What You Don't Know(64)

It’s not that they’re waiting, really. They’re putting together a timeline on Carrie Simms, but she’s the worst kind of person you’d ever have to track. She didn’t have a credit card so they could see her purchases, no cell phone that would’ve marked her locations. The last time anyone had seen Simms alive was school. Biology class. Most of the students didn’t know her name, only recognized her if they were shown a picture. Simms was quiet, didn’t have friends. Hadn’t had contact with any of her family in years, and none of them were surprised to find out she was dead, even her mother.

“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think it’ll be a long wait.”

“Jesus, Paulie. Don’t let anyone hear you say shit like that.”

“You know how it goes. This guy’s rolling into third gear. He’s getting into his groove.”

“Why do you think he’s doing it, Paulie?” Loren says. “For attention?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m starting to wonder if we’re ever gonna find this guy,” Loren says. “He’s probably yukking it up right now, thinking we’re too stupid to catch him.”

“We’ll get him.”

“Yeah. Listen, we’ve got the team from the field coming in to debrief in five. You sitting in?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“I hope this guy knows how much time we’re spending on his ass. Make him feel good about himself, stroke his ego.”

“Yeah, right,” Hoskins says, rubbing a finger over the bone in his eyebrow, where it’s still sore from Loren hitting him. “Gimme a minute. I’ll meet you down there.”

Loren shoots him a look before he leaves, but Hoskins doesn’t notice. He’s too busy considering; he has the maddening sense that there’s something here he should be thinking of, like a word on the end of his tongue that he can’t manage to dredge out. Something that Loren said reminded him of something else, the ego thing, and it seems important, but then it’s gone, as suddenly as it was there, before he could pull it out of the shadows and make sense of it.





SAMMIE

“Every decision I’ve ever made has been the wrong one,” she said once. This was to Dean, after she’d lost her job at the Post, when she was still upset and vulnerable, not considering the words coming out of her mouth before it was too late. “My whole life, I’ve never done anything right.”

“You’ll find another job.”

“Why don’t you make more money?” she’d asked, although she already knew the answer. Dean was a good guy, but he wasn’t good enough. He was smart, but not smart enough. In the grand scheme of things Dean was just another guy, forgettable, low on the totem pole at a marketing firm that was low on an even bigger totem pole, and he’d always be that way. He didn’t know how to move up in the world, and he didn’t have much interest in it. He was happy where he was, answering phones and building spreadsheets and whatever else he did—his title was Marketing Sales Coordinator, no one even knew what that meant, it was a mystery—he could never understand why she was always pushing for more, for herself, for him. “Every man I know makes enough money to support his family. Except you.”

“Is that what you want?” He looked sick. It was wrong, she knew it was, she was hitting below the belt, making him feel like less of a man because of his salary; her mother had always warned her not to do that, not to belittle her husband, but it felt good. She couldn’t keep the words from spilling out of her mouth. “You don’t want to work? You want to stay here, be a housewife?”

But she didn’t want to be a housewife, she’d never wanted that, she liked to work, didn’t mind it. And it wasn’t about the money but the idea of it, although she didn’t know how to explain herself in a way that made sense. She wanted Dean to gather her up in his arms, to tell her everything was okay, that she’d been good at her job, that she wasn’t a failure—but instead, Dean seemed as scared as she was.

“What I want is a man who can take care of me.”

*

It takes her two and a half hours to get to Sterling Correctional Facility, the prison where Jacky Seever will live for the next fourteen months, until he’s put in an armored transport and taken south to the prison in Ca?on City, where he’ll be strapped to a bed in the middle of a room full of witnesses and injected with poison, and everyone will wait until he falls asleep and his heart rumbles to a stop. Sterling is east of Denver, a downward slope away from the mountains and onto the plains, where the land becomes nothing but scraggy bushes and yellow dirt, houses that hunker close to the ground and hold on with all their might. It’s colder out here, where the wind blows without breaking, although there’s less snow on the ground than in the city, only a dusting that blows across the interstate, whipping around in tiny ice tornadoes before disappearing. This place makes her eyeballs ache. It’s all that sky, she thinks, unending gray stretching from one side of the world to the other, with nothing to break up the monotony. She feels like she’s suffocating under all that sky, like a fishbowl has been turned over and plunked right on top of her head.

She’s been to a prison before, when she was fourteen. It was part of the “scared-straight” program her high school had, although there weren’t enough delinquent kids to take, so everyone went. Not one kid had tried to get out of it, because any excuse to cut class was a good one, even if it was to visit a prison, so everyone was separated, boys on one bus and girls on another, and they went their own ways. Sammie doesn’t remember much from the field trip, only that one of the girls started weeping when she was patted down, big gulping cries that echoed off the concrete walls. And she doesn’t remember much about the prisoners who spoke to them, except that they were pleasant and vaguely boring, not all that different from her own mother, and none of them had done anything all that exciting to end up behind bars, except one, who was small-boned and pretty, who didn’t seem all that much older than they were.