What You Don't Know(43)

Christ.

Hoskins picks his way carefully around Simms, giving her a wide berth, careful not to put his foot down in any of the blood. He takes his cell phone out, snaps a few pictures. It’s an old habit, he’s always done it, years ago it was with the bulky old camera he carried around with him, and now with his cell, but it’s the same, he does it without thinking, and Loren doesn’t protest. He stands back, lets Hoskins do his thing.

Simms looks so small on the kitchen floor, so thin and fragile. He remembers the first few victims being carried out of Seever’s crawl space. One of the boys had a woven bracelet around his wrist, something he’d probably braided for himself out of parachute cord, and that’s what made it real for Hoskins, that’s what made it worse. Because that boy had once been alive, he’d once decided that wearing a bracelet was cool, he’d played with it when he was nervous or excited, he’d spun it around his wrist until his skin was raw.

“She’s had some fingers cut off,” Loren says casually, pulling the pack of cigarettes from his pocket and tamping them against his palm even though he’s already got one in his mouth. “Just the way Seever used to do it.”

“She’s not missing anything on her left,” Hoskins says.

“It’s her other hand. Seever got the pinkie. This guy got two more.”

“I want to see it,” Hoskins says, and Loren motions to the group out in the yard. Two of the technicians break off, set down their coffees, and slip on latex gloves. They ease through the kitchen, step around Hoskins, careful because it’s so tight, so close. They’re both young and professional, their faces blank, even as they hoist Simms up off the floor and onto the stretcher they’ve brought in. Good at their job. There’s a loud sucking noise when they lift her, because the blood doesn’t want to let her go, and Hoskins turns away, fights back his rising gorge. He’s been to dozens of crime scenes, hundreds, and it doesn’t much matter—that kind of shit will always be gross.

Hoskins grabs Simms’s right hand by the wrist, gently, holds it up so everyone can see. The hand is purplish-red and swollen, filled with blood from being trapped under the body. The pinkie is gone, but that’s nothing new, that’s how Simms came to them. Seever had already taken that part of her. Hoskins counts the fingers once, then again, even though it’s not necessary. Simms only has two fingers now, the pointer and the thumb. Her fingers make the shape of a gun, he thinks. A smoking gun.

He slowly lays her hand beside her and turns away, rubs the back of his wrist against his eye, watchful of his gloved hands, covered in the muck of death. He needs some coffee, or a nap. And he needs to call home, check on Joe, make sure the nurse is still there.

“This doesn’t feel like Seever,” Hoskins says, watching the techs carefully zip Simms into a black body bag.

“What makes you say that?”

“Seever kept his victims. Buried them under his house. He wanted them close, and he wanted to keep under the radar. But this.” Hoskins takes a breath, slowly, but not deeply. “This guy isn’t even bothering to hide the victims. He tied those last two together, he wanted them to be found at the same time.”

“Okay.”

“He’s targeting people, specific people. This guy wants us to find these women and immediately connect it to Seever. You saw that article this morning about Brody and Abeyta? People are already making the connection to Seever.”

“It’s a lot of work to set up these murders so it looks like Seever’s involved,” Loren says. “Why would this guy go to all the trouble?”

“I don’t know,” Hoskins says. “I stopped trying to understand the shit people do a long time ago.”

“You should see one more thing,” Loren says, putting the cigarette out against the side of the house before stepping inside. “Down here.”

Hoskins follows Loren, slowly picking his way out of the kitchen and down a hall—so short it could barely be called that, a few feet at most—and into the only bedroom. It’s small. A futon bed pushed against the wall takes up most of the room, a cheap dresser eats up the rest. There are textbooks on the dresser, a calendar tacked up on the wall. It’s probably a freebie from a bank, but the pictures are good. Scenes of Colorado, it says. It’s open to November still, the photo of jagged red rocks jutting up out of snow-covered pines.

The blankets are wadded at the end of the bed, caught in the no-man’s-land between the mattress and the frame, the bottom sheet covered in fans of dried blood.

“Up there,” Loren says, and it takes him a moment to notice the words written above the flimsy metal headboard in heavy black letters. He wonders if the guy had written them up there while Simms was still alive, if she’d had to look up at those words as she’d been fighting, trying to survive. He hopes not.

It’ll never be over.

“There’s no way Seever’s in contact with anyone on the outside. He doesn’t write letters, he doesn’t have access to email. No one visits him anymore except his wife, and half the time he’s so drugged up he can’t find his own dick. I don’t see how he could have anything to do with this.” Loren sighs. “But then there are the fingers. No one ever knew about those.”

“Yeah, but there were plenty of guys working that crawl space. Any one of them could’ve let it slip, told someone. It was in the case files. There were photos taken. It could’ve gotten out a dozen different ways.”