“I certainly fucking hope so.”
Someone shouts from the crawl space, words that she can’t understand, and she jumps, startled, and slams her hip into the counter, hard enough to bruise. She ignores the pain and sticks her head into the laundry room, where the crowd of men are, excited and high-fiving, pumping their fists in the air.
“They found another one,” the tech says, peering over her shoulder. His breath smells like wet cardboard. “Fuck, yeah. There’re more.”
She turns slowly, goes back to the kitchen. Her coffee is knocked over, although she doesn’t remember doing it, and the mug is on its side, lazily rollicking back and forth on the counter, as if it’s being pushed by a ghost. She grabs the roll of paper towels and drops to the tile floor, trying to ignore the excited chatter from the next room as she reaches for the steaming puddle.
HOSKINS
January 5, 2009
They’ve got a crew at Seever’s house, digging up the crawl space and cataloguing everything that comes out of the ground. It’s slow work, thankless. So far they’ve found eleven bodies, and that’s only one corner of the room, in a section a few feet square. Quadrant one, they call it. Nine of the victims are women, and one matches the description of a girl who’d gone missing in Fort Collins in 1988. Twenty years, Hoskins thinks. How many people could Seever have killed in twenty years?
“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.