“What’s that?” Seever asks. His eyes are greenish-brown, and there’s a bright spot of gold in his left one, under the pupil.
“Why’d you bury them all in your crawl space?” Hoskins asks. If this interview doesn’t end soon, if he doesn’t get out of this room, he’ll be sick. He felt the same way in the morgue, looking at the victims so far, their bodies laid out on the metal tables with the raised edges, so if the bodies leaked or bled there wouldn’t be a mess to clean. “Why keep them with you?”
Seever blinks.
This is the million-dollar question. Sammie asked Hoskins this the night before, when they were in his bed. She had a bowl of trail mix balanced in the crux of her thighs, and even though he hates eating in bed, hated finding the sunflower seeds and nuts in his sheets after she was gone, he lets her do it.
“If Seever hadn’t kept the—the dead people—”
“The victims,” he’d corrected her. “Or the departed. That’s what you should call them.”
“Why’d he bury them all under his house? It’s not like he has a good explanation for how all those bodies got down there. No one will ever think he’s innocent.”
“He’s not trying to convince anyone he’s innocent,” Hoskins said. “He doesn’t deny anything.”
Sammie was wearing one of his shirts, and the collar hung loosely off one shoulder. He ran his fingers along her chest, down into the dip above the delicate bone. She closed her eyes, tilted her head back so the fine line of her neck was exposed. He often wondered what Sammie was thinking.
“Did you go down to your crawl space sometimes, pay them all a little visit?” Hoskins asks now, mildly. There’s a rushing sound in his ears, and it seems like he’s looking at Seever through binoculars, but through the wrong end. Seever looks so far away and tiny, although he’s on the other side of the table, only three feet away, but he thinks that if he were to reach out and grab at Seever, his fist would swipe uselessly through empty air. “You’d go down there and gloat and laugh and jerk off?”
Seever swallows, his throat making a sharp clicking noise. Then he looks away.
“How’d you do it?” Loren asks, and Hoskins can hear the impatience in his voice, the waspy hum of anger below the surface. Maybe Seever can’t hear it, but he hasn’t worked with Loren for the last ten years, hasn’t learned to gauge Loren’s temper like you would the temperature of bathwater before climbing in. “Where’d you pick them up?”
Seever leans forward, his elbows on the table. He’s wearing one of the orange jumpsuits all the prisoners wear, and the front of it is filthy, smeared with dried food and dirt. Seever was always so particular about his clothing, and now that’s gone to shit. Incarceration isn’t nice for pretty boys. Seever props his elbows up on the table. He looks eager to talk, and Hoskins expects that they’ll get more lies out of him, more games and bragging, but instead, they get the truth.
“I got them from all over, wherever I could,” Seever says. “I never attacked anyone. They all came home with me because they wanted to.”
“I guess you expect me to believe that they wanted you to tie them up and kill them, too?” Loren asks.
Seever doesn’t answer this, just laughs, that high-pitched titter that digs right into your brain and doesn’t let go, and that’s what sets Loren off. That’s what they tell the boss man later, that Seever had laughed, he was always laughing like a maniac and Loren couldn’t stand it anymore. But it’s more than the laugh, Hoskins knows. It’s the last seven weeks they’ve spent following Seever around, watching and waiting for him to slip up so they could finally arrest him.