What You Don't Know(17)
The prosecution asked for the death penalty.
It took only three hours for the jury to make their decision. Fast enough that they were done in time to grab an early prime-rib dinner and shrimp cocktails at the Broker. The American public was relieved—a monster had been condemned, and they could finally get back to their regularly scheduled programming.
Jacky Seever was sentenced to death by lethal injection.
But a crime like this isn’t only about the killer. There are others to consider. The victims. Their families. Detectives Ralph Loren and Paul Hoskins, who were both given a commendation and a goodish raise for Seever’s arrest. Sammie Peterson, who became something of a local celebrity because of her articles covering the case. Gloria Seever, who had to learn how to live in a world without her husband. Those are just a few, because a crime like this has a wide reach, and you can never know how many are actually affected. That’s how things like this are—a drop in still water that starts a ripple, and it spreads in every direction, going on and on, probably into infinity, never flatlining but starting other ripples that head in completely new directions. Sooner or later, the original ripple will slow, it will lose much of its urgency, but it’s still there.
It’ll never be over.
THIS ISN’T OVER
November 27, 2015
After seven years, nearly everyone has forgotten about Jacky Seever. Except Carrie Simms. She’s spent every day of the last seven years thinking of Seever, of what he did over the days he’d kept her tied and gagged in his garage. Those kinds of things aren’t easy to forget, and sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night, her head aching because she’s had her jaw clenched tight, trying to keep from screaming. A dentist gave her a hunk of plastic to stick in her mouth when she sleeps, like something hockey players wear to keep their teeth from shattering, but she doesn’t need a guard for her teeth, she needs one for her brain, to keep it quiet, to keep from dreaming about Seever. A dream-guard, that’s what she needs. Or a lobotomy. Carrie used to be the kind of girl who talked a lot, laughed loudly, but over the last seven years she’s become mostly silent, a woman who doesn’t want to be noticed. She’s only twenty-six, but her roots are mostly gray already, there are deep lines radiating from the corners of her eyes, and her hand sometimes aches, as if longing for the lost finger.
But she’s alive.
She sometimes thinks back to her life before Seever, or Before Seever, BS, as she likes to think of it, in big capital letters and bolded. She doesn’t remember much of that life, only that she was sometimes hungry and cold, and almost always stoned out of her gourd, and the people surrounding her were a constantly rotating cast of nobodies, people she’d see once and then never again. That was all Before Seever, and she thinks that if she’d never met Seever in that bar, if she hadn’t gone home with him that night, she’d already be dead, from drugs or something, and it would’ve been her own fault, no different from suicide. Seever had meant to kill her, but in those few days she’d spent in his garage, her wrists and ankles tied together, an old rag stuffed into her mouth and sometimes one looped over her eyes, she’d learned an important lesson: She wanted to live. It sounds stupid, it sounds cliché, but those terrible hours spent with Seever made her life that much more precious, and when she finally got out of that garage and ran, her bare feet slapping against the concrete, when she was terrified that she’d look over her shoulder and he’d be there, ready to take a handful of her hair and drag her back into the darkness, those were the most beautiful moments she’d ever experienced. She’s not thankful for Seever and what he did, not really, but maybe she is, just a little.
She’s cleaned up now, no more drugs, no booze. She doesn’t work—her grandfather died the winter before, so she lives off what he left her and student loans, so she goes to school, training to be a vet tech, because she’s always liked animals, they don’t laugh and snicker and stare at the hand that has a stump instead of a pinkie finger, as if it’s the most horrifying thing they’ve ever seen. Animals have never tried to hurt her, not the way Seever did, or the way her uncle used to when she was young. If an animal attacks you, they have a reason, they didn’t do it because they thought it was fun, they didn’t want to see you hurt for no reason at all. Animals don’t laugh when you scream, and they don’t stroke your hair afterward and promise that it’ll all be over soon although it’s a lie. She lives alone, renting a guest cottage behind a bigger house, it’s probably meant to be a garage or a shed but was renovated, the washer and dryer sit in a closet and she can barely get the doors open to throw her clothes in and there’s only a stand-up shower stall in the bathroom, no room for a tub, but she doesn’t care. One day, she thinks, she’ll graduate and get a job, live somewhere better. Maybe she’ll even find some nice guy and go out on dates—or she’ll get a pet. A dog—a dog would bark if someone tried to break in, a dog would be good protection. Or she could get a cat. Probably a cat. She’d wanted to get a cat after she’d moved in, and she asked the owner, an old Korean guy who traveled a lot and liked to play golf, but he’d said no, that he didn’t want a cat pissing on the carpets, her security deposit wouldn’t go that far.
“So you think Seever’s wife knew you were there?” Detective Hoskins had asked, and she’d wanted to have an answer for him, but she wasn’t certain.