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I glance toward the bones on my table.

“If this is less interesting than the nineteenth-century clergyman currently on my table who was dismembered, bricked into a rectory dumbwaiter, and subsequently subjected to what I can only describe as amateur orthopedic carpentry, I’m going to be so disappointed.”

Mara stares at me for a long moment.

“Sometimes I forget how fucking weird your job is.”

“Your job involves considerably more living people. I would argue yours is worse.”

“Fair.” She exhales through her nose, but the amusement disappears almost immediately. “I arrested Nole this morning.”

Nole being arrested requires considerably less explanation than the table leg.

“It was initially a simple fender bender,” she continues. “A sedan rear-ended at a stoplight. With the airbags deployed, it was undriveable. When they were loading it onto the tow truck, the trunk popped open.”

She pauses.

“There was a skeleton inside.”

Okay.

That beats the table leg in terms of piquing my curiosity.

“Nole says he was paid to move it. He won’t tell us anything else.”

Nole was the kind of high school fixture who existed primarily in the peripheral vision of the principal’s office. He was a low-stakes mastermind of the absurd, a guy who’d been suspended for everything from running an illegal poker ring in the boiler room to liberating the cafeteria’s entire supply of chocolate milk to protest a nickel price hike.

He operated on a very specific, very mercenary frequency: he knew every secret within the walls of Stillwater High, and he was willing to act on any of them provided the price was right.

Back in tenth grade, I’d personally contributed to his weed fund when I paid him twenty dollars and a sleeve of Oreos to swap out my arch nemesis’s biology PowerPoint with a scratched CD-R containing nothing but a ten-minute loop of Nickelback’s “Photograph” set to low-res footage of a dumpster fire. He’d done it without blinking, slipping in and out of the media center like a gangly, skunky ghost.

Every time I think about it, it makes me laugh.

Seeing him now, caught with a skeleton in the trunk of a sedan, feels like a natural—if somewhat darker—evolution of his career.

“I assume the skeleton isn’t corroborating his story?” I ask.

Mara gives me a flat look.

“They’re old,” she continues. “Weathered. Partial.”

“Statistically speaking, graverobbers skew necrophiliac. Funny how that’s never the information they lead with.”

A calendar reminder pops up on the screen.

Call Mom.

I swipe it away before it finishes vibrating.

Judging by the silence, Mara is contemplating my own murder.

“I think it could be Casey,” she finally says.

A knot forms in my throat.

Casey Whitmore.

Sixteen.