What You Don't Know(68)

“His wife takes most of it with her. I heard she sold some for cash, but I think she hangs on to most of it.”

“None of it’s here, to see?”

“Nah. If his wife don’t take them, we chuck them into the incinerator. I wouldn’t want to take home anything that man made. It’d give me the creeps.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

She’d come with a long list of questions, everything she’d wanted to ask but hadn’t when he was first arrested, about the victims and his desires and his upcoming execution, and Seever had been surprisingly cooperative. But he’d never answered her first question. The most important question, in her opinion. He’d stared at her, his eyes glassy, with tears, or maybe it was a trick of the smeary glass partition. He’d opened his mouth and then quickly shut it again; she’d been able to hear the harsh snap of his teeth as they came together, even through the phone. They’d sat in silence until she knew that he wouldn’t answer, that he’d never answer, and she asked another question, moved the conversation along to something else, and she thought it might be because he didn’t know why he’d let her live, he didn’t have an answer, even in his own head.

It was when she was coming toward the end of her questions when she knew Seever was getting tired and impatient, she could see it in his eyes, and she’d known that was coming because that’s how interviews went—you could only pump someone for information so long before they were through, but she had to do this in one shot, because she never wants to come back to this prison, never wants to have to see Seever again.

Did you ever—

If I could get you in here would you suck me off? Seever interrupted, leaning forward until his nose was nearly pressed against the glass. His eyes were bulging and wide and he was breathing quickly, and she thought that she was seeing the monster now, desperate and hungry; this was the man who’d raped and tortured for so long, who looked like a normal man but was rotten and putrid inside. When you climb on top of Hoskins and push his dick up inside you, do you pretend he’s me?

She didn’t respond to this, only set the phone carefully back down in the receiver and gathered her things. She didn’t look up when Seever started rapping his knuckles on the glass, or even when his muffled shouts came to her ears. She’d been expecting something like this to happen. The interview was over.

She’s going to write one hell of a piece with this, Weber will never be able to come close.





FULL CIRCLE





HOSKINS

December 8, 2015

He’s downstairs, back in his basement office. Mostly because there’s no office for him upstairs, and also because all those people bother him now, the hustle and bustle of the detectives running in and out, the pings of emails coming and the steady whir of the printer. He used to thrive on the chaos up there; he couldn’t think straight unless there was loud music while he worked, but things have changed, and now he prefers the cool silence of this windowless room. He should be upstairs to help with the Secondhand Killer case, but being up there all day is pointless, because he gets all the reports in emails, in group texts on his phone. Besides, Chief Black didn’t tell him to run the case, just to make sure everything was going well, and it is. Except for Loren dressing up like Seever, which doesn’t bother anyone but Hoskins. Loren’s always been a little off-kilter, he’s done a lot of crazy things, and this is another example of it.

Despite Loren’s hijinks, the investigation is moving in exactly the way it’s supposed to—methodically, with each step on the list being checked off as it’s done. There is a team canvassing Simms’s neighborhood, another tracking down anyone who knew her. And a third team, calling and visiting anyone who’d once been connected to Seever, anyone who’d spent time in his company, because any of them could be a suspect, but any of them could be in danger too. This is how most murder cases are cracked, with questions and answers, with phone calls and knocks on doors, but Hoskins has to wonder if that’ll be enough this time. Sometimes you can follow all the rules, you can make sure every i is dotted, every t crossed, but there’s still a chance it won’t be solved. Hell, he only has to look around his office to know that, see all the murder cases that’ve gone cold, victims buried without justice, killers still on the loose. They’re running with the assumption that the Secondhand Killer knew Seever before he was arrested, that he’d known about the fingers, because it’s all they have now, they’re grasping at straws. Grasping at fingers, although Hoskins doesn’t think any of the detectives will find that so funny.

He sits behind his desk, flips on the table lamp that he brought from home, because the overhead lights aren’t enough down here, not if you need to actually work. The batteries in the wall clock must’ve died the night before, the hands are frozen at twelve and one. He fires up his computer and opens a file folder. Shuts it. He hasn’t been able to stop thinking about what Loren had said the day before: I hope this guy knows how much time we’re spending on his ass. Make him feel good, stroke his ego.

Hoskins turns away from the computer and picks through the pile of folders on his desk, shuffles through some pages. He ends up looking at one of the oldest cold cases they have on file in Denver—1952, a young woman left a cocktail party to run an errand and disappeared. She was found dead a month later, nearly thirty miles away. There are notes scrawled in the margins, left by other investigators over the years, some of them faded away to almost nothing. Hoskins runs his finger down them, tracing his nail along the words. There’s one that catches his eye, about halfway down on the right, written in blue ink. Based on this, I don’t think it’s his first rodeo. There’s an arrow beside this, pointing at a typed sentence from the medical examiner, stating the body had been carefully washed before being dumped, probably in water mixed with bleach. And that note was right on; it probably hadn’t been that killer’s first rodeo, he’d known what to do to keep from getting caught, nearly sixty years had gone by since then and the cops had never arrested anyone in connection to the murder. He was either dead by now or a very old man, and he’d stayed free because he’d known what to do, he’d probably honed his technique over several murders. His first kill had probably been sloppy, but he’d learned from it. Seever had done the same thing. His earliest victim had suffered a head wound, but she hadn’t died from it—the examiner thought she might’ve been buried before she was actually dead; she’d been smothered in the avalanche of crawl-space dirt shoveled over the top of her because Seever was still inexperienced, he’d probably been scared and nervous, but he’d learned, oh yes he had, and quickly, the same way a dog will learn not to piddle on the floor when you smacked him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.