What You Don't Know(8)
Seever swallows, his throat making a sharp clicking noise. Then he looks away.
“How’d you do it?” Loren asks, and Hoskins can hear the impatience in his voice, the waspy hum of anger below the surface. Maybe Seever can’t hear it, but he hasn’t worked with Loren for the last ten years, hasn’t learned to gauge Loren’s temper like you would the temperature of bathwater before climbing in. “Where’d you pick them up?”
Seever leans forward, his elbows on the table. He’s wearing one of the orange jumpsuits all the prisoners wear, and the front of it is filthy, smeared with dried food and dirt. Seever was always so particular about his clothing, and now that’s gone to shit. Incarceration isn’t nice for pretty boys. Seever props his elbows up on the table. He looks eager to talk, and Hoskins expects that they’ll get more lies out of him, more games and bragging, but instead, they get the truth.
“I got them from all over, wherever I could,” Seever says. “I never attacked anyone. They all came home with me because they wanted to.”
“I guess you expect me to believe that they wanted you to tie them up and kill them, too?” Loren asks.
Seever doesn’t answer this, just laughs, that high-pitched titter that digs right into your brain and doesn’t let go, and that’s what sets Loren off. That’s what they tell the boss man later, that Seever had laughed, he was always laughing like a maniac and Loren couldn’t stand it anymore. But it’s more than the laugh, Hoskins knows. It’s the last seven weeks they’ve spent following Seever around, watching and waiting for him to slip up so they could finally arrest him.
They were first led to him by an anonymous call; a woman gave them Seever’s name and address, said he was up to something, that she’d seen people going into the house and never coming back out. So they’d started watching him go to work and go to the bar and go home, peering at him through binoculars while he sat on the lip of his bathtub and clipped his fingernails into the toilet bowl. They started watching Seever because they had no one else to watch, no other leads, and they had to do something; the city was screaming for an explanation. Twenty-three disappearances reported in the last seven years in the Denver-metro alone. People disappeared all the time, but not like this, without witnesses or bodies, and there were stories about cults and Satan-worshipping floating around, of white slavery. Hoskins had heard the stories himself, and he’d laughed, because it was all so stupid. There had to be an explanation for all the missing people, he can remember thinking. Something sane and reasonable.
So they started following Seever, because of that one call, and they could’ve stopped at any time, but there was something that kept them after him. Because Seever was weird, there was something off about him, something wrong. It was Loren who said this, who said Seever was hiding something, that he was up to no good, he wasn’t sure Seever was behind all the missing people, but the dude was bad news. And Loren was to be trusted, he had a nose for the work, he knew how to read people. Loren didn’t like Seever, didn’t like the way he’d shake hands and hold the sweaty grip for a moment too long, didn’t like the way he’d gel his hair so the rows left behind by the comb’s teeth were still plainly visible. Loren wanted to bust Seever for something, anything, even if it wasn’t anything big, because he wanted to see the guy squirm, wanted to laugh in his face when they shoved him into a cell in his fancy suit and left him there to sleep on a cot and shit in a toilet with no seat. Oh, they could’ve busted him anytime for drinking—Seever liked to toss back a few at the bars most nights before heading home, they could’ve pulled him over a dozen different times—but Hoskins made Loren wait.
“I don’t know,” Hoskins had said. He was usually the one who plowed forward without a second thought—prepare for ramming speed, look away if you’re squeamish—but this was different, there was some niggling doubt, a pricking in his thumbs that told him to slow down, to wait. To watch. If Seever was guilty of something big—and as they spent more time watching him, Hoskins was sure this was the case—and they jumped on him too soon, he’d be lost. Seever had money, he had friends; people liked him. They could slap him with a DUI, but then they’d have to back off, because otherwise he could claim they were harassing him, that the police department was out for blood on an innocent citizen, and they’d never be able to get him for anything else. “It would probably be better to wait.”
“Bullshit,” Loren had said, smacking his palm hard against the steering wheel. They were in his car, parked outside one of Seever’s restaurants, watching the shadowed figures moving behind the glass, eating and laughing and sometimes doing nothing at all. “We could have him behind bars tonight.”
“That won’t get us into his house,” Hoskins said, drumming his fingers on the dashboard and staring out at the white stripes painted on the asphalt, as if he were bored. “Let’s say he is the one behind all these missing people. We’ll never know if we never step foot in his place. Then we’ll be the assholes who let this dipshit slip through our fingers.”
Loren wouldn’t take orders, he didn’t like to be told what to do, Hoskins had learned that not long after they became partners. Loren would only go along with something if he thought it was his own idea, so Hoskins played the game; he was the one yanking the puppet strings, although it had to be done softly, with care. None of Loren’s other partners had figured this out; Loren had stomped all over them and none of them had lasted, not until Hoskins. Because a partnership can’t work with two snarling pit bulls—one of them has to play the part of the leash.