Page 124 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

Oops. “He was a violinist, right?”

I point to the two-prong carving fork that entered Horne’s face under his chin to emerge just above his left mandible.

“No more private lessons for him.” Bart stands with a crackling of his knees. “Ready to have him moved?”

I nod, but it’s only when the removal team starts to lift him and I fire off a few photos from this new angle that I spot the problem.

“Bart,” I say urgently.

He ambles forward to stabilize the knives protruding from Horne’s neck and jaw, but the one in his eye is precarious, and I’ve got my hands full of camera.

“A little help?” I call to the room.

Dominguez comes running, his eager-beaverness restored. Then he sees his assignment and blanches.

“No,” he says.

“Yeah.” I nod with my chin at my equipment bag placed on the floor outside the blood radius. “Glove up.”

His eyes dart to the knives in the corpse’s face, and he swallows convulsively.

“Now, kid,” Bart barks. We share an exasperated look as the fit, buzz-cut twentysomething scrambles to follow our directions. To his credit, Dominguez keeps it together and holds the eye knife stable as the crew lifts Horne straight up, letting me slide in to get the shots I was missing. Then they carefully set him face-up on a clean sheet on the floor.

Because Horne’s body is in rigor, it stays in the position it was in at the time of death—folded over the dishwasher door, bent at the waist, one knee lifted and the other stretched behind him—and now that he’s on his back, it looks like he’s trying to ascend to heaven on an invisible ladder while his face acts as the world’s grossest pincushion.

“Hey,” I say to Dominguez, who’s breathing hard through his nose. “What do those white lines on Mr. Horne’s face mean?”

“Umm…” He’s turning green again, but he gamely leans over the body to look closely at the pale grid lines intersecting on the purplish-red skin of the man’s left cheek. “It’s where he was touching a surface and the blood couldn’t pool.” He glances over his shoulder. “The, uh, top of the silverware basket, probably.” Then his eyes snap back to the dark curls of Horne’s lips, and he whispers, “They look like Fruit Roll-Ups.”

“Stay with us,” Bart orders. “What do the grid lines mean?”

“Right.” Dominguez blinks, then nods slowly. “He wasn’t moved postmortem. So it was an accident?”

“Maybe,” Bart says, while I say, “Likely.”

The kid frowns as he looks from Horne’s face to the knife block to the dishwasher again, his choppy breaths starting to level out. “Who puts their knives point-up like that?”

Dammit. I was hoping no one would notice that, just like I’m hoping nobody will think to ask why Horne put his good knives in the dishwasher in the first place.

Bart just shrugs. “Who knows why anybody does anything?” He pats his pockets and pulls out his crinkled pack of cigarettes. “Who knows why I keep smoking these cancer sticks? And who knows why this guy was allowed to keep teaching after half a dozen sexual abuse allegations against him?”

Now it’s Dominguez and me sharing a look.

“Really?” I start to ask, but Bart’s already headed for the door with his lighter in hand.

“I’ll ask around,” Dominguez tells me. Having recovered from his messy corpse trauma, he wanders off to extract gossip from his fellow cops. And that’s when I find the plant cutting in Augustine Horne’s pajama cuff.

Our falling-out was so swift and brutal that I never got to ask him about it. But this is him. It’s Gomez and it’s Hugo, and this little sprig is for me.

I covertly squeeze my thighs together at the memory of that soft, almost reverent “fuck” as he came and the slap of his hand on the wall. For one ironic moment, I wished I had cameras in his half of the duplex so I could watch those big hands working his dick, could see his beautiful face twist in pleasure as he came.

I’m still furious with him. Of course I am. But apparently, it’s not that hard to get off on someone while being pissed at them at the same time.

I glance around the room, confirming that nobody’s paying any attention to the all-work, no-play investigator messing around with the grossest body in recent memory. It lets me turn and casually drop the cutting into my equipment bag to keep it from becoming evidence.

I wasn’t sure what I’d do if I came across another of his scenes, particularly one that had questionable evidence for me to flag. At least now I have my answer: I won’t turn him in. Even if we never speak again, I’ll keep covering up his kills, and I’ll tell myself it’s nothing more than the threat of mutually assured destruction.

That decided, I continue examining the body for any trace evidence I need to eliminate before the return of my partner, but the earthly remains of Augustine Horne are otherwise clean. I’m wrapping up when the smell of cigarette smoke reaches me a full five seconds before Bart does.