Page 43 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

“As for the how,” Hugo says, raising his hand like we’re in school, “he did have a cat.”

This draws an actual smile from the dour lead detective. “I can’t tell you how many things my cats have broken.”

“Okay,” I say. “The cat⁠—”

“Shadow,” Hugo interjects.

“Shadow knocks over the bowl. It breaks.” I pantomime a crash and an explosion. “Stones everywhere. McEwan sweeps them up, throws them away, misses a couple. But how do three of them end up there?”

I gesture at the fireplace.

“My third wife owned a lawn mowing business.” Bart’s back from his outdoor sojourn, cigarette smoke clinging to his jacket. He’s been wearing it nonstop for the past month, and I’m ready to strip it off him and dry-clean it myself.

“And?” Braunstein asks impatiently. She has no patience for my admittedly slow-moving partner.

He shrugs. “When mower blades run over rocks, they can shoot sideways like bullets. She had tons of insurance payouts to replace cracked windows.”

Dominguez looks at Bart like the only cracked window is in his brain. “Are you saying that McEwan was mowing his carpet?”

Bart gives him such a scornful look that I have to turn my head so the kid doesn’t catch my twitching lips.

“No,” my partner says with exaggerated patience. “But what’s the carpet equivalent of mowing?”

My spidey-sense starts tingling. Bart may look bored out of his skull in the field, but his brain’s always spinning underneath with observations that can crack a case wide open.

“Gimme a second,” I mutter, walking the perimeter of the open floor plan until I find what I’m looking for near the laundry room.

“Voilà.” I gesture like a game show host at the robot vacuum on its charger. “What are the odds that McEwan had it scheduled to run at a certain time every day, and when it hit a few stray rocks last night, they ended up lodged in the fireplace?”

“Which was already partially clogged,” says the tech who opened the vent. “So between the debris on the inside, the three new stones, and the firewood⁠—”

“Unnecessary firewood.” Hugo lifts a finger as he offers his home decor critique. “It’s a gas fireplace.”

“Not the point, but agreed on the affectation.” Braunstein has her hands on her hips as she surveys the table, the path to the fireplace, and the body in the chair. “If the fireplace was also on a nightly timer, the CO would’ve been building up slowly thanks to the vent issues.”

“And then yesterday, the rocks were the last straw. It’s the perfect storm,” Dominguez says with the smugness of a teacher’s pet.

Bart harrumphs. “Odds of a programmed vacuum kicking rocks around: fairly high. Odds of all three of those rocks ending up lodged in the vent: low.” Then he shrugs and crinkles the cigarette pack in his pocket, already planning his next trip outside. “But we’ve seen weirder things.”

“We have,” I murmur while my heart pumps hard in my chest. Because the odds of Gomez being the one who carefully placed those rocks in the vent? Sky fucking high.

Dominguez looks between Braunstein, Bart, Hugo, and me, practically vibrating with excitement. “Did we do it? Did we solve it?”

“I mean… technically, the Roomba did it.” Hugo meets my eyes, his own glinting with amusement, and while the lab techs start setting up a laser pointer to try to determine stone trajectories, I gesture at him to follow me to the porch.

“You did so well on your first crime scene,” I tell him, almost adding, Good boy, but stopping myself just in time.

Pink touches his cheeks, and he does the hair-glasses-cardigan twitching like a madman.

“Well, you know, Rue,” he says, and I can tell from the increased hunch of his shoulders that he’s about to give me a Dr. Bore lecture. “When a professional maintains a neutral facade, it can encourage sharing. So I suppose it’s a habit I’ve picked up over the years.”

The Rue from last year would’ve clawed her own skin off rather than listen to another second of this boring drone. But something shifted when I wasn’t paying attention, and now I see past the lecture. Past the exterior.

“You don’t have to do that, you know.” I strip off my gloves so I can touch him with more than the back of my hand. “You can just tell me you don’t like people getting a look under your Dr. Mohr mask.”

His gaze drops to where my fingers are wrapped around his, and the discomfort I expected to see as I walked him through the crime scene is there in his parted lips and furrowed brow. But it’s his eyes that get me. They’re wary. Hell, he almost looks afraid, like nobody’s ever called him on this before.

“Now who’s the drive-by therapist?” he mutters.