by JoAnn Chaney
Thank goodness we did, Tanya had said. If he’d caught one of us alone, we’d probably be dead right now.
He always gave me the creeps, Selene had said, and the two girls had laughed at that, snidely, although Sammie hadn’t included that in her article.
And now, seven years later, they were dead. They’d died as they’d lived—together. Sammie could remember the two of them, laughing and squealing as she interviewed them, excited about their fifteen minutes of fame, taking the chewed gum in their mouths and trading it with each other. Back then, she’d found the pair irritating, she’d been glad when they’d left, even though they made for a good story.
“Are you serious?” she asks.
“Serious as a heart attack,” Corbin says. “Missing for several days before they were found. The cops didn’t give specifics, but they said those two were murdered the same way Seever would’ve done it.”
“They think Seever’s involved somehow?”
“Maybe. Seems fishy, two women who he might’ve been grooming as victims showing up dead. You used to think Seever might’ve had a partner. You might be right, and the guy’s finally decided to finish what they started.”
“Maybe.”
She pushes her tongue into the corner of her mouth. There’s a toddler a few tables over, making one hell of a mess with fries and ketchup while his mother is busy texting and flipping through emails. She stands up, walks toward the big stone fireplace in the middle of the food court. It’s warmer there, and less crowded.
“Sam? You still there? Damn phone, we must’ve—”
“I’m here,” she says shortly. “I’m still here.”
“So you’ll help Weber? He could use it on these pieces he’ll be writing, and the book—”
“Book?”
“Oh, yeah.” Corbin sounds embarrassed, like this is a secret he’d been meaning to keep and let slip. “This guy I knew back in college is a literary agent, he was in town this weekend and I was telling him about Seever, and these two women. He was definitely interested, thought he could sell a book about it without a problem.”
“But there’s already been a book about Seever,” she says. That book should’ve been her book, but the two men who’d written it had been faster, they’d been able to jump on the opportunity and wring the life from it. That’s how it was with writing, Sammie had discovered. You had to be quick on the draw or you’d be left in the dust, and no one gave a damn.
“You and I both know that book was shit,” Corbin says. “And Seever’s crimes—especially if he’s connected to these new murders—I think it’s a big enough story to carry another book. A good one. And my friend agrees.”
This isn’t how this was supposed to happen. This is not how Sammie imagined all this going down, all those times she’d been standing in the shower, waiting for the conditioner to soak into her hair, acting a scene out to herself like Corbin was right there with her, begging her to come back to the Post. No, this is not how she’d thought all this would play out, but Sammie’s quick, already thinking one step ahead—she’s one hell of a chess player, and that’s all life is, isn’t it? One big game.
“What if I did some poking around myself?” she asks, speaking slowly at first. “What if I wrote up a piece on Seever, or something about these new murders? Something better than Weber could put out. Would you run it?”
“I don’t know,” Corbin says, but she can already hear the excitement in his voice, and she has to wonder if this is what he was planning all along. Because Weber doesn’t need her help, he’d been in the business long enough to know his head from his ass, he would’ve figured it all out no problem. No, this sort of thing is right up Corbin’s alley—pitting two reporters against each other. He wants to watch the struggle, collect the big reward at the end. If Corbin could turn his life into reality television, he’d plot and scheme and get everyone voted off the island. “I already promised this to Weber. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“I don’t think a good story has to be fair,” Sammie says, and she knows this’ll seal the deal, because Corbin’s not fair, he’s all about the business, and if she can bring him something good, something that makes people drag out their wallets and pay, she’s in. “I think it has to be good, and it doesn’t matter much who writes it.”
“I always admired that about you,” Corbin says. “You’ll do anything to get your way.”
You’d lie about anything to get what you want, Hoskins had said, and it makes her wince to think of it. Almost the same. Close enough.
“I’ll be in touch with some ideas,” Sammie says, and hangs up, because it’s always better to be the one ending the conversation, no awkward goodbyes needed. And she’s already thinking ahead, trying to figure out her next step, and imagining Weber’s face when he realizes that she’s snatched his job right out from under him. Petty, she knows, but it’ll be good. Not good. Fucking spectacular.
“You’re going to be writing for the paper again?” Ethan asks from behind her, and she jumps, startled, and then throws her arms around his neck. She’s excited, so she ignores the way his arms slip around her waist, how close he’s holding her. That’s all background noise, because she has a chance, and all anyone needs is one. Mice can squeeze through holes less than half their size, they can wriggle into places you’d never expect, and she’d done the same thing before; it’d been a fight to cover Seever the first time, she’d had to do things she didn’t like, but she could do it again. It’s right there, in front of her. The hole she has to squeeze through. She just has to make herself fit.
HOSKINS
December 2, 2015
His basement office is small and dark, and the fluorescent lightbulbs in the ceiling fixture are the kind that mimic daylight, but they seem too bright, overly fake. They hurt his eyes and give him headaches, they’re like something you’d put in a mental institution, or in a spook house, but he doesn’t complain. Even if he did say something, if he sent an email or a handwritten note up the ladder to administration, he’d be ignored. Once upon a time he was the golden boy, a rising star in Homicide who’d managed to bring down a serial killer. And then, in the blink of an eye, he was lower than dog shit, he was dismissed from his position and sent to work on cold cases, going through the old files that still needed to be put in the computer system, one by one, until his brain felt ready to explode.
“Those cold cases are still open investigations,” Chief Black had said. He was trying to make the move sound appealing, but couldn’t manage to sound entirely convinced himself. “You’re still technically a homicide detective. You’re an extension of the department.”
So here he is, two years after his fall from grace, plugging away on the cold cases, opening up the old brown folders with the creaky spines and the corners that had long ago splintered from age. Squinting at old photographs and deciphering the handwriting of detectives who’d retired before he’d even joined the force.
February 26, 1970: A pretty cheerleader never made it home from a high school basketball game and was found raped and murdered six miles from her home the next day.
June 23, 1979: A nineteen-year-old was shot in the head in Washington Park as he slept under a pine tree.
October 28, 1996: A skeleton was found on the side of the road in north Denver, still bound with rope across the midsection and legs. The coroner guessed it had been there for over a year before being found. The body was never identified.
If Hoskins were still up in Homicide, he’d be investigating those two girls pulled out of the reservoir. He can imagine what the two of them looked like, swollen with water, their tongues black and fat. Their eyes gone, because fish get hungry. He’d skimmed the article about them that morning, not that he could miss it, not right on the front page of the Post, about the connection the two victims had to Jacky Seever, the possibility of Seever having a partner, someone who was still free, raping and killing. The whole thing was ridiculous—or maybe it wasn’t. Sometimes truth is stranger than fictio
n, Hoskins knows that for a fact, but he also knows this: Seever never worked with anyone. Not a lone wolf, Hoskins would never call him that, but more like a weasel, a creature that seems harmless but will rip off your face if given the chance.
At least, he thinks, the article wasn’t written by Sammie. There have been times over the years that he’d yank the newspaper out of its blue plastic sleeve and unfold it to find her face staring up at him, a tiny, blurry photo printed beside her byline that was still clear enough for him to make out the hard line of her jaw, the sarcastic twist of her lips. Enough to make something inside him give a lurch and then settle down to silence once more. He hasn’t seen Sammie’s face in the paper for a while now, but he’s still surprised that she wasn’t the one to cover these two new murders, that she wasn’t the one to connect their deaths to Seever. He wonders at it, but not too much. He’s finally reached a point when he doesn’t think about her all that often, and he’d prefer it to stay that way.
“I’m gonna grab some lunch,” Ted Johnson says, sticking his head into the office and startling Hoskins out of his daze. Ted works in the next office over, and Hoskins isn’t sure what he does—something to do with the department’s computers, with the software. Tech stuff, the shit no one else seems to understand. He can usually smell the cheap cologne Ted always wears before he actually sees him, because the kid must bathe in the stuff. “Want me to grab you something?”
“I’m good,” Hoskins says. “Thanks for asking.”
“You doing okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been quiet, that’s all.” Ted takes a step into the office, and stops. He’s holding his wallet in his hands like it’s a purse, and Hoskins knows exactly what sorts of comments Loren would’ve made about that. Hoskins guesses Ted’s in his early twenties, sports those tight jeans and the low-top sneakers all the kids seem to wear these days, and not even ironically. If the kid lived in San Francisco or Seattle, he’d be working at some tech company, changing the face of the Internet. But in Denver, Colorado, Ted’s another unseen cog in the wheel of the police force, hidden away underground. “You want to talk?”
Hoskins is stunned for a moment, and then laughs, actually guffaws, because when was the last time he had anyone besides the department psychologist ask if he wants to talk? He was partners with Loren for almost fourteen years, and he was never the kind of guy to talk; if you started sharing with Ralph Loren, he would’ve told you to stick your feelings right up your poop-chute.
“What’s so funny?” Ted asks, frowning, and it makes Hoskins think of when he’d first been moved down to the basement and Ted had introduced himself. He’d asked Hoskins to call him Dinky, because that’s what his big brothers had always called him, and all his friends, and that had made Hoskins laugh, hard.
“Why Dinky?” Hoskins had asked. “Out of every nickname in the damn world, why that one?”
“You ever seen those vacation movies? You remember the dog that got tied to the bumper and dragged?”
“Yeah.”
“One time this kid hog-tied me to his bike,” Ted had said. “He dragged me down the street, and I lost most of the skin on my arms, had gravel ground into my face. The doctors had to pick it out with tweezers.”
“Nothing’s funny,” Hoskins says now, wiping at his eyes. “You surprised me. Same shit, different day. You know.”
Ted nods, still frowning, but Hoskins knows that Ted doesn’t know, because he’s a kid; he’s still wet behind the ears and he doesn’t know shit about much of anything. Ted still lives at home with his parents, still drives the car they bought him for his sixteenth birthday, spends most of his free time with his eyes glued to the screen of his cell phone. He’s a nice enough kid, smart and hardworking and eager to please, but he’s also naïve. Probably still a virgin.
“Hey, I guess I do need one thing,” Hoskins says. “Do you have access to old autopsy reports? I need stuff for the Grimly case, back in ’92, and I can’t figure out this damn computer.”
“I can get into anything in our database,” Ted says. He’s excited, now they’re on familiar ground. “You need some hard copies of it, or would an email be okay?”
“If you’ll get it to me on a floppy disk, that’d be great.”
Ted frowns.
“I’m pretty sure your computer doesn’t even have a port for a floppy—”
“I was kidding.”
“Oh.”
“An email would work,” Hoskins says. “I can print it out myself if I need it. And it’s not any hurry. Take your time.”
“Okay. Oh, hey, I just remembered—I was looking through the files on Seever, and he did some messed-up stuff,” Ted says, casually, although by his tone, it sounds like he’s been waiting to bring this up. That’s how people are, once they realize that Hoskins was one of the cops who arrested Seever, they think he’d like nothing better than to tell them all about it. If given half the chance, people would squeeze him for every bloody detail. “It’s really interesting, that he—”
“Who gave you permission to read through those?” he says angrily. “Those are classified files.”
I don’t think about Seever anymore, he’d told the department’s headshrinker a few weeks before. Not unless someone brings him up. But everyone always wants to talk about him. Like nothing else has happened in the world in the last seven fucking years.
A lot of detectives find themselves affected by a particular case, she’d said, toying with the bracelets on her wrists. They made a metallic chiming sound that put his teeth on edge. Especially with a larger-than-life figure like Jacky Seever, it’s normal to—
Didn’t you hear me? I don’t want to talk about him.
“Nobody gave me permission. But I know you worked that case, and—”
“Keep your fucking nose out of those files,” Hoskins says. “And just because I was on that case, doesn’t mean I want to rehash it with your ass.”
Ted blinks, and for a moment Hoskins is sure he’s going to cry, he’s still young enough for tears. He considers apologizing for a moment, then doesn’t. Better to let the kid figure out things on his own.
“All right,” Ted says. “Well, I’ll be back.”
“Okay.”
Ted looks at him one more time, sullenly, and disappears. A minute later, Hoskins hears the elevator doors slide open and closed, and then he’s alone.
* * *
“How’s he doing?” Hoskins asks. “Is he having a good day?”
He’s on the phone, calling home to check on his father. Good ol’ Joe Hoskins, who’d spent forty years as a floor supervisor down at the Brewery in Golden, who used to play poker every Tuesday with his work buddies and knew how to blow rings with his cigarette smoke, moved in with his only son in the early spring, when they decided he was no longer fit to live alone.
“He’s pretty clear today,” the woman says. Hoskins can’t remember her name. She’s the latest in the many women he’s hired to care for Joe, mostly retired nurses, someone to hang around during the day and keep the old man out of trouble. “He had eggs for breakfast. A cup of coffee.”
“Decaf?” he asks. If Joe has any caffeine, shit gets hairy, but they have to hide it from him. Replace his regular coffee with decaf without him seeing, dump most of the beer out of the bottles in the fridge and water it down with apple juice. It seems stupid, and it’s a lot of work and sometimes feels pointless, but those little tricks make it easier to live with Joe. That’s what his life has become these days—careful deception.
“Yeah,” the woman says, slowly, so Joe must be sitting right there, listening. He’s a different man these days, not the same father Hoskins had always known. Joe’s like a kid sometimes, childish and demanding, other times he is silent and angry. He’s not often sly, but when he is that worries Hoskins the most, when he looks in Joe’s eyes and can see the wheels turning, see some plan coming together. When his father looks like that it reminds him of Seever, before the arrest, when
he thought he was invincible, that no one could ever touch him.
You hear about that gal who disappeared down in the Springs last year? Seever had said once, when he’d sauntered up to where Hoskins and Loren were parked, a cigarette stuck delicately between his pointer and middle fingers, the way a woman would smoke. Anyone ever find her?
They did find that girl, later, down in Seever’s crawl space, but it’d all been a good joke for Seever then, a real chuckle factory, as he liked to say. And Seever was sly, sly as a fox, as a goddamn weasel, and there were times when Joe would look that same way, like he had some tasty secret he was hiding, and Hoskins would feel a cold trickle of fear on the back of his neck, and he’d feel bad; it’s his dad, after all, but there’s something about that look that makes him afraid. And what else was he supposed to do? His father’s crazy, Joe’s losing his fucking mind and it isn’t his fault, it’s the shitty luck his DNA had dealt him, but he’s still his father.
Still, Hoskins sleeps with his bedroom door locked.
“Did he take his pills?” he asks. Same questions, same phone call, every day. He’ll call again, in a few hours, to make sure Joe has eaten lunch, that he’s taken a nap in front of the TV. “Did you give him the paper? He needs to do the crossword.”
“I know,” the woman says flatly, and he can hear the impatience in her voice. She’ll quit soon, he thinks, and it won’t be long before he’ll be searching for someone else. Another name he won’t be able to remember. “He’s doing it now.”
“Does he have his slippers on? It’s cold in the house.”
“Yeah.”
“And he keeps scratching that spot on his arm. Could you put some cream on it?”
“I already did.”
“Okay.”
This must be like having a kid, he thinks. Calling the babysitter to make sure everything’s going all right, no one’s playing with matches or shit in their pants, worrying over everything. It’s been this way since his father fell off the ladder while pruning a tree in his backyard, and there hadn’t been any broken bones or damage, not even a scratch, but there’d still been a brain scan, just in case, and the doctor had thrown around lots of big words and charts and had shown them the X-rays on his laptop, and Hoskins and Joe had nodded and pretended to understand, although they had no clue what the fuck was going on. And afterward, when his father was at the front desk scheduling another appointment, Hoskins asked the doctor to explain it all again, in a way he could understand.