What You Don't Know

by JoAnn Chaney

  “There’s calcium depositing around your father’s brain,” the doctor said. He wasn’t looking at Hoskins, but down at his phone, scrolling through his endless text messages. He was already done with the conversation, moved on to other things, and Hoskins considered snatching the phone from his hand and throwing it through the window. “If we hadn’t done the CAT scan, we might not have found out until it was far too late.”

  “Found out what?”

  The doctor looked up from his phone, smacked his lips together wetly. God, Hoskins hated doctors, hated everything about them. The expense of them, and the time they took, but mostly he hated the way they made you feel like such an idiot, like you were too stupid to even be worth their attention.

  “The calcium is affecting your father’s brain,” he said. Slowly, as if Hoskins might be the one with the dysfunctional upstairs. “He’s going to start forgetting things, even more than he already is. Suffering from dementia. His brain impulses will slow down, so he won’t be able to get around as well. It could happen a little bit at a time, over many years so you might not notice, but your father’s got a pretty advanced case. The calcium’s been building up for a long time.”

  “Jesus. What are we supposed to do?”

  The doctor shrugged.

  “There’s no known treatment for his condition,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “So we’re waiting for him to die?” Hoskins asked, and the doctor had to have heard the anger in his voice, the fear, or maybe he didn’t notice it at all. Maybe the doctor had heard so much of it over the years that he’d become deaf to it.

  “I suppose we are,” he said. “But you could say the same thing about everyone. We’re all waiting to die, aren’t we?”

  * * *

  His father was going to lose his mind, had possibly been losing his mind over his entire life, slowly, one piece at a time, and this was a curious thing, that a disease had hidden in the structure of his DNA and decided to finally make itself known; it’d been there all along and no one had ever noticed it, because everyone loses their keys and forgets to turn off the oven, maybe Joe did it more often than most people, but how was that supposed to be a reliable sign of what was coming? But Hoskins, he was losing his mind because he was a cop and he’d seen terrible things and it happened a lot, cops went apeshit all the time, but that felt like a half-assed excuse, because it was his job, wasn’t it? He’d signed up for the whole damn thing and he’d known exactly what he was walking into; he’d been trying to get into Homicide since the day he’d been sworn in and it’d driven him to the brink and still he missed it, he sometimes wanted back in so bad he could taste it.

  Or, Hoskins thought, he was losing his mind for no reason at all.

  He finds ways to keep it together. Just one way, really, although there might be more ways, methods he hasn’t yet discovered. Not drink, he’d tried that, most cops have found their way to the bottom of a bottle at one point or another, but it didn’t work for him. He was a lousy drunk. He didn’t smoke and he didn’t sleep with whores and he didn’t shoot up and he didn’t gamble. He didn’t take the prescription the department psychologist had prescribed for him either; they made his tongue fuzzy and his hands tingle in a way he didn’t like, and he didn’t care much to talk about his feelings, but he still went to the head doctor once a month, partly for show, because people thought you were trying to get better when you went to the doctor, although that wasn’t entirely true in his case.

  “Avoidance behavior,” this woman had immediately said, not ten minutes after they’d first met. She’d been asking all sorts of questions, one after another, and marking his answers on her notepad, although she held it so he couldn’t see what she’d been scribbling. “You don’t care for conflict, so you avoid it.”

  “That’s what you think?”

  “I think it’s interesting that you’d choose to go into law enforcement, when confrontations clearly make you anxious.”

  “Can I ask you something?” he’d asked, and she’d smiled, but sourly, so he knew that she had to let him speak but she wasn’t happy about it.

  “Of course.”

  “Isn’t there some sex thing called the pearl necklace?” he’d asked, and she’d flushed in embarrassment, because she was wearing a blouse that had been left mostly unbuttoned and a thick rope of pearls that hung low, so your eyes were drawn down, way down into the cleft of her cleavage. Her name was Angelica Jackson, but Hoskins couldn’t stop calling her Ms. Jackson, like the old song. Ms. Jackson if you’re nasty.

  None of that shit made anything better for him, and he might’ve gone bananas if he hadn’t started walking when he felt himself losing it. It sounded like the most fucking stupid thing on the planet, he was like one of those old guys who show up at the mall before business hours in a sweatband and tennis shoes to cruise the perimeter, but it worked; it was the only thing that did. He couldn’t run—well, he could run, and sometimes he did run at the gym, hopped on the treadmill and cranked it until his eyeballs felt ready to burst like pimples and ooze down his face—but running only made it worse, his brain would start working overtime, like it was trying to keep up with his legs, and when his head got working like that he’d think about going out onto the street and grabbing someone, anyone, and shooting them right in the face—not between the eyes but right in the face, so there’d be nothing left and then he’d do the goddamn mashed potato in the mess it left behind. But when he walks he doesn’t have thoughts like that, everything becomes soft and distant and vague, like he’s looking at the world through gauze.

  “Why are you so afraid of losing your mind?” Ms. Jackson had asked him. “What do you think will happen?”

  But that wasn’t the right question, because he knew what would happen if he lost his mind, it’d already happened. He’d grabbed that daughter-killing woman, not because he’d felt some moral obligation to teach her a lesson or because the little girl’s murder bothered him in a way he hadn’t felt before. No, he’d beat the shit out of that woman because he’d wanted to; he’d wanted to hear her scream and beg for him to stop, he wanted to see her bleed. There was something pleasurable in it, feeling the soft push of her flesh under his fists and the snap of her bones; he thinks he could’ve kept doing it until she was dead, and that thought horrifies him, but there’s another part of him that smiles and rubs its hands together gleefully, and that part of him was left there by Jacky Seever, was pushed deep into his soul like a seed and left to germinate, to grow into something poisonous and deadly, a white-bellied mushroom that only grows in the dark.

  * * *

  His office phone rings when he’s pulling on his coat, and he stares at it for a long moment, because how long has it been since someone called him? Up in Homicide the phone would be ringing constantly, all day and all night, but his cases are long cold, and anyone who ever cared about them has long since stopped calling. He considers ignoring it and heading home, but then finds that he can’t. If he doesn’t answer it, he’ll spend the rest of the night wondering who it could’ve been. So he picks up.

  “Hoskins?”

  “Yeah?”

  He doesn’t recognize the voice, not at first, takes him a moment, but only because it’s been so long since he’s heard it. Chief Jonathan Black is still technically his boss, but he doesn’t have constant contact with the man anymore, not like he used to. At first it was a relief, not having to give a daily report on his investigations and fill Black in on his progress, but then he realized that he never had to tell anyone what he was doing because no one cared. And somehow being ignored was almost as bad as having the boss man breathing down his neck.

  “It’s Black.”

  “Yeah, got it.”

  “How’ve you been doing down there?”

  Hoskins doesn’t know how to answer this. The easiest answer is that he’s fine, everything’s fucking grand, as long as the direct deposit keeps dumping into his checking account every other Friday and his health
insurance is still valid and the balance in his retirement keeps ticking upward, he can’t complain. But then again, maybe he’s not fine. He’s stuck in the basement forty hours a week, in an office with no window, and no hope, flipping through murder cases that are sometimes older than he is. He’s started taking the photos out of the files and taping them to his office walls; some of them are pictures of victims before they were killed, smiling at prom or at a family barbecue, but mostly it’s the crime scene pics he puts up. Photographs of a woman on a bare mattress—the only way anyone seems to be killed on a bed, with the sheets and blankets missing—her bottom half naked, legs splayed and eyes closed; old black-and-whites of a field, overgrown with grass and weeds, with the body of a small child facedown in the packed dirt; a man lying over a sewage drain, his eyes open and glittering, seemingly alive except for the strange way the soft flesh of his neck was peeled back, the knife’s cut so deep that it’d almost separated his head from his shoulders. These photos might be a sign that he’s not okay, this macabre gallery staring down at him five days a week; maybe it’s not okay to be constantly looking in the face of death.

  “I’m fine,” Hoskins says. “I was about to head home, Chief. Is there something I can do for you?”

  “I guess you heard about the two floaters out at Chatfield?”

  “Yeah.” He tosses his coat over the back of his chair and sits. Kicks back his feet. “I read about them this morning, in the paper.”

  “And Loren told you, didn’t he? He keeps you filled in?”

  Hoskins presses his lips together, doesn’t say a word. He might be a cop, but he’s not a goddamn snitch.

  “You don’t have to answer that,” Black says. “Loren’s never been able to keep his mouth shut. But in this case, I don’t give a damn.”

  A part of Hoskins is glad to hear that Black won’t put a stop to Loren’s calls, there’s a part of him that likes those calls from Loren, looks forward to them. Wants to hear the latest goings-on. It keeps him in the loop, but that loop is the problem. The reason why he can’t move on.

  “Listen, I’m calling because another victim’s been found, looks like she’s connected to the first two.”

  “Okay.” Hoskins knows exactly where Black’s going with this, and he has the sudden urge to hang up the phone, to throw on his coat and run out the door, don’t let it hit your ass on the way out, and pretend like he never got this call.

  “It looks like Seever’s work.”

  “Seever’s in prison.”

  “I know where he is, Hoskins. But now we have three women who’re all connected to Seever in some way—and they’re all dead.”

  “So why’re you calling me?”

  “I want you working this case with Loren.”

  “No.”

  “You seem to think that was a request,” Black says. “Believe me, it’s not.”

  “My answer’s still no.” Hoskins stuck his thumb in his mouth, chewed on the skin around the nail bed. It was a habit that used to piss his father off, and Joe would smack him upside the head when he caught him at it, complain about how nasty it was.

  You afraid the nail-biting’s gonna keep me from landing a husband, or something? Hoskins had asked once, and Joe had laughed, more out of surprise than anything else, and he’d laid off on the nagging. For a while.

  “The scene’s down in Lakewood, on the east side of 470,” Black says, as if Hoskins hadn’t refused. “I need you out there in the next half-hour.”

  “You’ve got lots of detectives upstairs,” Hoskins says. “Give it to one of them.” He’s trying to worm his way out, but he already knows he’s going. Not just because Black is giving him an order but because he wants to go, no matter what he says.

  “Do you know that Loren hasn’t been able to keep a partner since you went down there?” Black asks. Angrily, but also amused, but Hoskins guesses that to be the chief of police you can’t have the stick crammed up your ass all the time. “He can’t seem to figure out how to play nice with anyone else.”

  “So let him work alone. He’s a good detective. He took down Seever, he’ll figure this one out.”

  Black laughs. “Why do you do that, kid?” he asks.

  “Do what?”

  “Why do you play down the work you did? Why do you let Loren take all the credit?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah, you do,” Black says, softly. “You might think you’ve got everyone fooled, but you’re wrong.”

  “Loren’s a good detective.”

  “Yeah, I heard you the first time,” Black says. “But so are you. But you’d be better off upstairs, we both know that. With Loren.”

  “Tell me more,” Hoskins says, only half-joking. “Flattery will get you absolutely everywhere.”

  “You’re really going to make me do this?” Black asks. “Maybe you’d like a handjob while I’m at it?”

  “I’ve seen all the calluses you’ve got on your palms. I don’t want your hands anywhere near my dick, thanks. It’d be like sharpening a pencil.”

  “Look, I’m sorry I put you down in the basement, but it’s the only way I could keep you on the payroll after that stunt you pulled,” Black says. “Is that what you want? An apology?”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  “You’re the best fucking detective I’ve ever had on my team,” Black says quietly and quickly, like he doesn’t want to take the chance that someone else might hear what he’s saying. “I need you on this case with Loren. He’s got a few suspects in mind already, and I need an arrest made, all these loose ends tied up as soon as possible. No one else can handle this the way you can.”

  “This is—”

  “Listen, that article those assholes at the Post published this morning is scaring plenty of people. I asked them to chill out, give us some lead time on this before they start up, but you know how those reporters operate, and they’ll throw this city into a panic. If the people around here start thinking this is Seever Junior, that’s going to cause a lot of issues. You remember what it was like before.”

  Hoskins closes his eyes. He does remember those weeks before they arrested Seever, when the city had gone batshit. Everyone had been scared, people were turning on one another. Gun sales skyrocketed. People were being killed in their own homes, because they’d gone to the toilet in the middle of the night without turning the lights on and spooked a family member. People were acting like Jack the Ripper had come to Denver; everyone was waiting to hear about the next disappearance, expecting to turn a corner and see a monster coming down on them with a knife and a grin, no one ever expected it to be Seever the Clown, sitting pretty behind the wheel of his German import in his fancy suit.

  “And this latest victim, it’s Carrie Simms,” Black says, quickly. Like he wants to get the words out fast, get the bad taste out of his mouth.

  “Carrie Simms.” Hoskins’s heart, it takes a turn in his chest again, quick and slippery, then stills.

  “Simms, Hoskins. The girl that got away from Seever.”

  “I know who she is. Are you sure it’s not suicide?” Hoskins asks. It’s all he can think, women like Simms sometimes didn’t recover well from trauma, and she was already fucked up, even before Seever got a hold of her. Seven years was a long time to wait to kill yourself, but you could never know what people would do, or how long they would wait to do it. Sometimes a human was nothing more than a ticking time bomb, and sometimes it took time to detonate.

  “It’s not suicide.”

  “Fuck.”

  “That’s what I said,” Black says. “I’ll text you the address. Loren’s already out there.”

  “Okay.”

  “You didn’t think I’d let you molder down there for the next twenty years, did you?” Black says. “You didn’t think you’d be done with this forever?”

  GLORIA

  There’s a peach tree in her backyard, stunted and small. It never bears any fruit, because the climate in
Denver isn’t right for it—the summers are too short and never get hot enough, the winters are far too cold. The soil is too sandy and rocky. She sometimes wonders who planted the tree to begin with, what hopeful person flipped through a Burpee catalog and ran their finger along the slick pages and stopped on a peach tree, already imagining the taste of the fruit, the way the juice would explode from the flesh at the first bite and run down their arm, dripping all the way to their elbow. And then that tree came in a brown box, the roots wrapped up in a burlap sack, and it was planted in the backyard, in the sunniest corner, but it only grew a little every year, twisting and bending like an old man, and nothing ever bloomed on those scrawny twigs. And there it still is, right outside the dining-room window, bare branches shaking in the wind. She’s thought about having it cut down, clearing that spot and having a concrete pad poured, where she could put out some nice lawn furniture in the summer, but she never seems to get around to it. It’s not as if her schedule is crammed full, but she forgets the tree, doesn’t think about it again until a time like this, when the cold is creeping in through the cracks around the windows and the peaks of the mountains are covered in snow.

  She’s been in this house for the last seven years, creeping around like a mouse, hoping that no one in the neighborhood would recognize her, make the connection, and so far she’s been lucky. It would be easier to pick up and move to another town where Jacky wasn’t much more than a story on the evening news, a city where people didn’t accuse her of being some kind of dragon lady, and she’d tried to move, rented a house in California after Jacky was sentenced, drove out caravan-style behind the moving truck, through the mountains and desert and into a part of California that was so green it made her eyes hurt. The house she’d rented had a pool shaped like a kidney bean in the back, and the privacy fence was covered in a creeping bush that blossomed in great clouds of pink. It was all so quaint and normal, and no one recognized her; she never once heard someone mention Jacky’s name—Jacky’s case was national news, she still sometimes saw it mentioned, even so many miles away, but it wasn’t as bad, and California had plenty of its own problems.