Page 39 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

She looks at it for another beat before moving to McEwan’s body and bending over as if she’s examining it. But her focus isn’t on the pink corpse as she slides the little sprig between the cushion and the arm.

Her action looked casual enough to anyone buzzing around the room with a job to do, but my only job right now is to watch her, and I saw how carefully she placed it so it’s just out of sight. A woman not wanting to fill out a form in triplicate would have put it back where she found it and declared it irrelevant. But she protected the little scrap from my yard without a flicker of an eyelash or a word to her partner.

Why? And what has she done with the other cuttings I’ve left for her as a sign of my quiet devotion? I’m sure she overlooked some and brushed others aside, but this one she sheltered, possibly for the first time. And I watched her do it.

I may never recover from this.

Rue, meanwhile, straightens with a soft curse. “Damn. I left my evidence kit in my bag.” She turns to me with a coaxing smile, waving her gloved fingers at me. “Would you grab it from the porch? It’s the black zippered pouch.”

My answering nod probably looks manic, but fuck, I’d cheerfully remove the spleens of her enemies with a ballpoint pen and a couple of rubber bands. Of course I don’t mind grabbing her evidence kit.

On my way back to her, the lead detective steps into my path, having finally noticed there’s an interloper on the scene.

“Excuse me,” the woman says. “You are…?”

Oh, you know. Just the killer returning to the scene of his crime.

“Sorry.” I hold my hand out to shake. “Hugo Mohr.”

She’s even shorter than Rue, her close-cropped curly hair more gray than black, and she ignores my extended hand with the brusqueness of a veteran detective who’s seen too much to put up with my shit.

“And you’re at my crime scene because…?” Her already cool gaze turns downright chilly.

“Because Dr. Mohr responded to the MCRT call of a child in distress,” Rue says, appearing next to me. The smell of her hair invades my lungs, helping ratchet down the tension building in my neck and shoulders over every decision I’ve made in the past fifteen minutes and maybe also the past fifteen years. “He’s the best clinical psychologist in the city.”

A second compliment from Rue. All of a sudden, there’s an entirely new tension gathering in my lower body. As a bonus, her words chase the suspicious expression off the other woman’s face.

“Oh, yes. Good work on that,” she says. “I’m Detective Leah Braunstein.”

“Detective.” I nod in greeting, my gaze dropping to the gun at her hip. She rests her hand on it, her thoughts scrolling across her face like a Times Square billboard: the touchy-feely talk-therapy man isn’t comfortable with firearms.

Well, she’s not wrong. Guns aren’t my style.

“Don’t worry,” Rue says. “He’s mine. I’m keeping an eye on him.”

He’s mine. Imagine if she actually meant that.

All business again, she gestures for me to follow her back to the corpse, and dammit, I cannot be sporting wood next to a dead guy. Talk about raising questions.

She smiles at me as she pulls out a long probe and slides it into McEwan’s abdomen. “Looks like TOD was around one a.m.”

Well, damn. That’s exactly what Quinn predicted it would be when she created a concoction to amplify the effects of minor amounts of CO in the blood. Now, if I can get Rue to share the rest of the toxicology findings with me, my partner in chemistry-based crimes will be elated.

“Take a look at this,” the tech working on the fireplace says, and Rue finishes repacking her probe before walking to the black marble column running from the floor to the ceiling. It provides a dramatic container for the inset glass box with its ten black firestones arranged in a row on the bottom. The setup is ostentatious as fuck and completely out of place in this otherwise modest home.

I shouldn’t involve myself. I should not involve myself.

“How much do you think a fireplace like that costs?”

Oops, I involved myself.

Rue hums. “Good question. Bart?”

“On it.” He bends over to look for a manufacturer’s name, then starts typing it into his phone, one heavy finger jab at a time. His bushy salt-and-pepper brows lift when the page loads, and the figure he announces a few seconds later is so large that the room falls silent but for a low whistle from one of the uniformed officers. If I needed more proof that I made the right call in killing McEwan, it’s right there on Rue’s disgusted face.

“This thing cost thirty-nine thousand dollars?” Braunstein asks.

“Before any remodeling and installation costs,” Bart confirms.