by JoAnn Chaney
“You’re not sick? I have vitamin C in my purse. The chewy kind.”
“No, I’m fine.”
She folds a stick of gum into her mouth and turns away, heads back onto the floor. It’s been busy in the store, even before opening there was a line outside, customers waiting to be let in. There’s nothing worse, she thinks, than eager retail shoppers, pounding on the glass and foaming at the mouth to get at the merchandise. There’s something so embarrassing about it, so tacky, and she can’t stand to look when they first come streaming in, giddy with excitement. There’s a bigger crowd than usual today, because there’s a new line of products being released—eye shadows and lipsticks and blushes, all limited edition, which will work the crowd into a frenzy, because everyone wants what they might not be able to have.
“I’d like to try that one,” one customer says, sitting down on Sammie’s stool. She’s wearing Crocs and pushing a stroller, and the baby inside is red and ugly and squalling. The woman’s pointing at a bright-blue eye shadow, one that she’ll probably buy and never wear again. “It’d be good for the office, don’t you think?”
Some women are defined by their husband, some by their children, but Sammie had always thought she was defined by her work, by the words she’d put out into the world. And the Seever case—that’d put her at the top of her game, she’d had reporters from all over the country calling, wanting to horn in on her success. She could’ve gone anywhere after those days, should’ve taken one of the offers at the bigger papers in Philadelphia or New York, even L.A., but she’d stayed because she felt a loyalty to the Post. Denver had become her hometown even when it wasn’t, because it was where she wanted to be. But instead of moving up she’d gone to this, one woman after another in her chair, every one of their faces running into the next, so there were times when she’d look around the shop and be unsure who she’d already spoken with.
“What are you wearing?” the next customer asks. “You’re so pretty. What’s that lipstick you have on?”
“It’s this one right here, one of my favorites,” Sammie says, picking up a tube. “Let’s put some on you. It’s called Liar.”
Seever had made her career, and he could do it again. Remake her. She still thought about him often, still flipped through the scrapbook she’d made of all her articles on him, her name in bold print under her blurry photo. Thirty-one victims were found on his property. Twenty-six of them were female. Seever preferred women, but he’d happily taken whatever had come his way.
“You don’t have something with fuller coverage? I can still see that scar.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“It’s there. Right there. You’re not looking close enough.”
Not all the victims had been identified, even after seven years. Eight of them had been buried without a name, without anyone to mourn for them. The cops guessed it was because his victims were from all over, not just Denver, and a lot of missing people were never reported. They were homeless, or prostitutes, or people no one gave a shit about. When they were gone, they stayed gone. And Seever had been on the road a lot, traveling for business, and his routes were nearly impossible to trace. He’d been at it a long time, before cell phones and credit cards, before surveillance cameras had appeared on nearly every building. He’d been a ghost.
“I’d never wear that color lipstick. It’s fine for you, but I’m a mother. You understand, right?”
She’d interviewed most of the families, walked through their homes, sat at their tables and drank their coffee. They showed her photo albums and old stuffed animals. They’d cried, and she’d patted their backs, handed them tissues. They’d wanted to share their pain, and she gladly took it, turned it into words. She’d visited the families, looked at the photographs of the dead, inhaled the dirt that’d covered their bodies down in that crawl space. Those experiences were like thread, and she’d taken them, braided those threads together and pulled them tight, laid one perfectly against the next, and that weave became her stories.
“I’ve had a terrible morning,” a woman says. She has hard eyes, a mean mouth. “I don’t want anyone to know there’s anything wrong. I want you to make me look good.”
This is nothing, Sammie thinks. These women and their petty problems, their flaws they want covered, their little insecurities. They don’t know what real suffering is. They’ve forgotten their coupons or they don’t know what to make for dinner or they don’t like how their hair looks. They tell her all these things because they want someone to care, but she doesn’t, not after what she’s seen.
“My ex-husband won’t leave me alone,” another one says. “He wants to fuck me again. One more time, he tells me. That’s all he wants.”
She needs to talk to Hoskins. That’s where this all started, how she got going on this path to begin with. They haven’t spoken in almost seven years. She doesn’t want to see him, but she does want to see him. She feels both ways, neither. But if Weber’s information is right and the two women pulled out of the reservoir are somehow connected to Seever, Hoskins will know for sure, he’ll know exactly what’s going on.
“How much does that cost? For one lipstick? Are you kidding me?”
“Excuse me,” Sammie says. “I’ll be right back.”
She goes to the bathroom, stands in front of the sink, and washes her hands. The light is dim and soothing, not at all like the glittering bulbs out on the floor. She wets a paper towel, presses it carefully to her eyelids so she doesn’t smear her eye shadow, the careful line of kohl. When she’d first been hired, she’d come in with nothing on her face at all, and she’d seen the shocked looks the other girls had given her, the disgust.
We sell makeup, her boss had said. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that you come in with some on your face.
The bathroom door opens, and one of her coworkers comes in. It’s Kelly, Ethan’s girlfriend.
“What’s wrong with you?” Kelly asks, letting the door shut and crossing her arms over her chest. She’s so young, and so stupid—the type who’ll always think that if she bullies and complains enough, if she screams the loudest, she’ll always get her way. And sadly, it usually works.
“What do you mean?”
“We have customers out there.”
“I know.”
“So what’re you doing?”
Sammie looks at Kelly in the mirror. She hates this. Being questioned by a girl with shorn punk-rock hair who’s almost half her age.
“Do you really need me to answer that?”
“What I need you to do is get back to work.”
There’s a cough from one of the closed stalls.
“Right away, boss,” Sammie says, sketching a salute, wanting to end with flipping the girl the bird but resisting it.
“Oh, you think you’re real funny, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I’m a real comedian.”
“I hate it when bitches like you get hired,” Kelly says. “You think you’re so much better than the rest of us. You think you can do whatever you want and everyone will fall down at your feet and worship you.”
“What’re you talking about?” Sammie asks coolly. But she knows, she’s seen the way Kelly’s eyes narrow when she sees them talking, the way she’ll immediately make her way over and butt into the conversation.
“You’re not better than me.”
“I never said I was.”
Kelly considers this, leans back on the sink, and crosses her arms over her chest.
“A guy came in the other day, asking for you,” she says. “He said you used to write for the paper, about all those murders that happened a few years back. He told me he wanted to talk to you about the case.”
“Who was it?”
“He never said.”
Sammie sighs.
“What did he look like?”
“A real creep.” She smirks. “The kind of guy who’d sneak up on you in a dark alley and tell you what a pretty mouth you have.”
“Wh
at did he want?” Sammie asks, puzzled. She doesn’t have a clue who’d show up here looking for her. Or who even knows she’s here.
“I guess there’s so many men hunting you down you can’t keep track of them,” Kelly says. “And I bet all these guys have wives or girlfriends.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re so full of it. You should get down off your high horse before you fall and hurt yourself.”
Sammie pushes past the girl to get out, gritting her teeth and resisting the urge to clap her hands over her ears because the girl is still talking. She isn’t crying, she’s not the crying type, but she’s angry, and it’s a few minutes before her hands stop shaking.
* * *
When she leaves work she heads downtown, weaves through the afternoon traffic, and slips into a parking lot, where she has to buy a ticket from a machine and stick it on her dashboard so she won’t get towed. She walks quickly up a side alley to Sixteenth Street, where the lampposts are wrapped in twinkling white lights and the pedestrian shuttles are running nonstop. It is crowded on the street, people swarming past, going home from work or to work from home, doing some holiday shopping, grabbing an early dinner. The country is supposed to be in a recession, but you’d never know it here.
It’s cold, but it’s not far to where she wants to go. She ducks inside, and the gold bell above the door jangles merrily. The bookstore is warm and well lit, and she stands just inside it for a moment, rubbing her hands together. She hasn’t been in this building for a long time, not since Seever’s trial, when she was invited to read some of her work, excerpts from the book she’d been writing on Seever, bits that hadn’t made it into the paper but she’d squirreled away instead. Back then everyone had assumed she’d be announcing a book any moment, and the back room of the Tattered Cover had been completely packed with folding chairs, standing room only, the people were crowded in at the corners, their heads tilted as they strained to hear her read. She’d been flushed, nervous, and she’d forgotten to pee before starting, so all she could think about was her hot, heavy bladder throbbing against the bottom of her belly, but it’d gone well; there’d been plenty of applause and later a few people had asked for her autograph on copies of the Post, above her byline. But then, before Sammie’s head had been able to stop spinning from it all, that other book about Seever was published, written by two guys who’d never even been to Colorado, who’d done some searching online and wrote a few hundred pages. And they’d referenced her articles, for God’s sake, they’d ripped off her material and got away with it, and then it was over; no one wanted another book about Seever then, especially not with all those kids going missing out east, and a string of murders in Florida. Jacky Seever was big news then, but he wasn’t the only news, and the public was hungry for some new piece of gore to snack on. The book about Seever, she thinks, the one not written by her, was the beginning of the end, but at least it didn’t sell well. It wasn’t made into a movie, thank God. So it isn’t all bad.
She walks through the bookstore, the old wooden floorboards creaking under her shoes. The thin green carpet is bunched up in some places, so she has to be careful not to trip. But it’s the books she’s looking at, the endless shelves of them, going from the floor all the way up to the ceiling in some places. It makes her dizzy, all these words together in one place, it always has, even when she was a kid and would visit the public library during the summer, and their air conditioning would be cranked and the water fountain icy cold, but she’d still be sweating and almost ill, because it was all so overwhelming. But in this store she knows exactly where she’s going, she does this every time she comes in, but now it feels like it means something more, now that she might have a chance. She goes to the corner where the nonfiction is kept, and she runs her fingers along the spines until she finds the exact spot where her book about Seever would be sitting. Should be sitting. Will be. She worms her pointer finger in between two books she’s never read and holds it there, feels the spot where she’s supposed to be, where she’s going to be.
* * *
She’s parked outside Hoskins’s home, idling across the street in the gray shadows between the streetlamps. It’s a little shoebox house near downtown; it looks tiny on the outside but is huge inside, like it’s been enchanted with some weird magic. It’s different from the last time she saw it. Better. He’s been putting some effort into the property. Trimming back the branches on the evergreens and hanging drapes in the windows. Sweeping the snow off the walkway out front. She can remember when she’d first met him, right after Seever was arrested, when Hoskins was running on nothing but nervous energy and caffeine, when he didn’t have time for anything but his work. Things have changed a lot over seven years, and she’d heard about his suspension, it’d been covered in the paper although she wasn’t the one to write it, she’d turned down that assignment because it seemed too weird, too close to home. She knows he lost his position in Homicide, but she’s not sure if he still works for the PD. Or if he still lives here.
Almost six in the evening. There’s a car parked in front of the house, another in the driveway, but she’s not certain if either belongs to Hoskins. He might’ve changed cars in the last seven years. The lights are on in the back of the house, where she knows the kitchen is. He might be making coffee, or dinner, pushing ground beef around a frying pan, although the thought of him cooking a meal strikes her as funny. She never saw Hoskins use his kitchen; she once opened his fridge to find nothing inside, not even an old box of baking soda. Nothing but the frosty blue light. The fridge could’ve been brand-new, recently unboxed and plugged in, except for the outside, which was peeling back at the corners from wear and tear, and the white-powder coat was flaking away to the metal beneath. The empty fridge had made her laugh at first, and then it upset her, made her sad, although she didn’t know why. When she’d first started dating Dean, his fridge had been filled with food, and she’d found it comforting. Slices of cheese and wrapped butter in the door, plastic containers of leftovers stacked neatly on the shelves under the cold light. She used to open Dean’s fridge just to look, to run her eyes over all that food like a greedy kid in a candy store.
She’s made her decision—she’ll get out, go to the front door. Wing it from there. She has no idea what she’ll say, but she’s always been good on her toes. She’ll make it work.
What she actually does: nothing. Before she can turn off her car the front door opens and Hoskins comes out. He looks the same. A little older, but the same. Or maybe he’s changed a lot, and she doesn’t know the difference. She remembers the big freckle he had on the inside of his thigh and the streak of grays in his pubic hair, but she can’t seem to remember what color his eyes are. The other things she remembers about Hoskins: The smell of cologne on his bare chest. The big vein on the underside of his cock. The way his eyebrows would jump up his forehead when he laughed, as if he was surprised into amusement. The grunt he made when he came.
She isn’t excited to see him, like she thought she might be, or even nervous. Instead, she doesn’t feel much of anything. He walks across his front yard, pushing through the snow so he can get to his car that much faster, and a woman comes out behind him, waving her hands and saying something. She looks like she’s wearing scrubs—a nurse? The woman might be his girlfriend, or his wife. For the first time, there’s a twinge in her chest. It could be jealousy, but that doesn’t make sense, because it’s been seven years—isn’t that long enough for her not to feel a thing? It’s like one of her girlfriends used to say back in college: Once you fuck a man, he’s yours forever. Even if you wish he was dead.
She watches the woman go inside the house, Hoskins get into his car. He’s moving in the quick, jerky way she recognizes. It’s the way he moves when there’s something big going on, when the adrenaline is pumping furiously through his veins. She could come back again later, when he’s home again, but instead she decides to follow him, to see exactly what’s going on, where he’s heade
d in such a hurry. Get the scoop, like they supposedly say, although she’s never heard anyone actually use that phrase, not once in her whole life.
HOSKINS
He’d been in Homicide for all of a day when he pulled Loren as a partner. Luck of the draw, he was told, although later he’d find out that it was because no one else could stand to work with him, even though he was a good detective, he had more arrests under his belt than anyone else.
“You like being a cop?” Hoskins had asked him once, not long after they’d started working together. They were sitting in Loren’s car, parked behind a dry cleaner, eating tacos. Loren turned to look at him, bewildered, and Hoskins turned red. It was a stupid thing to ask, like something a second-grader would ask the cop coming to talk about Chester the Molester and stranger danger, but he had to know. “I mean, you seem pretty good at it.”
“I fucking hate it,” Loren said immediately.
“Then why do you do it?”
“Because I’m good at it,” Loren said, the ghost of a smile hanging around his hard mouth. Hoskins didn’t care much for that smile.
“So? I’m sure you’re good at other things.”
“Nope. This is it.” And Hoskins knew that a person could be good at something and also hate it, but after a while he realized that Loren loved police work, really got off on it, no matter what he said. It wasn’t serving the public and helping his fellow man that did it for him, and it wasn’t that he got to put one over on the dipshits of the world and parade around like a hero. And it certainly wasn’t the money, because cops make shit; teachers and cops, cleaning up everyone’s messes, got the shaft in the payroll department. No, for a guy like Loren, it’s not about the money or anything else.