Chapter 8 Abi
ABI
They have the whole block roped off, yellow tape criss-crossing over the road.
I can still see the Rosado gazebo, though, a white-and-pink structure rising out of the center of a lush green patch in the middle of downtown.
It’s a historical marker, one of those things that Rosado’s known for aside from the beach.
The town has farmers’ markets here once a month and a Halloween festival in the fall.
And now it’s a crime scene.
My throat is dry as I walk up to the uniformed police officer guarding the area. I don’t recognize her, although that doesn’t mean she won’t know my name.
“I’m Abilene Snow,” I say, already pulling out my coroner’s badge. “I need to look at the body.”
She frowns at my badge. “I didn’t realize Kaplan had contacted you yet. He’s still talking with Detective Contreras about how they want to proceed.”
I stiffen. I didn’t expect Kaplan to actually be here, not with the crime scene being in the city limits.
“The police department contacted me,” I lie, tucking my badge back into my pocket. “May I?”
The officer nods and pulls the tape away.
I duck through and cut across the dew-damp grass, my heart thudding furiously in my chest. Officers from both the police department and the county sheriff’s office are here, all of them swarming around the space like ants.
I don’t see Kaplan, but I’m sure he’s around here somewhere.
But I’m not really worried about him. My vision’s focused on that gazebo, though, gleaming in the morning sun.
I can already see the blood.
It spills down the steps like some bright, garish river. My stomach turns over, and I bite back the nausea rising in my throat. I deal with dead bodies every day. I am absolutely not going to throw up over this one.
Even if it’s Olivia Pearce. Even if she protected me, more or less, when I was a terrified teenager.
As I get closer, I can see more of the damage: the entire floor of the gazebo is soaked in blood, and the deceased—
Oliva
—is positioned in the center. They’ve covered her up with a sheet, the white already marred with a few spots of blood.
“Ms. Snow? What are you doing here?”
I recognize Kaplan’s voice immediately.
I sigh and compose myself before I turn around, hoping my expression looks bland and professional. Kaplan and Rick Contreras, a detective from the police department, both stand a few feet away. Rick gives me a friendly smile. Kaplan doesn’t.
“I wanted to see the scene,” I say stiffly, digging my nails into my palms. “I heard it was—”
“Heard from who?” Kaplan asks. “I didn’t tell the department to contact you yet.”
We stare at each other, Kaplan glowering at me from beneath his shock of grey hair. Rick clears his throat.
“Someone at the police department probably did,” Rick says smoothly. I’m sure he believes what he says, but I still appreciate the cover. “It’ll be good to have the coroner check things out. We don’t exactly get a lot of murders around here—”
Kaplan fixes his gaze on me, like he’s daring me to contradict it. I don’t say anything.
“And this scene is—just brace yourself,” Rick continues. “I’ll let the CSI know you want to take a look.”
“Do you know who the victim is?” Kaplan says coldly. “Not sure you’re necessarily the right person for the job.”
Rick looks at me apologetically before he slinks away. Coward.
“Yes, I’m aware of the victim’s identity,” I say stiffly, squaring my shoulders. “And I don’t know who else would perform the autopsy. The body was found in Rosado. I’m the Rosado County coroner.” I give Kaplan my iciest smile. “Now, I’d like to do my job, please.”
I glide past him, my chin lifted as I make my way to the gazebo. I can feel him watching me, but he doesn’t say anything more. Doesn’t try to stop me, either.
Rick is up ahead, talking to one of the CSIs beside the gazebo. I circle around on the grass so I don’t step in the dark, sticky blood on the sidewalk.
This her?” the CSI asks as I approach. “The coroner?”
“Yes. I’m Abilene Snow,” I tell him. “Do I need to cover my shoes?”
“Nah, I’ve already got everything from the steps here.” It’s a second entrance into the gazebo, and it’s far less bloody than the one I saw when I arrived. The CSI tilts his head. “Come on up.”
I suck in a deep breath as I enter the gazebo.
The stench of blood is everywhere, sweet and sickly like rotting flowers.
I’m not used to smelling blood out in the open.
In the frigid, preserved air of my examination room, scents fade into the background.
Besides, we don’t get a lot of mangled corpses here in Rosado.
Even with… him.
I shove his masked face out of my head. I’m still doubtful he did this. All this terrible theater isn’t exactly how he operates.
“You ready?” the CSI asks, tugging on the white sheet covering the body.
I nod, afraid that my voice will crack if I speak. He peels the fabric back.
“Jesus Christ,” I murmur, reflexively stepping backward.
It doesn’t look like the Olivia I remember, the pretty blonde woman who bought me a coffee and listened without judging.
The face barely looks human at all. It’s nearly split in half, in fact, cut at her mouth so the top part of her skull falls backward, revealing the glossy, bloody mess of tongue and mouth.
Worse, the body is naked and black with bruises—around the throat, across the chest. Around the wrists, too, which are positioned behind the back, with the body arranged into a kneeling position.
One of the breasts has been cut off, a black, oozing hole where it should be.
The entire front of the body is drenched in blood.
The same blood that ran down the steps and onto the sidewalk.
What patches of clear skin I can see, it’s clear that lividity has already set in. She’s been dead for at least a few hours. Probably longer, given the scent of rot on the air.
For a moment, everything seems to constrict around me. The cicadas are already screaming, and the sound draws tighter and tighter in until I think I might black out.
“Who found her?” I spit out the first question I think to ask, even though I already know the answer.
“A groundskeeper,” Rick says. “We spoke to him already. I sincerely doubt he had anything to do with this.”
I walk around her slowly, my steps shaky. “How did she get here? Do you know?”
Rick gestures at the CSI, who throws the fabric back over the body. I breathe out, relieved even though I don’t want to admit it. Rick wouldn’t hold it against me, but I can feel Kaplan watching me from the grass, and he would.
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Rick says. “Her husband’s out of town. We confirmed that, by the way. Been in New Orleans for the past three days. Got tons of witnesses to back it up, too.”
I nod, my throat dry.
“She was killed here,” I say numbly. “There wouldn’t be so much blood otherwise.”
“Yeah,” Rick says. “Unfortunately, the security cameras were vandalized a few days ago. Hadn’t been replaced yet.”
Of course.
“We’re asking around some of the shops on the square to see if they might have any footage. Hopefully, we’ll find something.”
I keep walking around the gazebo. Nothing else looks out of place. But then, I don’t normally look at crime scenes, do I? I look at the body.
“When did the last shop close?” I study a wisp of spider web in the corner. My killer—
You did not just think of him that way.
He broke in a little after midnight.
“The diner across the street closed at 10 P.M.” Rick nods toward it. “I’ve got someone following up with the cook who closed last night, but the waitress here this morning said they’re usually gone by eleven. So we figure the death had to happen sometime between eleven and five A.M.”
I shudder. My encounter happened a little after midnight. I suppose it’s possible that he broke into my examination room, kissed me, and then killed Olivia Pearce.
But it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel like him. This wasn’t made to look like an accident, for one.
But I’ll only know for sure if there’s no letter marked on her skin.
“Send the body to the funeral home when you’re ready,” I say, wheeling around and out of the gazebo. It feels better out in the thick, stagnant air, even though the stink of death hangs heavy around us. “I’ll get the autopsy done today.”
Seeing Olivia laid out on my examination slab is somehow worse than seeing her at the crime scene. At least out there, she was a victim of a terrible crime. In here, on the metal table and beneath the bright lights, she’s meat.
Horrible, mangled, horribly mutilated meat.
The first thing I do after Hector delivers her to my examination room is search her body for another letter. I rinse the blood off in patches, scouring her bruised, mottled skin for one of those telltale marks.
It’s not there. Not on her ankles or calves, not on her hip, not in the crook of her elbow. Not in any of the places the letters have been before.
But more than that, rigor mortis has already set in through the body, the limbs stiff and immobile. I take the internal body temperature and calculate backward.
The time of death, as best I can tell, is between eleven and one A.M.
When my killer was here. With me.
I look over at my office, the door closed shut and the lights switched off. By this point, it’s been more than twelve hours, and I still haven’t taken the break-in to the authorities. I guess I have to accept that I’m simply not going to.
If a letter had been on Olivia Pearce, I would have. It would have been definite proof—look, I told you those others were murders. But there isn’t.
So, yes. He didn’t kill her.
But someone did.
Which strikes more worry in my chest. Because Olivia wasn’t just killed. She was tortured. She was arranged in one of the most prominent places in Rosado in a position of submission—kneeling, her hands tied behind her back, her skull split open.
I grip the side of the examination table, taking slow, deep breaths. I tell myself this is a coincidence, that this has nothing to do with the articles Olivia wrote in my defense ten years ago.
But it sounds absurd. It sounds like a lie. And I can’t shake the deep-rooted, shuddery feeling that Olivia is dead because of me.
I force myself to focus on my work. An autopsy is the first step in finding out who did this and getting justice for Olivia. So I began the slow, methodical process, starting with a visual examination.
“Probable cause of death,” I say numbly into my recorder. “Severe laceration to the head.”
Then I move closer, studying the patterns in the cuts: jagged, angry, a bit amateurish. The bruising is intense, too, and suggests she was tied up for several hours, a thought that makes me queasy enough that I have to stop, stepping over to my supply cabinet to take deep, long breaths.
I’ve always told myself I went to mortuary school because of Uncle Vic.
Because he was here for me, in Rosado, when it felt like the entire world loathed me, even my parents.
Because I found peace in the calm, gentle way he guided people through their grief, the way he would spend hours applying makeup to the deceased so that they would look their best.
But it became clear to me early on that I’m not cut out to be a funeral director.
That’s why I went on to study forensic science.
I didn’t want to let go of working with the dead.
And deep down, I’ve always wondered if that’s because my life was touched by death so early on.
A death I caused, even if I didn’t mean to—
You did mean to you knew he would fall down the stairs you did it on purpose
I squeeze my eyes shut, but it’s not enough to stop it, the sudden, terrible onslaught of memories.
How Jessica and Ashley, who I thought were my friends, told Blake I had a crush on him.
How he laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world, then called me a few weeks later and said he’d been thinking about me and did I want to come over? His parents weren’t home.
And I did.
I did, and he kissed me, jamming his tongue into my mouth. It was my first kiss. I thought it was how things were supposed to go, even though I didn’t really like it.
Then he started pulling my top off, and I told him to stop, and he hit me, hard, in the face. Hard enough that I had a black eye for a week. Ms. Staunton told me, two years later, that black eye helped save me.
Because it was photographable proof of what he did.
Everything else he did, you couldn’t see.
The way he slammed me against the wall and yanked my shorts down and shoved himself inside me while I was screaming at him to stop.
The pain was blinding. I can almost feel it now, a lance of fire slicing between my legs.
I press my forehead against the cool wall, trying to remember what my therapist taught me when I was a teenager.
Breathe in for four. Breathe out for four.
But it’s like my lungs can’t get enough air. And I keep seeing it: how I wrenched away from him and shoved him. Not once, like I told everyone, even Ms. Staunton. But twice.
Once to get him off of me.
And then a second time, when I realized he was lined up with the top of the stairs.
My stomach lurches, and I vomit up the remains of the lunch I nibbled at earlier. The splat of it against the floor slams me back into the present.
I’m not sixteen years old. I have not just been raped. I have not just killed the boy who raped me.
I’m twenty-six. I’m a grown woman. I graduated from high school early and went on to study mortuary science and then forensics. I’m a professional.
You let a killer put his hands on you, and you didn’t fucking stop him.
I rise on shaking legs. Olivia Pearce is still lying out on my examination table. I haven’t even cut her open yet.
I should have asked to have her sent to Magnolia. I don’t think I’m strong enough to handle this.
My phone chimes, the sound startling me but also grounding me enough that the overwhelming, sickening panic recedes. I throw down some paper towels on my vomit, peel my gloves off, wash my hands, and check to see who it is.
I assume it’s Ms. Staunton again, as anything related to the investigation would have gone to the office line. Maybe Penelope or Chloe, although I haven’t told them what happened yet.
But when I pick up my phone, the name I see on the screen is the last I expect.
It’s Rowan Hanover.