“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.