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.
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?”