Chapter 1 Abi
ABI
My latest assignment arrives after lunch, right as I’m rinsing off my dishes. The chime ripples from the back of the house, soft and reassuring.
A body is here.
I got the details from the sheriff’s department this morning—an accidental death at the Palm Breeze Hotel. A tourist from Oklahoma slipped in the shower and hit his head and bled out. One of the maids found him when she came in to clean. Another accidental death.
There are a lot of accidental deaths in Rosado.
The bell chimes again, and I wipe my hands and step into the funeral parlor, which takes up the entire downstairs save for the kitchen.
Everything down here is tastefully decorated in sleek, midcentury furniture and muted colors.
I don’t hold funerals these days, not since Uncle Vic died.
He loved being a mortician: meeting with the bereaved, walking them through the funeral process with his soft, even voice.
Me, not so much. I’d rather work with the dead than the living, which is why I got a graduate degree in forensic science and finagled my way into the county coroner position two years ago instead.
Still, I can’t bear to close up shop completely. So I keep everything how it was and do my coroner work out of the same space in the back of the house where Uncle Victor would spend hours preparing the deceased for their casket viewings.
I’m in that space now, and I heave up the big garage door that opens to the back driveway. Hector’s waiting for me, leaning up against the refrigerated truck while he pulls on a silver vape pen. He lifts his hand in greeting, eyes squinted against the sun.
“You ready for him?” he asks, tilting his head toward the truck.
“Yeah, of course.” I have the same anxious, prickly feeling that I’ve been fighting all day, ever since the call from Deputy Molinas.
I held my tongue when he was going over the details, because I could tell from the clipped way he spoke that Sheriff Kaplan had told him not to entertain any of my theories.
Hector tucks his vape pen away and slides the body bag containing the deceased out onto a stretcher. “So what did it look like?” I say, swallowing against my dry throat. “When you picked him up?”
Hector glances at me. He knows my theories, too, and he’s more willing to entertain them than Sheriff Kaplan.
“Normal,” he says. “It was an accident, Abi. The tub was coated in soap scum, and the guy was older. Probably didn’t have good balance.”
I breathe out. I want him to be right, I do. But there have been so many accidental deaths in Rosado, even before I landed the role of county coroner. Uncle Vic noticed them, too. A lot of people die badly here, he told me once, the summer before I left for college. I’m glad you’re getting out.
Of course, I didn’t stay out. I couldn’t. Not when the only other choice was to sell Hatch Street Funeral Home to one of the big funeral corporations after Uncle Vic got his cancer diagnosis. I couldn’t stand to see that happen. So here I am, back in Rosado.
I follow Hector as he pushes the deceased down the hallway and into the examination room. Once everything’s situated, I unzip the body bag and get my first real look at him.
Marcus Nielson. That’s the name on the identification tag, scrawled out in Hector’s messy hand. Mr. Nielson is older—maybe his sixties, although he looks strong for his age. The back of his head is a mess of bone fragments and brain matter, but the rest of him seems unharmed.
It does, at first glance, look like an accident.
“Thanks, Hector,” I say. “I can take it from here.”
He gives me a two-fingered salute. “Don’t go chasing rabbits, girl,” he says, heading back into the hallway. “It’s just an accident. Accidents happen.”
I don’t say anything. Accidents happen. More than anyone else, I know how that isn’t necessarily true.
That’s an old hurt, though, one that I’ve managed to more or less work through, and I’ve got more important things to focus on today. Like Marcus Nielson.
“All right, Mr. Nielson,” I tell him, snapping on my gloves. “Let’s see what you can tell me.”
The steps of the exam are second nature at this point.
I take some photos. I record my initial observations.
I tilt Mr. Nielson’s head sideways to get a look at the injury site.
According to the report the sheriff’s office sent over, he was found slumped on the floor, the back of his head against the rim of the toilet.
I click through the photos of the crime scene.
Blood splatters outward around the toilet, in line with the trajectory of the fall.
It does indeed look like his cause of death was blunt force trauma to the back of his head, and a slip and fall in the shower would be sufficient for that to happen.
So why do I have the distracting, persistent thought that it’s more than that?
I continue my external examination, running my gloved hands over his arms, lifting his limp hands and turning them over to examine his knuckles.
No bruises, no cuts. No sign of a struggle.
A slip and fall, like Hector said. Or a heart attack, massive enough that he toppled through the shower curtain and hit his head before he could call for help. The internal exam will let me for sure.
But I keep looking, combing over every inch of his smooth, waxy skin. It’s almost a compulsion at this point whenever an accidental death comes in. Because so many of them carry a very specific mark.
My breath tightens as I work lower down Mr. Nielson’s body. I still haven’t found anything. The mark, when it appears, is always small. Imperceptible. Something that could be explained away a million different ways if I didn’t keep finding them in the two years that I’ve been back in Rosado.
I lift Mr. Nielson’s leg, feeling my way down his calf with my gloved hand. There are a few cuts and scrapes, but nothing with the intentionality of what I’m looking for. What I’m certain is a sinister pattern, even if Sheriff Kaplan thinks I’m just being hysterical. His word, of course.
And then I get to Mr. Nielson’s ankle.
It would be easy to miss at first—another minor cut just above the lateral malleolus on his left foot. But when I tilt his foot into the light, my breath catches in my chest.
It’s a cut, very tiny and very precise. At first glance, it looks like the others I passed over. But there’s something about this one that makes me reach for my big magnifying glass. And then, like that, the thick lens reveals the secret:
The letter R.
I stare down at it, taking deep, steady breaths even as a chill ripples down my spine.
“Who did this to you, Mr. Nielson?” I breathe out.
He doesn’t answer.
I take a picture of the R, even though I know Sheriff Kaplan won’t give a shit.
He was the one person who opposed my appointment to the county coroner position, and I know damn well it’s because of what happened when I was sixteen.
Taking this to him will do nothing. But I’ll still include it in my report, and I’ll add the information to my own research.
Because I don’t care if Kaplan thinks I’m some hysterical teenage girl instead of an adult woman with the training and education to do my job. It’s clear to me that all these accidental deaths in Rosado aren’t accidental at all. I think there’s a killer stalking along our windswept beachfront.
And I think he’s trying to send a message.
I stick a red pin in my map of Rosado County, right along the beachfront where the Palm Breeze Hotel is located. It has a little flag on it, too, with the letter R.
Then I step back and look at everything, my arms crossed tight over my chest. There are nineteen pins total, all scattered across Rosado. Seven of them are red, each with its own letter attached. Seven bodies that came into my examination room with a tiny letter carved somewhere on them.
Right now, they spell out YOURDAR. And with the way they’re arranged on the map, it’s really more like YOUR DAR.
I rub my hands over my arms, chasing away the chill in the office next to my examination room, where I’ve set up my makeshift investigation. The air is always chilly in here, but I don’t think it’s just the AC that’s making my skin prickle with goosebumps.
The first marked body showed up about a month after my coroner appointment.
It had been a tourist death, a college student here for spring break.
He’d been drinking all day and took a Jet Ski out on the water after dark.
They found his body lying in the surf the next morning, cuts across his face and his lungs filled with water. An accident, obviously.
But I still found that tiny, intentional Y, freshly carved into the skin of his hip. After death.
Kaplan told me I was being absurd. I don’t know how they do things up in Virginia, he said. But you need to keep this foolishness out of your reports if you want this community to take you seriously.
He stressed the word this, as if Rosado weren’t my community, too.
The worst part was that I could tell Uncle Vic agreed with him, even if he wouldn’t come out and say it. He just told me I shouldn’t rock the boat, not if I wanted to hold on to my position. That people here have long memories. So I set it aside.
Until another accidental death came in, a few months later. A car collision on the beach highway. And I found a tiny carved O on the woman’s wrist.
And they keep happening, these marked deaths. All of them get ruled as accidents. All of them look like accidents in every way except for those tiny letters carved into the victim’s skin.
I started mapping them after Uncle Vic died. I’m sure my grief had something to do with it—I was drowning in it, and I don’t have friends here in Rosado. My parents don’t talk to me anymore. All I had was him, and then he was gone.
That was also around the time I started looking into strange deaths from before I came back.
I found twelve that seemed similar to the ones with the carved letters—tourists, usually, or people passing through.
All had been ruled accidents or suicides by the authorities.
All were gruesome, though. Bloody. Disturbing.
I couldn’t say it was a particularly scientific process, identifying them and throwing them up on the map. Just a hunch. A sense that they belonged with the others. I added the location of those accidents to my map, too, marking them with white pins instead of red.
I slump back against my wall, studying the map, trying to find a pattern. The red pins, with their accompanying letters, string along like Christmas lights. Or like a sentence.
YOUR DAR—
Your darling? Your darkness? Your Darwin? Possibilities buzz through my head, but none of them actually tell me anything.
I think of poor Mr. Nielson, currently resting in his cubby in the cold locker.
I’m sure the sheriff’s department has already told his family that there was an accident, and my report will only corroborate that.
Because I didn’t see any sign that he was killed, other than that cruel, vicious R.
A calling card from a killer who knows how to make his deaths look unintentional.
It’s not fair. Not to the victims. Not to the families. And I know I’m not really helping them, pinning these deaths to this map. I just wish I had something more, something substantial. Something that even Kaplan couldn’t ignore.
I step closer to the map, sweeping my gaze over the locations of the marked deaths for the millionth time.
They seem random, too, although they do run more or less parallel to the water, as if the killer is using the shoreline as a ruler.
I’ve gone to the locations before, but they’re usually isolated.
An empty parking lot. A boarded-up gas station. A back road. That sort of thing.
There is one thing that’s different, though. This is the first time one of the deaths has been in such a public place. A hotel is swarming with people, especially this time of year. Maybe someone saw something.
My breath quickens. Do I have the guts to investigate on my own? Kaplan will be furious if he hears I’ve been sniffing around during my off hours, but it’s not like he can really do anything about it. He doesn’t fucking employ me. The county does.
And I do know Palm Breeze Hotel well. It’s one of the prettier ones on the beachfront, and when I walk the beach during the off-season, I usually make sure to pass it by.
It was built back in the ‘60s, and it still has that midcentury charm, with its white stucco walls and cerulean trim.
Plus, unlike most of the newer hotels, the owner is from Rosado.
He still lives here, too, from what I understand. So he might be more willing to help.
I duck out of the office, my breath quickening in my chest as I close and lock up the door. Am I really going to do this?
Yes, I am. I owe it to Mr. Nielson. To all of the other victims.
Someone has to find their killer.