What You Don't Know(67)

“The Secondhand Killer, isn’t that what you called him in that article?” Seever asks. “Because he’s picking at my leftovers, I guess?”

“I didn’t come up with it.”

“Good. It’s a terrible name.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know who he is, if that’s what you’re here to ask,” Seever says. “Detective Loren comes to visit me once in a while. He had some crazy ideas, thought I might’ve had a partner, or mentored someone, and now they’re starting up where I left off.”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?” Seever’s smiling, he knows what she wants but he’s going to force her to spell it out for him.

“Have a partner? When you—when you murdered all those people—were you working with anyone?”

“No.” He shrugs, and her gut thinks he’s telling the truth. She might be wrong, she’s been wrong before, but maybe she’s not. She decides to let the question be.

“Are you in touch with anyone?”

“Like who?” he asks, amused. “My wife is the only one who visits me anymore, and she wants to tell me about the soap operas she’s watching, and how much it costs to fill up her gas tank.”

“Maybe you’re telling your wife things, and she passes them on to the Secondhand Killer.”

An emotion flickers across Seever’s face, but is just as quickly gone. His face falls back into slack lines.

“Leave Gloria out of this.”

“You don’t write letters? Send emails?”

“Nope. Nothing like that. You can confirm all that with the prison officials.”

Seever isn’t going to tell her anything she doesn’t already know about the Secondhand Killer, and she had a feeling it would be this way but she came anyway, because there’s always a chance. She looks down at her paper, taps the pointed lead end against it so there are tiny dots all over the top, small smudges. She’s not normally this way in an interview, so quiet and hesitant, but this is different because this is Seever, and she knows him.

“I figured you’d have more questions for me,” Seever says, smiling. He looks like a kindly old man, white hair and glasses, but there’s a monster hiding behind that smile, and she hadn’t wanted to come see him for that reason; it gives her a sort of creeping horror to know what this man has done, what he’s capable of, and she’d never known, the whole time she’d been sleeping with him she’d never had a clue. “I thought you were the reporter-extraordinaire. I expected more. I hope when your boyfriend Hoskins comes out to talk to me, he’ll actually make it worth my time.”

He’s taunting her, throwing out a line and waiting for her to take the bait. That’s how Hoskins always put it to her, that talking to Seever was like playing Russian roulette—you could never be sure when that bullet would come, when a truth would show its face among all the lies. Seever could twist your words, leave you so confused and out of sorts that you’d forget what you were talking about; he’d plant ideas so deep in your brain that you’d never know they were there until they’d start hatching and rooting around, like maggots. But she’s ready for this, she’s got questions, she wrote a list, and she’s prepared for his head games. That’s the most important thing.

“Oh, I have plenty of questions,” she says, and Seever’s eyes widen when she turns over her sheet of paper, when he sees everything she has written down. “Are you ready?”

“Shoot.”

The first question isn’t on her list, it’s not something that’ll ever be published in the Post, but it’s a question she’s had since she’d found out what Seever had done.

“Why’d you let me live?”

*

“Did you get everything you needed out of him?” the guard asks.

“I think I did.” She rifles through her purse, makes sure everything’s there. “Seever—he doesn’t get any visitors?”

“His wife. And you.” The guard holds up his fingers, counts off the names. “Sometimes that cop stops by. Loren.”

“No phone calls? He doesn’t write letters? Or get packages?”

“Nope. I mean, his wife brings him things.”

“Like what?”

“Food, sometimes, when the warden allows it. Cookies, those kinds of things. And art supplies. But that all gets inspected, so we know there’s nothing bad coming in.”

“Art supplies?” She’d forgotten about Seever’s art. It’d been big news when he first started, it was like having a monkey at a typewriter, pounding out a novel, and at first his paintings had sold for lots of money, but it wasn’t long before the newness of it had worn away. She hadn’t realized he was still doing it. “What does he paint?”

“He used to paint all kinds of nasty things. Dead people and blood and—and well, you know,” the guard says, and she catches his hesitation, he doesn’t want to say anything too nasty in front of her. “But that only lasted till the docs amped up his happy-pills.”

“Now what does he paint?”

“Nothing all that interesting anymore.”

“What happens to all his work?”