Page 123 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

Her whisper finds me from six inches away.

“Goodbye, Hugo.”

CHAPTER FORTY

Rue

My suspicions start to ping as I approach the house with the first dead guy of the day.

Maybe it’s my years as a death investigator. Maybe it’s intuition that only a seasoned killer carries with her. Or maybe it’s the rookie cop puking his guts out on the front lawn.

“You okay, Officer Dominguez?” I ask as I pass him on the way to the front door.

“Hey, Miz Bellamy.” He lifts his head and scrubs his uniform-sleeved arm across his mouth, his complexion a greenish beige. “It’s b-bad in there.”

My gaze tracks to Bart, who’s mid-eye roll as he waits for me in white disposable overalls.

“The kid’s not wrong,” he says when I reach him, handing me my own Tyvek suit to pull on over my street gear.

“Great.” Behind us, the rookie gives another mighty retch and heaves up everything he, his father, and his grandfather ever ate. “Whatever’s inside can’t be any worse than Dominguez redecorating the rhododendrons.”

Bart snorts. “That’s a boxwood. Do you know anything about plants?”

“I had an extremely rocky childhood,” I say cheerfully as we step inside and follow the buzz of activity to the kitchen.

Bart gives a low whistle as we stand shoulder to shoulder in front of the frail old man impaled on the silverware in his open dishwasher.

“Need to puke?” he asks.

“Nope,” I say. “You?”

“Nope.” He pulls out a pair of gloves. “Let’s do it.”

My suspicions continue to grow as I fire off a series of photos documenting a death that gives every indication of a household accident but is a little too Final Destination for me to brush off entirely. Bart, meanwhile, dictates his observations into a digital recorder similar to the one Hugo found and⁠—

And I’m not thinking about Hugo and what we did last night. I’m thinking about Hugo and why he might’ve gone after a retired junior high violin teacher named Augustine Horne.

When I crouch to get a better look at his injuries, Bart says drily, “Mind the blood.”

I laugh because it’s everywhere. Horne looks like a Dairy Queen dipped cone, coated in a thin layer of chocolate from the nose down, dropped in a dishwasher, and left to melt.

And of course, there’s the smell. No protective overalls in the world will spare the clothes underneath from the almost meaty smell of old blood or the piss- and shit-stench from the body. That’s what I get for wearing dry-clean-only today.

“Elderly male found prone across an open dishwasher door. Scene consistent with a possible trip and fall,” Bart says into his recorder. “Multiple injuries to the face and neck with possible airway involvement. Wounds appear to be from utensils in the silverware basket. Specifically…”

We both lean in to study the objects that pierced Horne’s papery flesh.

“Items from the knife block,” I say, standing to confirm the handles embedded in Horne’s head match the ones in the wooden block on the counter. “And he must’ve kept them sharp.”

I squat back down and fire off a few pictures before carefully moving the hair at the nape of Horne’s neck, where blood’s turned the once-silvery strands dark and crispy. “Did you clock the⁠—”

“Knife poking out next to his C-2 vertebra? Sure did.”

That’s the least cinematic of Horne’s wounds; the most dramatic by far is the gash that damn near split his face in half, creating a grisly death mask. If this is Hugo’s work, which I’m almost entirely certain of by now, I’m extremely impressed. I also understand why poor Trevor Dominguez was tossing his cookies; the crusty glaze on the blade piercing Horne’s eye is especially nasty.

“At least he left me one good one to pull from,” I mutter as I snap a pic.

“What’s that?” Bart glances up from where he’s crouched to study the leathery, split lips.