What You Don't Know(97)
“Stop it.”
“When I visit Seever, he talks about Sammie all the time. Not his wife, not any other woman. Just Sammie. And did you know Seever paints her? I flashed around Sammie’s picture at the prison, a few of the guards recognized her from the paintings he does. They said she’s usually naked in the pictures. Sometimes she’s dead.”
“Where are you going with this, Loren?”
“I guess Seever’s wife got her hands on one once, and just about shit her pants. Now, after he paints Sammie, they throw them in the garbage. Destroy them.”
“I had no idea,” Hoskins says, fishing out his wallet and handing it to Ted, who’s pushed him gently to one side so he could get on the computer. Alltheprettyflowers.com. The page that pops up is simple—a cartoon gravestone, RIP, with a single white daisy sprouting from the patch of grass in front of it. It makes him think of Seever in a clown costume, a daisy pushed into his lapel.
“Seever’s obsessed with Sammie, and it got me thinking, because Secondhand’s obsessed with Seever. At least, that’s what it looks like.”
“And now you’re obsessed with her?” Hoskins is watching as Ted types in his credit card information—two hundred dollars a month, it says, plus a termination fee when he cancels—scrolls through the terms of use, inputs a username and is finally in. The site is simple, nothing special, there aren’t even ads running up and down the sidebars, until Ted clicks on the search tool in the top right corner and types in two words: Jacky Seever.
“I’m saying, Sammie’s the common denominator in all this,” Loren says, and Hoskins hears both this and the whir of his computer as it loads thousands of images onto the page, pumping everything the site associates with Seever onto his screen. Some of the pictures don’t have anything to do with Seever at all, but most do. “She wrote about every one of the victims for the Post before, and now all of them are dead. She was fucking Seever. Her career took off because of what he did.”
“Sammie didn’t kill anyone,” Hoskins says numbly, his eyes darting over the computer screen, horrified, taking it all in. There are crime-scene photos from Seever’s crawl space, he recognizes most of them—hell, he’d taken some of them, those photos had all been stored in the PD’s files, they were supposed to be secure. And there they are, the answer to what they’d been wondering—there are photos of victims’ hands, zoomed in and cropped, the stumps made front and center.
“I didn’t say she did,” Loren says. “But I think Secondhand might’ve started all this because of her. Maybe because he caught on to Seever’s obsession with her, decided to keep it going. She’s back at the paper, isn’t she?”
“Look at this,” Ted whispers, scrolling down. The page goes on and on, into infinity, it seems, the most recent additions at the bottom. According to the time stamps, a dozen new photos have been added in the last twelve hours, all by the same user, all uploaded at the same time. SecondHand is the username, of course it is, of course he’d want to show off his work, because he wants his ego stroked, maybe he thought he wasn’t getting enough attention and the sick fucks on here would give it to him, would give him a goddamn standing ovation.
The first photo added by SecondHand is of Carrie Simms, her face covered in blood, lying on her kitchen floor. Hoskins took a picture very much like it with his own phone. Hoskins scrolls quickly through the rest—Abeyta and Brody, and the boy they’d found. Jimmy Galen. There are two photos of the boy, but he’s not out in the woods like they found him, he’s tied up on a concrete floor, his mouth is a big circle, he’s screaming, alive. Hoskins grimaces and clicks to the last photo uploaded.
“If he was doing it for Sammie at first, he’s not anymore,” Hoskins says. There’s pressure building up behind his eyes, and he hopes he can get a few minutes alone with the Secondhand Killer, it doesn’t matter that his hands are swollen and painful, he’ll teach the little prick a lesson he won’t forget. “We have to find her. She’s in danger.”
The last upload, it’s Sammie, but it’s not her. It’s a painting of Sammie, propped up against a wall, Seever’s signature in the bottom corner. She’s naked in it, her eyes closed, and bleeding from where two of her fingers have been cut away. But it’s not the painting that bothers Hoskins so much, but the caption beneath it.
She’s next? SecondHand had typed. And then, added after the words, somehow making it all even worse: ?
*
Sammie’s gone. Hoskins met a unit at her house first thing, battered down the door when no one answered and searched the place, but no one’s home. He’s called her cell, called her work, called the security out at the mall, and no one’s seen Sammie. He has the team at the station working on getting a hold of Dean, of her parents. Anyone who might know where she is.
He’s coming out of Sammie’s house when his phone rings.
“We found another victim,” Loren says. “About thirty minutes ago.”
“Is it Sammie?” Hoskins asks dully.
“Christ, no. Guy named Chris Weber. And you’ll never believe this shit—it was Gloria Seever who called it in. He was over at her house last night, she says he was there to interview her for the paper, a piece about Seever and the Secondhand Killer. She says he left after the interview, she didn’t notice he was still parked out there until this morning. He’s crammed on the backseat of his own car with half his face bashed in, and all the fingers on his right hand are missing.”