What You Don't Know(7)

“I didn’t kill anyone,” Seever says. The three of them are together. Hoskins, Loren, and Seever. We are family, Hoskins thinks. I’ve got all my brothers with me. They’re in an interview room, one that’s so tight it’s claustrophobic, and the air vents blow out either hot or cold, but never a temperature that’s anywhere near comfortable. “This is all a big mistake.”

“So those eleven people we’ve pulled outta your place are a figment of my imagination?” Loren asks. He’s sitting opposite Seever at the small metal table, a cup of coffee in front of him. He hasn’t offered Seever anything. Hoskins is by the door, his arms folded over his chest. He can’t stop thinking about the last victim they pulled out. She had twine wrapped around her wrists and a scarf around her neck, one end of it crammed in her mouth. She’d choked on it, the coroner said, sucked it in and it’d snaked most of the way down her throat. She’d drowned in watered silk, the fabric printed with blooming red poppies.

“Is that all you’ve found?” Seever asks. He’s agreed to talk to them without a lawyer, isn’t all that concerned with his defense. He’s not stupid, just crazy.

“So there’re more?”

“Oh, I’m sure.”

“How many are we gonna find down there?”

“Zero.”

“How many did you murder?”

“All of them.”

Hoskins rubs his fingers across his lips. They’re dry, cracked. His hands smell like the soap in the station’s bathroom—cheap and generic, but familiar. This isn’t the first interview they’ve done with Seever, and it won’t be the last. Not by a long shot. He’s a sanctimonious son of a bitch, and he likes to play games, to toy with them. He talks in circles, sometimes telling the truth, but most are lies, bullshit made up for his own amusement. Jacky Seever’s under arrest, he’s guilty, no one in their right mind could think otherwise—but he’s still all loosey-goosey, his hair slicked back from his forehead like he’s goddamn greased lightning, an easy smile on his face like he’s got nothing to worry about. Like he expects to be heading home soon, pulling up a kitchen chair and tucking into his dinner.

“What’d you do with their fingers?” Loren asks, and it’s a good question, a valid one, because every victim that’s been carried out of the crawl space has been missing at least one. Left hand, right hand, it varied. Seever didn’t seem picky. It was a detail they hadn’t released, Hoskins had even kept it from Sammie because she’d run it in an article if she had the chance. He thinks he might love Sammie, but love doesn’t mean he’s stupid. Sammie believes people should be told everything, that nothing should be held back, but not for the common good—just her own. She would want to feed the detail of the missing fingers to the public, serve it up like a waiter carrying a silver platter and lifting away the lid with a flourish.

“Fingers?”

“Yeah, dummy. You got some weird kink with fingers? Seems to me like you prefer the middle ones—you stick them up your ass to get off?”

Seever smiles. He likes to talk, there are some times he won’t shut up, but Hoskins has a feeling they’ll never hear the truth on this, and maybe it doesn’t matter.

“I have a question,” Hoskins says. It’s the first time he’s said anything, because Loren does most of the talking in these interviews; he’s better at it, he knows what to ask. Hoskins is more like window dressing, backup if it’s needed, a witness in case something bad goes down. Someone to keep an eye on Loren, make sure he behaves.

“What’s that?” Seever asks. His eyes are greenish-brown, and there’s a bright spot of gold in his left one, under the pupil.

“Why’d you bury them all in your crawl space?” Hoskins asks. If this interview doesn’t end soon, if he doesn’t get out of this room, he’ll be sick. He felt the same way in the morgue, looking at the victims so far, their bodies laid out on the metal tables with the raised edges, so if the bodies leaked or bled there wouldn’t be a mess to clean. “Why keep them with you?”

Seever blinks.

This is the million-dollar question. Sammie asked Hoskins this the night before, when they were in his bed. She had a bowl of trail mix balanced in the crux of her thighs, and even though he hates eating in bed, hated finding the sunflower seeds and nuts in his sheets after she was gone, he lets her do it.

“If Seever hadn’t kept the—the dead people—”

“The victims,” he’d corrected her. “Or the departed. That’s what you should call them.”

“Why’d he bury them all under his house? It’s not like he has a good explanation for how all those bodies got down there. No one will ever think he’s innocent.”

“He’s not trying to convince anyone he’s innocent,” Hoskins said. “He doesn’t deny anything.”

Sammie was wearing one of his shirts, and the collar hung loosely off one shoulder. He ran his fingers along her chest, down into the dip above the delicate bone. She closed her eyes, tilted her head back so the fine line of her neck was exposed. He often wondered what Sammie was thinking.

“Did you go down to your crawl space sometimes, pay them all a little visit?” Hoskins asks now, mildly. There’s a rushing sound in his ears, and it seems like he’s looking at Seever through binoculars, but through the wrong end. Seever looks so far away and tiny, although he’s on the other side of the table, only three feet away, but he thinks that if he were to reach out and grab at Seever, his fist would swipe uselessly through empty air. “You’d go down there and gloat and laugh and jerk off?”