What You Don't Know

by JoAnn Chaney

  He knocks on the glass with his fist, points at the phone. She picks it up, presses it against her ear. It’s slick in her hands, smells like rubbing alcohol.

  “Sammie,” he says. She closes her eyes, thinks of his voice traveling into the mouthpiece, down into the wires and cords and then spilling directly into her ear. She almost puts the phone down and walks out, but then she thinks of Weber, of his smug face and his interview with Simms’s mother, and how she has nothing to write, nothing at all, not without this. “It’s me, Sammie. Jacky.”

  She never called him Jacky. Oh, plenty of other people called him that, he insisted on it, he liked to be on a first-name basis with everyone, but she’d always called him Seever.

  “Oh,” she says, opening her eyes. “Hey.”

  She can hear him breathing through the phone, see the rise and fall of his chest, but the two things seem somehow disconnected, separate. Like a video recording when the audio is off, just a bit, not enough to matter but still annoying.

  “It’s good to see you,” Seever says. “God, you look exactly the same as you did fifteen years ago.”

  “You don’t,” she says, and Seever laughs. Not the big belly laugh he used to have, but a soft, wet chuckle.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’ve been told.” His tongue pokes out, bright-pink, sweeps over his bottom lip. “Why’d you come all the way out here, Sammie? You’ve been an approved visitor for a long time, you never showed up before.”

  Have someone else go out, she’d told Corbin years before, because she was getting everything she needed from Hoskins, he told her everything Seever said in the interview rooms, and Corbin had tried to send another reporter, but Seever had refused to talk to anyone except her. But she wouldn’t go, the thought of seeing him made her physically ill, she didn’t think she’d be able to stomach it. It would’ve been an exclusive; Seever had never talked with anyone else from the media, and maybe that’s why Sammie had ended up on the chopping block, because she’d refused to play along. But she was here now, wasn’t she? They’d finally gotten her in, Corbin would get the story he’d wanted so long ago.

  “Have you heard about the murders in Denver?” she asks, picking up her pencil and tapping it against the desk. A few sheets of paper and a pencil was all the guard would let her bring in. She hates writing in pencil.

  “The Secondhand Killer, isn’t that what you called him in that article?” Seever asks. “Because he’s picking at my leftovers, I guess?”

  “I didn’t come up with it.”

  “Good. It’s a terrible name.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t know who he is, if that’s what you’re here to ask,” Seever says. “Detective Loren comes to visit me once in a while. He had some crazy ideas, thought I might’ve had a partner, or mentored someone, and now they’re starting up where I left off.”

  “Did you?”

  “Did I what?” Seever’s smiling, he knows what she wants but he’s going to force her to spell it out for him.

  “Have a partner? When you—when you murdered all those people—were you working with anyone?”

  “No.” He shrugs, and her gut thinks he’s telling the truth. She might be wrong, she’s been wrong before, but maybe she’s not. She decides to let the question be.

  “Are you in touch with anyone?”

  “Like who?” he asks, amused. “My wife is the only one who visits me anymore, and she wants to tell me about the soap operas she’s watching, and how much it costs to fill up her gas tank.”

  “Maybe you’re telling your wife things, and she passes them on to the Secondhand Killer.”

  An emotion flickers across Seever’s face, but is just as quickly gone. His face falls back into slack lines.

  “Leave Gloria out of this.”

  “You don’t write letters? Send emails?”

  “Nope. Nothing like that. You can confirm all that with the prison officials.”

  Seever isn’t going to tell her anything she doesn’t already know about the Secondhand Killer, and she had a feeling it would be this way but she came anyway, because there’s always a chance. She looks down at her paper, taps the pointed lead end against it so there are tiny dots all over the top, small smudges. She’s not normally this way in an interview, so quiet and hesitant, but this is different because this is Seever, and she knows him.

  “I figured you’d have more questions for me,” Seever says, smiling. He looks like a kindly old man, white hair and glasses, but there’s a monster hiding behind that smile, and she hadn’t wanted to come see him for that reason; it gives her a sort of creeping horror to know what this man has done, what he’s capable of, and she’d never known, the whole time she’d been sleeping with him she’d never had a clue. “I thought you were the reporter-extraordinaire. I expected more. I hope when your boyfriend Hoskins comes out to talk to me, he’ll actually make it worth my time.”

  He’s taunting her, throwing out a line and waiting for her to take the bait. That’s how Hoskins always put it to her, that talking to Seever was like playing Russian roulette—you could never be sure when that bullet would come, when a truth would show its face among all the lies. Seever could twist your words, leave you so confused and out of sorts that you’d forget what you were talking about; he’d plant ideas so deep in your brain that you’d never know they were there until they’d start hatching and rooting around, like maggots. But she’s ready for this, she’s got questions, she wrote a list, and she’s prepared for his head games. That’s the most important thing.

  “Oh, I have plenty of questions,” she says, and Seever’s eyes widen when she turns over her sheet of paper, when he sees everything she has written down. “Are you ready?”

  “Shoot.”

  The first question isn’t on her list, it’s not something that’ll ever be published in the Post, but it’s a question she’s had since she’d found out what Seever had done.

  “Why’d you let me live?”

  * * *

  “Did you get everything you needed out of him?” the guard asks.

  “I think I did.” She rifles through her purse, makes sure everything’s there. “Seever—he doesn’t get any visitors?”

  “His wife. And you.” The guard holds up his fingers, counts off the names. “Sometimes that cop stops by. Loren.”

  “No phone calls? He doesn’t write letters? Or get packages?”

  “Nope. I mean, his wife brings him things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Food, sometimes, when the warden allows it. Cookies, those kinds of things. And art supplies. But that all gets inspected, so we know there’s nothing bad coming in.”

  “Art supplies?” She’d forgotten about Seever’s art. It’d been big news when he first started, it was like having a monkey at a typewriter, pounding out a novel, and at first his paintings had sold for lots of money, but it wasn’t long before the newness of it had worn away. She hadn’t realized he was still doing it. “What does he paint?”

  “He used to paint all kinds of nasty things. Dead people and blood and—and well, you know,” the guard says, and she catches his hesitation, he doesn’t want to say anything too nasty in front of her. “But that only lasted till the docs amped up his happy-pills.”

  “Now what does he paint?”

  “Nothing all that interesting anymore.”

  “What happens to all his work?”

  “His wife takes most of it with her. I heard she sold some for cash, but I think she hangs on to most of it.”

  “None of it’s here, to see?”

  “Nah. If his wife don’t take them, we chuck them into the incinerator. I wouldn’t want to take home anything that man made. It’d give me the creeps.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  She’d come with a long list of questions, everything she’d wanted to ask but hadn’t when he was first arrested, about the victims and his desires and his upcoming execution, and Seever had been surprisingly cooperative. But he�
��d never answered her first question. The most important question, in her opinion. He’d stared at her, his eyes glassy, with tears, or maybe it was a trick of the smeary glass partition. He’d opened his mouth and then quickly shut it again; she’d been able to hear the harsh snap of his teeth as they came together, even through the phone. They’d sat in silence until she knew that he wouldn’t answer, that he’d never answer, and she asked another question, moved the conversation along to something else, and she thought it might be because he didn’t know why he’d let her live, he didn’t have an answer, even in his own head.

  It was when she was coming toward the end of her questions when she knew Seever was getting tired and impatient, she could see it in his eyes, and she’d known that was coming because that’s how interviews went—you could only pump someone for information so long before they were through, but she had to do this in one shot, because she never wants to come back to this prison, never wants to have to see Seever again.

  Did you ever—

  If I could get you in here would you suck me off? Seever interrupted, leaning forward until his nose was nearly pressed against the glass. His eyes were bulging and wide and he was breathing quickly, and she thought that she was seeing the monster now, desperate and hungry; this was the man who’d raped and tortured for so long, who looked like a normal man but was rotten and putrid inside. When you climb on top of Hoskins and push his dick up inside you, do you pretend he’s me?

  She didn’t respond to this, only set the phone carefully back down in the receiver and gathered her things. She didn’t look up when Seever started rapping his knuckles on the glass, or even when his muffled shouts came to her ears. She’d been expecting something like this to happen. The interview was over.

  She’s going to write one hell of a piece with this, Weber will never be able to come close.

  FULL CIRCLE

  HOSKINS

  December 8, 2015

  He’s downstairs, back in his basement office. Mostly because there’s no office for him upstairs, and also because all those people bother him now, the hustle and bustle of the detectives running in and out, the pings of emails coming and the steady whir of the printer. He used to thrive on the chaos up there; he couldn’t think straight unless there was loud music while he worked, but things have changed, and now he prefers the cool silence of this windowless room. He should be upstairs to help with the Secondhand Killer case, but being up there all day is pointless, because he gets all the reports in emails, in group texts on his phone. Besides, Chief Black didn’t tell him to run the case, just to make sure everything was going well, and it is. Except for Loren dressing up like Seever, which doesn’t bother anyone but Hoskins. Loren’s always been a little off-kilter, he’s done a lot of crazy things, and this is another example of it.

  Despite Loren’s hijinks, the investigation is moving in exactly the way it’s supposed to—methodically, with each step on the list being checked off as it’s done. There is a team canvassing Simms’s neighborhood, another tracking down anyone who knew her. And a third team, calling and visiting anyone who’d once been connected to Seever, anyone who’d spent time in his company, because any of them could be a suspect, but any of them could be in danger too. This is how most murder cases are cracked, with questions and answers, with phone calls and knocks on doors, but Hoskins has to wonder if that’ll be enough this time. Sometimes you can follow all the rules, you can make sure every i is dotted, every t crossed, but there’s still a chance it won’t be solved. Hell, he only has to look around his office to know that, see all the murder cases that’ve gone cold, victims buried without justice, killers still on the loose. They’re running with the assumption that the Secondhand Killer knew Seever before he was arrested, that he’d known about the fingers, because it’s all they have now, they’re grasping at straws. Grasping at fingers, although Hoskins doesn’t think any of the detectives will find that so funny.

  He sits behind his desk, flips on the table lamp that he brought from home, because the overhead lights aren’t enough down here, not if you need to actually work. The batteries in the wall clock must’ve died the night before, the hands are frozen at twelve and one. He fires up his computer and opens a file folder. Shuts it. He hasn’t been able to stop thinking about what Loren had said the day before: I hope this guy knows how much time we’re spending on his ass. Make him feel good, stroke his ego.

  Hoskins turns away from the computer and picks through the pile of folders on his desk, shuffles through some pages. He ends up looking at one of the oldest cold cases they have on file in Denver—1952, a young woman left a cocktail party to run an errand and disappeared. She was found dead a month later, nearly thirty miles away. There are notes scrawled in the margins, left by other investigators over the years, some of them faded away to almost nothing. Hoskins runs his finger down them, tracing his nail along the words. There’s one that catches his eye, about halfway down on the right, written in blue ink. Based on this, I don’t think it’s his first rodeo. There’s an arrow beside this, pointing at a typed sentence from the medical examiner, stating the body had been carefully washed before being dumped, probably in water mixed with bleach. And that note was right on; it probably hadn’t been that killer’s first rodeo, he’d known what to do to keep from getting caught, nearly sixty years had gone by since then and the cops had never arrested anyone in connection to the murder. He was either dead by now or a very old man, and he’d stayed free because he’d known what to do, he’d probably honed his technique over several murders. His first kill had probably been sloppy, but he’d learned from it. Seever had done the same thing. His earliest victim had suffered a head wound, but she hadn’t died from it—the examiner thought she might’ve been buried before she was actually dead; she’d been smothered in the avalanche of crawl-space dirt shoveled over the top of her because Seever was still inexperienced, he’d probably been scared and nervous, but he’d learned, oh yes he had, and quickly, the same way a dog will learn not to piddle on the floor when you smacked him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.

  And that was the thing, wasn’t it? This Secondhand Killer—and it seems like that’s what he’s going to be called, whether any of them like it or not—was careful, he was thorough. He hadn’t let anyone see him, and he hadn’t left much, or anything, behind, although the tests are still being run on the samples they’d taken from Simms. He was good, very good; some people might say he was lucky, but over the years Hoskins had come to understand that a person makes their own luck, especially if that person is a killer.

  He turns to the first page of the file, looks at the photo of the woman who’d disappeared in 1952. She had dark hair and big eyes. A lush mouth filled in with lipstick, probably red, although he couldn’t tell in the black-and-white photo. Whoever killed her had been experienced. He’d done it before. And maybe, he thinks, it’s the same with the Secondhand Killer. Maybe he’d killed, and then he’d switched gears and decided to go after people connected to Seever, he’d even started doing it the way Seever did it. Why?

  Because he wants his ego stroked.

  Lots of killers crave attention, for people to sit up and notice them. They do it for the blood, they do it for the sex, but it’s also driven by the ego. It sounds like some crazy Freud shit, but it’s true. There was the Zodiac Killer out in California, BTK in Kansas, both had sent letters to the police, they’d taunted and teased, because they wanted the attention, like a kid screaming for candy. And Secondhand was sending them messages too, because he’d chosen to mimic Seever, but he wasn’t hiding the victims like Seever did—no, he was leaving everything out for anyone to see, because he wanted them to notice. He didn’t want to be caught, oh no, he wanted to stay free and keep doing what he was doing, but he wanted everyone to be talking about him, he probably went to bed at night smiling because he was so damn satisfied.

  Hoskins taps on his keyboard, wakes his sleeping computer back up. He’ll comb the database of unsolved murder cases
involving a female victim that happened in the last five years, possibly even less. The last two years. There wouldn’t be too many—Denver is still a safe place to live, not safe enough to keep your doors unlocked at night, let’s not get crazy, but safe enough. He waits, hoping the computer will get its ass going, but it just sits there with a half-loaded page, not doing anything, even when Hoskins tries to reboot it.

  “I need a few things, it won’t be long,” Ted says, and Hoskins looks up in time to see the kid walking past his office door, his cell phone stuck against the side of his head. He hadn’t expected to see Ted anytime soon, he’d figured the kid would still be at home, but this is good, he wants to apologize, to clear the air, and besides, he needs his help. “Give me two minutes.”

  “Hey, I didn’t expect to see you here,” Hoskins says, standing in the office door. Ted freezes, then slowly looks over his shoulder. If a person could look like a scared rabbit caught in a snare, that person would be Ted. “I’m glad I caught you.”

  “I thought you were working upstairs,” Ted says, turning full around. There’s a clean white bandage crossed over an eyebrow, and a ring of purple bruises around his neck. The whites of his eyes are red from burst blood vessels. Hoskins winces, touches his own face. His upper lip is swollen, his nose sore, and there’s a lump on the back of his head, but Ted looks worse, and it’s bad because he was the one to do this.