Page 37 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

Rue considers me with narrowed eyes before nodding.

“Yes. If you follow the rules.” She starts rummaging through her bag as we walk up the porch stairs, handing me supplies. “Booties over shoes. Gloves on at all times. Touch nothing unless I say it’s okay. Stay behind me, and no taking photos of any kind. Oh, and you’ll need to sign the log. We keep a record of everyone who has access to the scene.”

The hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention when she mentions that last item. Then she bends at the waist to pull the plastic baggies over her shoes, giving me an uninterrupted view of her ass, and I’ll sign anything she puts in front of me because fuck.

Once we’re suited up and I’ve officially put my name on the scene log, Rue sets her bag on the porch and slips a camera on a strap over her head. “Okay, follow me.”

She starts narrating the instant we cross McEwan’s threshold.

“The deceased is Aaron McEwan. Fifty-seven, single, lived alone. Initial reports are that he died from carbon monoxide poisoning.”

I’ve often wondered how serial killers who don’t have chemistry-genius best friends get by. My job last night was to sedate McEwan, flop him in his favorite chair, stage the scene, grab the cat, and get the hell out. Quinn’s carbon monoxide–binding compound took care of the rest.

Let’s see how well we did.

“Is that why all the doors and windows are open?” I ask innocently.

“Yep.” She slides me a smile, and I hide one of my own. So far, this all fits the story I built.

“What makes them think it was carbon monoxide?” I ask with Dr. Mohr-like curiosity.

“You’ll see,” is her answer as we walk toward the living room where Aaron McEwan’s body is sprawled on an easy chair near the fireplace.

“Whoa.” McEwan wasn’t dead when I left, and his postmortem appearance is… different.

“You good?” She slides her eyes over to me, concern on her face. “Is this your first time seeing a body?”

I clamp down on the manic laugh threatening to slip free. “No. I, uh… I’ve seen…” I let my voice trail off so I’m not tempted to give her the precise number and gesture at McEwan’s body. “I’ve just never seen…”

“The hot-pink skin?”

I nod and try to seem queasy instead of interested. McEwan looks like he nodded off after swimming in a vat of cherry Kool-Aid. “I knew it was a sign of carbon monoxide poisoning, but I didn’t know it’d be that pink.”

A gentle pressure on my arm has me glancing down to see that Rue’s peeled back the top of her glove so she can half pat, half stroke me with the exposed section of her wrist.

“Keeping my gloves clean,” she says with a “you can do it, li’l buddy” smile as she makes another pass down my forearm with the back of her wrist. “I know coming face-to-face with death can be a lot. Maybe it’d help if I explained the science behind it?”

This is a first. Someone’s co-regulating me. Hand on the arm, name the distress, give the nervous system something to hold—and it’s Rue doing it while offering to perform serial-killer audio erotica.

Hell yes, touch my arm while you shape your pretty pink lips around each word explaining the science behind my kill so I can remember it when I’m alone in bed tonight, picturing that same mouth just a few feet away from me while I⁠—

“So the skin color is from elevated carboxyhemoglobin in the blood,” she says, oblivious to the stirrings of my cock as she walks me through my own kill. “This kind of death is pretty common, unfortunately. Especially as the weather gets colder and people fire up their gas-powered heaters.”

Having comforted me without contaminating her glove, she uses the tip of her pinkie to position it back in place and starts moving around the chair to take photos of the dead man from every angle.

“Aaron McEwan.” One of the uniformed police officers on the scene looks up from the stack of mail he’s been sorting through. “Isn’t that the landlord with the dead tenants?”

“Yes.” Rue and I answer in unison, then look at each other in surprise. It makes sense that she’d be up on McEwan’s history given her job, but I spoke without thinking. Being near Rue is making me sloppy.

“He’d been blowing off maintenance on the furnace at one of his properties,” she says. “A family of three died in their sleep from carbon monoxide poisoning when the venting failed last winter.”

The young officer raises his brows. “Well, that’s ironic.”

Hell yeah, it is, although Rue’s the one who responds, murmuring, “A little too ironic.”

I look up in alarm.

“Wait,” I say over my jack-rabbiting heart. “Are you saying this was foul play?”