Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Rue
“Final Destination.”
Hugo’s nostrils flare at my soft murmur. “What?”
“Oh. Nothing,” I say quickly.
Sloppy. Stupid.
I’ve been enjoying talking Hugo through my process so much I forgot where sharing and caring needed to stop.
In my almost six years working for the ME’s office, I’ve come across a handful of elaborate accident scenes that were a little…
off. Wound geometry that didn’t quite match the likely angle of impact for someone who slipped getting out of the bathtub.
A highball glass sitting on the pristine end table, not the one covered in moisture rings from the ghosts of old-fashioneds past. An overdose sprinkled with a light dusting of the talc you find inside disposable gloves.
A good medicolegal death investigator would document the hell out of those discrepancies, have the police techs bag up the evidence, and prepare a report suggesting a nonnatural death requiring a thorough investigation.
I’m a very good medicolegal death investigator, but I did none of those things in the half dozen cases that immediately spring to mind, and there’s one very good reason for that: each of the dead men was already on my list or would’ve ended up there eventually.
So I brushed away the powder and explained how the dead guy might’ve been twisted when he shattered his skull against the bathroom vanity.
And that highball glass? Hey, people sometimes switch hands when it’s a three-cocktail kind of night.
Bart rarely bothers to review my work before I submit it, and if I’ve written a logical, sound, and convincing report—which I do, always—the ME signs off with zero reservations.
After all, what’s more believable: a series of unfortunate events leading to a death in the home, or a meticulous serial killer hard at work staging elaborate Rube Goldberg mishaps?
I even joked about it with Fi, saying it was like the horror-movie version of death was out there Final Destination-ing on my behalf.
But now I’ve met Gomez. He stages his kills to look like accidents and goes after targets like Aaron McEwan, who was on my own “someday” list. Hell, Gomez even told me he had a project to keep himself busy until we meet again.
This is Gomez’s kill. Those other cases were probably his too.
“Rue?”
I snap back to attention, barely able to hide my delight at this discovery.
But Hugo’s jaw is hard enough to crack the marble fireplace hearth at my back, and I realize I’ve been staring at him the whole time a nuclear bomb was exploding through my brain.
“Sorry.” I shake my head. “Just thinking about the case.”
The case. The one I’m here to work. And my work could keep Gomez off the police’s radar yet again. After all, I tucked that little leafy boy into the recliner to avoid adding a single thing to the possible evidence pile, and that was before I knew it might be Gomez’s calling card.
I’m frozen again wondering how many of those cuttings I’ve found and discarded over the years.
There was the guy with the ladder, that lawn mower accident from the summer, the dude who was bitten by his venomous snake.
Wasn’t there a little spray of those spatula-shaped leaves at that bathroom vanity scene?
I’ve known Gomez for far longer than I realized.
“Neighbor girl.” Hugo’s voice is worried, and I jump to attention.
“Shit!” I force a laugh. “I clearly shouldn’t have skipped lunch today. Good thing this turned out to be an open-and-shut case.”
“So you’re still thinking it was accidental?”
God, no. My vigilante situationship did this.
“Yes,” I say firmly, and my decisive tone works because his tense shoulders slowly drop as he exhales a long breath and straightens the cuffs of his hideous cardigan.
Unlike the lightness I saw there earlier, his face is the expressionless mask I’ve seen cops wear when they’re forcing themselves to stay composed at a grisly crime scene.
“Zero judgment, Dr. Mohr.” I shoot him an encouraging smile. “You can wait outside if it’s too much. I know you’re used to clients who are still breathing.”
This finally pulls a smile back to his face. “No, no. I’m fine.” Then he does that thing with his glasses that I’m starting to find almost endearing, which clearly means I’ve been spending too much time with him.
With him, thinking about him, listening to his bizarre musical choices bleeding through our shared wall.
“Your nannies.” I start chattering on a new subject, hoping to pull him out of his own head and keep myself from dwelling on my mind-blowing discovery. “Were any of them big fans of Motown?”
He blinks at my non sequitur, his face relaxing into a more Hugo-ish smile. “Yes, actually. How’d you know?”
I grin at him. “C’mon, like you’re not fully aware of how thin our walls are.”
His answering smile’s almost… wicked. There’s knowledge in that smile that no thirty-four-year-old probable virgin should possess, and a pulse of heat hits me low in my belly at the things he might’ve heard me do at night alone in my bed.
My bed that shares a wall with his.
Oh my god, why is it only now occurring to me that this man has lain awake at night, adjusting his glasses as he listens to the hum of my vibrator?
“Dead battery,” calls a voice from the hallway to the bedrooms. My eyes flutter shut at the unfortunate overlap of my intrusive thoughts and Officer Dominguez’s report on McEwan’s carbon monoxide detector situation.
“Guess he should’ve invested in rechargeable ones.”
I jump at Hugo’s murmured words in my ear.
“How did…” Then I narrow my eyes. No way is my irritating neighbor going to trick me into talking about the care and feeding of my sex toys in the middle of a goddamn crime scene.
“Behave yourself.” I point a gloved finger at him. “What’s gotten into you today?”
He buries his hands in his pockets and offers me a lopsided smile. “Just enjoying you in your element.”
“I’m going to talk to my landlord about better soundproofing,” I mutter before I force my attention back to Trevor Dominguez. “How was the rest of the upstairs?”
“Spick and span,” the eager-beaver rookie says. “Even the underwear in the drawer was folded.”
“Well, that’s serial-killer behavior if I’ve ever heard it,” I say with the confidence of a serial killer whose underwear drawer is utter chaos.
“Hey,” Hugo laughingly objects. “I fold my underwear.”
“It never once crossed my mind that you don’t.” I grin at him as the ridiculous idea unfurls in my mind. “Should we check your crawl space for bodies next?”
His brows lift incredulously. “Me? A serial killer?”
It’s such a ridiculous idea that I have to laugh. “The neighbor is always the last to know.” I mimic holding a microphone under my chin. “He was so quiet, kept to himself. I only saw him carrying a bloody chainsaw that one time, so this really came out of nowhere.”
One corner of his mouth tilts up, but whatever he’s about to say is lost when Braunstein asks the room at large, “Anybody find the source of the blue stones?”
There’s a chorus of noes from the techs and police who’ve fanned out through the house.
“You good for a bit?” Bart waves his battered pack of Parliaments at me, and I give him a thumbs-up.
Any evidence fudging I need to do will be easier if my partner’s not looking over my shoulder.
And bless his heart, he doesn’t wait for me to finish nodding before he’s parked a cigarette between his lips and beelined to the door.
“You might want to join Bart outside for this part,” I tell Hugo as I unzip my evidence kit.
“Oh yeah?” He brightens, seemingly ready to rise to the challenge I’m about to throw his way, the big weirdo.
“Ever watch someone take a vitreous humor sample?” I ask as I select a needle and approach McEwan’s body.
“No.” He cocks his head, calm and curious.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.”
I place the thumb and index finger of my left hand on the corpse’s eyelids and gently pry them open, exposing the dull, milky orb underneath.
“The fluid in the eye is invaluable in postmortem toxicology reports,” I say as I carefully insert the needle into the outer corner of the sclera, angled toward the center of the eyeball. “Less decomp, less contamination.”
I pull back on the plunger to extract the fluid, and the eyeball softens under my fingers.
“How you doing?” I glance over my shoulder at Hugo, braced for puke but surprised to see nothing but rapt attention.
“You’re fucking amazing,” he breathes.
I tell myself that the shiver rippling through me is from hearing stuffy Dr. Mohr curse and not from the awe in his voice. Either way, I almost fumble the syringe.
“Hugo!” My laugh’s more of a wheeze. “I only have one other shot at this. You can’t distract me like that.”
“Sorry.”
He doesn’t sound sorry, and I’m not terribly sorry about the pleased little smile on his face. I hastily cap the needle and busy myself storing it safely.
“I threw up the first time I did one of these,” I tell him in a low voice for his ears only. “Eyes don’t really bother me, but there’s something about sticking a huge needle into one for the first time that upsets the system.”
But not Hugo’s, apparently. He leans closer to study the slight depression beneath McEwan’s now-closed lid. In fact, he’s mostly been steady in a setting that would send the average civilian screaming for the door, which has me wondering what he’s seen in his life that prepared him for this.
“Would you be able to let me know what turns up from the, uh, eye fluid?” he asks, his hands in his pockets.
“I can, but it’ll take a couple of weeks, and the report itself will be pretty technical.”
He shrugs. “Clinical psychology emphasizes the biopsychosocial model, so I’ve got a hard science background.”
The casual confidence. Jesus. Where has this guy been hiding?
Maybe it’s for the best he didn’t bust this out at our mailboxes. If he had, I might’ve been tempted to—
“Found the rocks!”