Emma bit her lip. There was something about it that she didn’t like—Quinlan’s rapid-fire questioning had left her feeling vulnerable and confused. But there was no way a DNA test could incriminate her—she
and Sutton would be identical, and refusing would seem suspicious. She nodded.
Quinlan extracted a Q-tip from a clear plastic tube in his briefcase. She opened wide, and he ran it along the inside of her cheek, peering into her mouth like a dentist. Then he briskly slid the swab back in
the tube and slammed his briefcase shut.
“Wait right here,” he said. “I’ll be back in just a few minutes.”
With that he turned to the door and was gone.
An uneasy feeling descended on me in the silence left in his wake. I didn’t trust Quinlan. He was almost as crafty as I’d been. And now he was out of sight. But that also meant that Emma was alone—and he’
d left the files on the table. It was finally time to see how I’d died.
17
BODY OF EVIDENCE
Emma counted to ten, holding her breath so she could hear Quinlan’s movements as he went down the hall. A distant door opened and shut, and then there was silence. When she was sure he was gone, she grabbed
the file that listed her own name.
She flipped it open—and immediately dropped it. The file landed on the table in front of her, gaping open. Paper-clipped to the inside of the folder was a photo of a skeleton.
Emma’s throat went dry. She’d known there would probably be post-mortem pictures in the file, but she hadn’t stopped to imagine what they’d look like. She couldn’t swallow; her tongue felt like sandpaper
inside her mouth. But she took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. What if there were clues the cops hadn’t known to look for? She had to see those pictures.
The body’s empty eye sockets stared straight up at the sky. Brightly colored leaves partially covered it, red and gold and brown. Scraps of skin still clung to the bones, and its long hair spread out behind
it, dried out and bleached red by sun and exposure. The skull’s awful grin was a strange contrast to the faded pink hoodie still zipped around the corpse’s torso.
I gazed at the picture, unable to tear my eyes away from what little remained of the body I’d left behind. Staring at the skull, I could just trace out the memory of my own features—there were my high
cheekbones, my narrow chin. But I didn’t feel much connection with the bones in the picture. They didn’t have anything to do with me anymore. Weirdly, Emma’s body felt more like mine than my own did.
There were other photos, paper-clipped behind the first, capturing the body from different angles. It looked like Sutton had been wearing yellow cotton shorts the night she went to the canyon. Close-ups
revealed splintered bones, and one showed a jagged hole near the crown of the skull.
The more she looked at the pictures, the stranger Emma felt. She’d known for months her sister was dead. Between the killer strangling her in Charlotte’s kitchen and dropping a theater light next to her in
the school auditorium, and most recently, what happened to Nisha, there was really no room for doubt. But still, still, there had been some small, hopeful part of her that thought Sutton might walk back into
town someday, laughing at the success of her best Lying Game prank yet. Staring down at the pictures of the body, though, there was no room left for hope or fantasy.
This was what had happened to her sister. This was all that was left of her.
Of course, everyone thought this was Emma’s body. There was nothing to tell them apart—not even the DNA in their bones. Looking at Sutton’s dead body was like looking at pictures of herself dead.
A dry spasm shot through her, and bile filled her mouth. She went to a low metal garbage can and spit into it, wishing desperately that she’d asked Quinlan for a glass of water before he’d left.
She went back to the table and sat down again, shaking slightly, fighting to suppress her nausea. On the other side of the folder were stacks of forms and reports, collated and stapled. She picked up a facial
reconstruction sketch that showed a young woman’s features, from the front and then again in profile. It was almost spookier than the actual remains—there was something uncanny about seeing her own face,
drawn by someone who had never actually seen her but who had built the image up from her sister’s bones. All the details were right. The artist had gotten the features perfectly, but something was off in the
eyes and the lips. Of course, those would be the hardest things to imagine with only the skeleton for a guide.
Next she picked up a diagram of the crime scene, sketched from multiple angles, that showed both the body’s distance from the road and the spot the investigators thought she’d fallen from, high overhead.