What You Don't Know(15)

Gloria leans against the armchair wearily, pulls her legs up to her chest and settles her forehead against her knees. She looks like a girl when she sits like this, young and vulnerable, the girl she used to be. The girl hiding behind the couch while her father held a gun in her mother’s face.

She has her eyes closed and is breathing deeply, trying to get herself under control. In through the nose, out through the mouth, like the gym teacher used to tell them back in high school. And then, she smells it. What others had sometimes complained about but she never noticed. The smell of rot, the cloying, wet scent of flesh boiling with maggots.

It’s my imagination, she thinks. It’s all in my head. I don’t smell anything.

She waits for it to pass, bundling her hands into fists and pressing them against her eyes. It makes her think of a trip to the zoo when she was much younger, standing inside the moist heat of the monkey house and feeling the bile rising in her throat before that horrible smell finally faded into the background, still there but tolerable, and she thinks this will be the same, but it only seems to get stronger; it might be because of the heat, the big brick house would always get so hot during the summer unless the AC was pumping away, but it’s a moot point, because she can’t take it any longer. She stumbles out of her bedroom and down the stairs, reaching desperately for the front door, barely able to keep from vomiting, or from screaming.





HOSKINS

May 18, 2009

Carrie Simms, the girl who escaped Seever, doesn’t want to testify at the trial. She’s painfully thin and small, with a face like a mouse. She’s normally easy, agreeable to most anything, but not on this.

“I can’t be in the same room with that guy,” she says. Her hair has grown out in the last few months, and she wears it hanging in her face, strands of it poking into her mouth so she seems to be gnawing on it, making her seem younger than she is, and shy. “Every time I see that bastard on TV I feel like passing out.”

Simms had wandered into the station the third week of December, when the holiday decorations had already been up for long enough that Hoskins was sick of looking at them. He’d spent Thanksgiving watching Seever’s friends and family through the big front window, passing baskets of dinner rolls and slices of turkey breast around the dining-room table. They were having a good time in there, warm and laughing, and it was those situations that made Hoskins hate his job, because he should’ve been doing the same thing, he should have a wife and kids but instead he had nothing, his ex-wife had left because he was always so wrapped up in his work, he was never around. When he finally called it a day he stopped by his father’s house, but the old man was asleep in front of the television, kicked back in his La-Z-Boy with a can of beer nestled between the armrest and his thigh. And when Joe woke up, he didn’t seem to recognize Hoskins at first; he was nervous and a little scared, and that depressed Hoskins even more, because that was his life, sitting in front of a suspect’s house alone and then being forgotten by his own father. Even Loren had someplace to go for the holiday, although he wouldn’t tell Hoskins where.

He expected it to be the same for Christmas. More watching Seever, alone, while everyone else was opening presents or drinking nog, and he was thinking about this as he looked at a sprig of mistletoe someone had stapled to the ceiling near his desk. He was just about to get up on his chair and rip it down when Simms came in, wanting to tell someone her story. He didn’t believe her. Not at first. Simms was a high-school dropout who’d fallen into drugs, mostly meth, and she’d been arrested for prostitution a few times, once for assault. She’d called police eight times in 2005, saying she’d been robbed, trying to file claims for TVs and stereos and expensive things she’d never owned. She was nineteen but looked forty-five, she was a junkie who needed a fix, and she said she’d ended up with Seever because she was more than willing to suck dick for cash, and that’s what she’d offered him. She’d climbed willingly enough into Seever’s BMW, he’d given her shots of tequila, a hit of coke, and a handful of pills, and then she’d blacked out. When she woke up she was naked and hog-tied, and the guy who’d been so friendly at the bar was suddenly a different person, and he had a big bag of all kinds of things, things you can’t buy in a store but only through catalogs that arrive in the mail wrapped in heavy black plastic so the mailman can’t see what kind of kinky shit you’re into. Seever had big plans, he was practically bouncing on his tippy-toes with excitement, like a kid at Christmas. It had gone on for days before Simms was able to escape, when the twine around her wrists was loose—partly because Seever was lazy and hadn’t double-checked his knots, but mostly because Simms was so damn skinny. She’d managed to wiggle free from the ropes and she’d run, not paying attention to where she was going or where she’d been, or even to the fact that she was only wearing panties and a ripped undershirt.

“Why didn’t you come to us with this right away?” Hoskins had asked. “You said it happened—four months ago? Beginning of August? Why’d you wait so long?”

“I don’t know,” Simms said. A few minutes into their conversation she’d asked for blank paper and a highlighter, and she’d sat there, still talking, running the marker over the white sheet until it was completely yellow, and then she’d started on the next one. The pinkie finger on her right hand was gone, only a badly healed stump was left; she said Seever had cut it off, although she couldn’t remember him doing it, she’d been unconscious when it happened, woke up and it was gone. They didn’t believe this, not at first; it seemed like another lie, another fantasy. Simms was missing teeth and had the scabby skin of a meth-head, she had track marks all up and down her arms—on anyone else, a missing finger would’ve been startling, but on Simms it was barely worth noticing. Hoskins didn’t believe her story about Seever cutting off her finger until he saw the other victims being hauled out from under the house, their hands mutilated, the stumps sometimes still weeping with pus and blood and rot. “It’s not like I want to advertise that some dude spent two days jamming a dildo up my ass and talking about the hole he’s digging in the crawl space for me.”