brenner, the monster responsible for her laboratory-bound upbringing.
Ah, crap.
“No, this is different. He was different. It’s…complicated. Listen…”
He paused, and drank some coffee. Was he really doing this? Suddenly it seemed like a very bad idea. El was, in many ways, younger than her physical age, and now he was telling her about New York in the 1970s and that time he faced off against a serial killer?
That was too much. He sighed and rubbed his face.
“I’m not sure this is a good idea, really. I mean…”
El sat bolt upright. “Don’t stop now.”
Hopper sighed. Again. “You’re really sure about this? Because—”
“But what happened?”
“Because I don’t want to be giving you nightmares for the next year, okay?”
El looked at Hopper with her customary intensity. The silence stretched between them before El finally spoke.
“Go back to the start.”
“The start? The story is long enough as it is. And the first two murders were the same. Like I said, it was on the third one that things began to happen.”
El looked at the table. Hopper looked at her from over the rim of his mug. She didn’t speak, and Hopper lowered his coffee.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Beginning, middle, end,” said El, not lifting her eyes from the table. “That’s a story. Beginning, middle, end.”
“That’s true.”
El looked up at Hopper. “Start with Delgado.”
“Delgado? Now that question, I can answer.”
Hopper sipped his coffee and started at the beginning.