What You Don't Know(6)

Seever was already killing at that time, Hoskins told her, although he was working carefully, picking his victims at random, people no one would miss, no one who could be connected to him in any way. It wasn’t like years later, when Seever had gotten lazy and sloppy, when he thought he was invincible and he’d let Carrie Simms escape, and things had started to unravel. Sammie sometimes wonders what Seever had been thinking when he gave her that daisy, if he’d been thinking about taking her to his house and tying her up, doing bad things before he killed her, the way he’d done with so many others. But when she thinks about Seever now—the Seever she thought she’d known, the guy in the expensive suit with the gilt-edged smile—she can’t imagine him killing anyone, even though she’s a writer, and aren’t all writers supposed to have big imaginations? And of course she knows, like everyone else, she’s been trained by a lifetime of television and movies and books that the bad guy is usually the one you’d least expect, the one who seems the most innocent, the guy who laughs a lot and opens doors for ladies and is never, ever rude.

Seven bodies have been taken out of the crawl space so far—five women and two men—and they’d all hoped that lucky number seven was where it would end, that they’d find nothing else down there but dirt and worms. Victim seven had been removed the day before last, patches of red hair still clinging to his weathered skull, a punk-rock shirt hanging around his wasted chest. Later, they’d learn that the kid’s name was Kenny Fitz, that he’d run away from home, like he had a million times before, but this time he’d never come back. Later, Kenny Fitz’s mother would give Sammie a photograph of him to run in the Post alongside her article, and Sammie would hate to look at it. The photo was a glimpse into the past, at the grinning kid who’d one day accept a ride from a guy wearing a tweed suit. She wished she could go back in time, warn the kid, tell him to go home, hug his mom and get his shit together. But she couldn’t, and she hoped that Kenny Fitz hadn’t known what was going on at the end, that he hadn’t been aware of anything when Seever had wrapped that extension cord around his throat and tightened down for the last time. She hoped that Kenny had spent his last few moments thinking good thoughts. About his mother. Or the dog he’d left behind, who still slept on Kenny’s empty bed, his snout twitching and his paws paddling uselessly through empty air.

“Someone cared about this kid. Loved him. You know how I know?” Hoskins said this after the boy’s body had been slipped into a plastic bag and wheeled away, before they knew who he was. Hoskins hadn’t been eating much, or getting much sleep, and she could see it in his face, in the gray skin under his eyes. “It’s his teeth. That kid’s got good ones. Lots of fillings. He had braces at one point. Good teeth aren’t free. Someone paid for all that work. Someone who loved him.”

*

They find the eighth body the next day, while Sammie is in the kitchen, pouring herself a cup of coffee and listening to one of the technicians bitch about his job.

“When I blow my nose these days, nothing but black shit comes out. It’s filthy down there. I don’t know how much longer I can take this.”

“Sorry,” she says. She wonders how many times a day she says that single word. “It sounds terrible.”

“That’s what you should write about. How fucking bad it is down there. I feel like I’m stuck in a nightmare and I can’t wake up.”

She’d discovered, not long after starting her daily visits to Seever’s house, that it was best to let the guys complain. At first she’d tried to reason with them, to point out they were doing their jobs, that they were getting paid to hunker down in that crawl space and dig corpses out of the ground. It wasn’t like anyone was expecting them to work for free. But the men would get angry when she said things like that, so she started keeping her mouth shut, acted sympathetic and apologized when the complaints started. That went over better.

“It’ll be over soon,” she says.

“I certainly fucking hope so.”

Someone shouts from the crawl space, words that she can’t understand, and she jumps, startled, and slams her hip into the counter, hard enough to bruise. She ignores the pain and sticks her head into the laundry room, where the crowd of men are, excited and high-fiving, pumping their fists in the air.

“They found another one,” the tech says, peering over her shoulder. His breath smells like wet cardboard. “Fuck, yeah. There’re more.”

She turns slowly, goes back to the kitchen. Her coffee is knocked over, although she doesn’t remember doing it, and the mug is on its side, lazily rollicking back and forth on the counter, as if it’s being pushed by a ghost. She grabs the roll of paper towels and drops to the tile floor, trying to ignore the excited chatter from the next room as she reaches for the steaming puddle.





HOSKINS

January 5, 2009

They’ve got a crew at Seever’s house, digging up the crawl space and cataloguing everything that comes out of the ground. It’s slow work, thankless. So far they’ve found eleven bodies, and that’s only one corner of the room, in a section a few feet square. Quadrant one, they call it. Nine of the victims are women, and one matches the description of a girl who’d gone missing in Fort Collins in 1988. Twenty years, Hoskins thinks. How many people could Seever have killed in twenty years?