What You Don't Know

by JoAnn Chaney

  What he thinks Simms is trying to tell him, what Loren and the task force are overlooking: The Secondhand Killer might’ve started out killing for some kind of gain, whether it’s financial or personal, but it doesn’t seem that way anymore. There’s only one thing he seems to be looking for now—pleasure. No one tortures a person for days unless they’re getting their rocks off, and there was a sort of frenzied glee in Simms’s murder. Hoskins closes his eyes, thinks of the toaster sitting on its side, dented and covered with hair and bone, blood. Whoever Secondhand is, he’s had a taste of pleasure, and now he knows he likes it. He raped those three women, tortured and murdered them, he was cruel about it, he made it last.

  And he’s going to do it again.

  There’s one more name on the list, ridiculous, but somehow not.

  Jacky Seever.

  * * *

  “You know what I like about you, Paulie?” Seever said once. This was near the end of their time together, before the trial started and after Hoskins had gotten everything he could out of Seever, although it sometimes felt the opposite, as if Seever was the one wringing him like an old dish towel. “You understand. Not like Loren. You understand me.”

  “I think you’re mixed up. I’m not here to understand you. I’m here because I have to be. This is my job.”

  “I don’t know,” Seever said, smiling. “I think there’s a part of you that enjoys being in here with me.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “You ever jerk off to the stuff I tell you, Paulie?”

  “What?”

  “I see how you look when I talk,” Seever said. “I get the feeling you wouldn’t mind trying some of it yourself.”

  “I’m not like you. I’d never do the things you’ve done.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure. You’ve got potential, I can see it.”

  * * *

  It’s important to establish a victim’s timeline, the days and hours and even minutes leading up to their death. This can be problematic, because you can’t always know what someone is doing. You can’t always know who they talked to, or what they were thinking, even technology these days can’t catalog every second of every minute of every hour of a person’s day, although Hoskins is sure Apple is working on that.

  Like some of these cold cases he has on his desk. Murders that happened ten or twenty, thirty years before. It’s not as if he can pick up the phone and ask people where they were on a particular date decades before, or what they were doing. Time passes, people forget. Evidence is destroyed. And then, years later, those files end up on Hoskins’s desk.

  “We don’t have shit,” Loren says. They’re in a conference room at the station, Loren on one side and Hoskins on the other, going over the list of suspects, working through everything point by point.

  He hadn’t found Cole in Pueblo, Loren said. No sign of him. Hoskins doesn’t like to look right at him, because Loren’s still dressed up like Seever, pressed and proper in his suit, a tiny flower tucked into the lapel, but what can he do about it? Nothing, because even if he says something to Chief Black, even if he moseys on down to Human Resources and files a complaint, they’ll shake their heads, laugh at him. Because he’d be complaining about Loren’s suit, the glasses he’s wearing, and the slick part in his hair, and those things don’t mean anything to anyone but him, because Hoskins sees Seever in everything Loren’s doing, in the clothes he wears, the way he smokes, the way he sucks his saliva through his teeth. Those are Seever-isms, they don’t belong to Loren, but they don’t alarm anyone except him. “Five days since we found Simms, and still nobody knows anything, nobody sees anything. I hate when this happens. We end up waiting for another victim to turn up.”

  It’s not that they’re waiting, really. They’re putting together a timeline on Carrie Simms, but she’s the worst kind of person you’d ever have to track. She didn’t have a credit card so they could see her purchases, no cell phone that would’ve marked her locations. The last time anyone had seen Simms alive was school. Biology class. Most of the students didn’t know her name, only recognized her if they were shown a picture. Simms was quiet, didn’t have friends. Hadn’t had contact with any of her family in years, and none of them were surprised to find out she was dead, even her mother.

  “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think it’ll be a long wait.”

  “Jesus, Paulie. Don’t let anyone hear you say shit like that.”

  “You know how it goes. This guy’s rolling into third gear. He’s getting into his groove.”

  “Why do you think he’s doing it, Paulie?” Loren says. “For attention?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m starting to wonder if we’re ever gonna find this guy,” Loren says. “He’s probably yukking it up right now, thinking we’re too stupid to catch him.”

  “We’ll get him.”

  “Yeah. Listen, we’ve got the team from the field coming in to debrief in five. You sitting in?”

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  “I hope this guy knows how much time we’re spending on his ass. Make him feel good about himself, stroke his ego.”

  “Yeah, right,” Hoskins says, rubbing a finger over the bone in his eyebrow, where it’s still sore from Loren hitting him. “Gimme a minute. I’ll meet you down there.”

  Loren shoots him a look before he leaves, but Hoskins doesn’t notice. He’s too busy considering; he has the maddening sense that there’s something here he should be thinking of, like a word on the end of his tongue that he can’t manage to dredge out. Something that Loren said reminded him of something else, the ego thing, and it seems important, but then it’s gone, as suddenly as it was there, before he could pull it out of the shadows and make sense of it.

  SAMMIE

  “Every decision I’ve ever made has been the wrong one,” she said once. This was to Dean, after she’d lost her job at the Post, when she was still upset and vulnerable, not considering the words coming out of her mouth before it was too late. “My whole life, I’ve never done anything right.”

  “You’ll find another job.”

  “Why don’t you make more money?” she’d asked, although she already knew the answer. Dean was a good guy, but he wasn’t good enough. He was smart, but not smart enough. In the grand scheme of things Dean was just another guy, forgettable, low on the totem pole at a marketing firm that was low on an even bigger totem pole, and he’d always be that way. He didn’t know how to move up in the world, and he didn’t have much interest in it. He was happy where he was, answering phones and building spreadsheets and whatever else he did—his title was Marketing Sales Coordinator, no one even knew what that meant, it was a mystery—he could never understand why she was always pushing for more, for herself, for him. “Every man I know makes enough money to support his family. Except you.”

  “Is that what you want?” He looked sick. It was wrong, she knew it was, she was hitting below the belt, making him feel like less of a man because of his salary; her mother had always warned her not to do that, not to belittle her husband, but it felt good. She couldn’t keep the words from spilling out of her mouth. “You don’t want to work? You want to stay here, be a housewife?”

  But she didn’t want to be a housewife, she’d never wanted that, she liked to work, didn’t mind it. And it wasn’t about the money but the idea of it, although she didn’t know how to explain herself in a way that made sense. She wanted Dean to gather her up in his arms, to tell her everything was okay, that she’d been good at her job, that she wasn’t a failure—but instead, Dean seemed as scared as she was.

  “What I want is a man who can take care of me.”

  * * *

  It takes her two and a half hours to get to Sterling Correctional Facility, the prison where Jacky Seever will live for the next fourteen months, until he’s put in an armored transport and taken south to the prison in Cañon City, where he’ll be strapped to a bed in the middle of a room full of witnesses and injected w
ith poison, and everyone will wait until he falls asleep and his heart rumbles to a stop. Sterling is east of Denver, a downward slope away from the mountains and onto the plains, where the land becomes nothing but scraggy bushes and yellow dirt, houses that hunker close to the ground and hold on with all their might. It’s colder out here, where the wind blows without breaking, although there’s less snow on the ground than in the city, only a dusting that blows across the interstate, whipping around in tiny ice tornadoes before disappearing. This place makes her eyeballs ache. It’s all that sky, she thinks, unending gray stretching from one side of the world to the other, with nothing to break up the monotony. She feels like she’s suffocating under all that sky, like a fishbowl has been turned over and plunked right on top of her head.

  She’s been to a prison before, when she was fourteen. It was part of the “scared-straight” program her high school had, although there weren’t enough delinquent kids to take, so everyone went. Not one kid had tried to get out of it, because any excuse to cut class was a good one, even if it was to visit a prison, so everyone was separated, boys on one bus and girls on another, and they went their own ways. Sammie doesn’t remember much from the field trip, only that one of the girls started weeping when she was patted down, big gulping cries that echoed off the concrete walls. And she doesn’t remember much about the prisoners who spoke to them, except that they were pleasant and vaguely boring, not all that different from her own mother, and none of them had done anything all that exciting to end up behind bars, except one, who was small-boned and pretty, who didn’t seem all that much older than they were.

  “I killed my husband,” the woman told them. She wasn’t nervous standing in front of the group of teens, but matter-of-fact. “I thought it was an accident, but they said it wasn’t.”

  They, Sammie quickly figured out, was everyone else, everyone who wasn’t living inside the woman’s head.

  “I did it with a knife,” the woman said, after someone asked how it’d happened. “He was asleep.”

  Then they were taken to the prison’s cafeteria for lunch, where they were served macaroni and cheese, a green salad, and cartons of chocolate milk like they had at school.

  “It’s not usually this good,” the husband-killer said. “They made a special lunch, just because you guys are here. Like we’re having a fucking party or something.”

  * * *

  The prison is not what she expects. She’s read about it, looked up photos of it online, but she isn’t prepared for how big it is, how empty it seems. That’s an illusion, she knows, because the place is full up with prisoners, too many of them, but they’re not out in the fenced yard, not in this snow and cold.

  There are parking spots for visitors, and she pulls into one but keeps the engine running. Checks her hair. She’d had trouble choosing lipstick—the color a woman wears on her lips is important, like she tells customers at work. It can make your teeth white, your smile glow. Lipstick can change everything. She’d spent a long time picking through her bathroom drawer, looking at all the tubes, each color with its own name printed on the bottom. Lust. Sin. Defiance. Gorgeous. Perverted. They’re all sexual, tawdry. DTF. Down to fuck. There’s nothing called Intelligent or Brainiac. No Failure or Idiocy. Disgusting. Nothing like that. After a while, she slid the drawer shut, didn’t put on lipstick at all. But she wore good shoes—black flats with silver studding around the edges. Classic, expensive. They look nice, but they pinch around her toes. She has her leather purse, she’s wearing a brand-new blouse. It’s stupid, she thinks, to get all done-up to visit a man in prison, but she didn’t think blue jeans would do it. Seever had always noticed when women dressed nicely, and complimented them, and she wants this to go well.

  Sammie gets out of her car, pushes the button to lock the door, and starts toward the prison. There’s a woman coming her way across the parking lot, walking fast, her head down to keep out of the wind. Another visitor, all done for the day. There’s something familiar about the woman, and it isn’t until they’re a few feet away that she realizes who it is—Gloria. Seever’s wife.

  Gloria looks much like she always did, is even dressed the same. Sammie had seen her a few times when she worked at the restaurant, when she’d come in with Seever, on his arm, and she’d sit in a corner booth and pick through a salad, or tear apart a hamburger, only eating the meat and skipping the bun, and always with her mouth pinched as tight as a drawstring purse, disapproving. Sammie didn’t officially meet Gloria until after Seever’s arrest, when she was scrambling, when every reporter on the planet was desperate for an interview, and Gloria had agreed to sit down and speak with her. It hadn’t gone well, and it’d only lasted a few minutes, but surely, Sammie thinks, Gloria won’t recognize her. It’s been so long.

  But Gloria does. She’s walking across the lot, hurriedly, and she seems upset. Or she’s chilled from the wind—there are two spots of color high in her cheeks, her lips are pressed thin—but when she sees Sammie she stops short, takes in a sharp breath. She looks like a woman preparing for a fight.

  “Mrs. Seever,” Sammie says, coming forward, her hand already stretched out. She could turn and run back to her car, part of her wants to do exactly that, but she’s found it’s sometimes better to react against her instinct. It throws people off. “How good to see you again. I’m not sure if you remember me, Samantha Peterson. I’d love to speak with you, if you have a moment.”

  Gloria doesn’t blink an eye.

  “He told me you were coming,” she says, her teeth set as she speaks, clamped together so only her lips move. Her voice is different, Sammie realizes. Gloria’s the kind of woman who usually speaks in a soft voice, a feminine tone. High-pitched and girly, almost a whisper. But now she sounds harsh and gritty, and Sammie realizes it’s because she’s about to burst into angry tears. “Said he’s anxious to see you after so long. Could barely sit still from the excitement.”

  Sammie is struck dumb. Gloria Seever is jealous. Every word she says, every movement she makes is oozing with it. Jealousy is always a terrible thing, but this seems so much worse, this ugliness over a man who’ll be put to death soon enough.

  “I’m here for an interview,” she says. “To talk.”

  “Can you imagine, after everything I’ve done for him,” Gloria shrieks into the wind, and Sammie flinches back from the sound of it. “He’s looking forward to a visit from you.”

  And then, just like that, it’s over. Gloria totters away across the blacktop on her sensible heels and climbs into her Buick. Her car squeals when she backs it out, when she turns onto the street. She needs brake pads, a whole new car. Sammie can’t seem to get her legs to move for a moment after Gloria is gone, but is frozen in place, her purse smacking against her thigh and her heart pounding against the inside of her chest.

  * * *

  “I’ll need to hang on to your purse, sweetheart,” the guard at the front says, smiling shyly at her. “Standard procedure, you understand.”

  “No worries,” she says, handing over her bag and lifting up her arms, so he can wave a metal detector up and down her body, searching for whatever it is people might try to sneak into a prison. She scratches the loose bun on the top of her head while her arms are up, and the guard catches the movement.

  “Can you let your hair down, please?” he asks, eyeballing her head carefully, as if she might be hiding a shank in the coils of hair.

  “Sure,” she says, but less enthusiastically than before. She’d wanted to keep her hair up, so she’d look severe, older, not with it all tumbled around her shoulders. She pulls the pins out and the guard sticks his gloved hands right into her hair, digging around and massaging her scalp, running his fingers along the backs of her ears, pulling the ends. He sniffs, he might be smelling her hair, although she’s probably being paranoid.

  “You look familiar,” the guard says, staring. “Have we met before?”

  “I write for the Denver Post,” she says, a little self-conscious, but still
pleased he knows her. “You’ve probably seen my photo printed there.”

  “Yeah,” he says, not sounding convinced. “Except I don’t read the paper.”

  “Is it usually like this?” she asks the guard when he brings her into a room split in two by a glass partition. There’s a small desk on each side, and a plastic chair. An old rotary phone mounted on the wall, just the receiver. She thought Seever would be right in front of her, so she could smell his breath, see the network of wrinkles under his eyes, but he’ll only be a voice in her ear, a man on the opposite side of the smeary screen. “With visitors, I mean?”

  “No, not usually,” the guard says, his hands on his hips. “Most prisoners get to see their guests in the common room.”

  “But not Seever.” Not a question, not exactly.

  “Nope, not him. He’s had some—problems in the past.”

  “What happened?”

  The guard gives her a pitying look. I’ll spare you the details, that look says. It’s not a story fit for young ladies.

  “Seever’s old and fat, but he’s quick. Slippery. He ain’t allowed to see anyone anymore, not unless they’re on the opposite side of some bulletproof.” The guard smiles, shows off a mouthful of dentures that look more like alligator teeth. “Because he’s still dangerous.”

  * * *

  Seever is so different that it’s almost like meeting a stranger. She remembers one time, when they were alone in the restaurant and she stripped down to a rubber apron and yellow gloves that ran up to her elbows, and slowly washed the dishes in the big basin sink, and when Seever came around the corner and saw her there, suds dripping down her bare breasts, he made a choking noise, and his face had turned very red. This fat old man sitting across from her, his wrists chained together and then looped around the legs of the desk, he can’t possibly be Jacky Seever, who wouldn’t let her take that apron off when he fucked her, so it made a watery squeaking noise as they moved against each other.