Ollie froze. And then he covered his face, shaking his head in disbelief. “That might be the actual worst thing that anyone has ever said to me.”
“No!” As Makani burst into laughter, she smiled with all her teeth. “I mean, I stand by my assessment. But I swear I have pictures that are just as bad. Worse, even.”
“I demand proof.”
“Fair enough. The next time you’re at my house, take a peek under my bed.”
Ollie blinked. And then his eyebrows rose, perhaps at the mention of her bed.
“Seventh-grade swim team.” Makani shuddered as she recalled her flat chest, gawky posture, and unflattering suit. “Let’s leave it at that.”
The microwave let out an extensive series of beeps. As Ollie removed the steaming burritos, he glanced at her. “You’re a swimmer?”
Shit.
She couldn’t believe it had slipped out. Since the age of seven, she’d dived competitively, but her grandmother was the only person here who knew it. Osborne didn’t even have a swim team. And even if it did, those days had passed.
“I used to swim.” She looked away. “A little.”
Her eyes snagged on a brown file folder. It was sitting in the center of the breakfast table. She didn’t have to open it to know what it contained.
Ollie followed her gaze. “See? He’s practically asking me to read it.”
“Why didn’t he take it with him?”
“I’m sure he just forgot. Happens all the time.”
The case file was thick. “Isn’t a good memory kinda important for an officer?”
Luckily, Ollie didn’t take offense. “That’s why they write everything down. Cops do shit-tons of paperwork.” He shrugged. “Memories aren’t reliable, anyway.”
Makani wished that she could forget. In the darkest hours of the night, her own memory was keen and cruel.
“You can look if you want.” Ollie’s voice tensed. “It isn’t pretty.”
Of course she wanted to look—sheer human curiosity demanded it—but there would be no unlooking once she’d done it. Her fingertips crawled toward the file anyway. They recklessly flicked it open to reveal a stack of photographs and papers. A female body lay on her back, right arm hanging limp from a bed. Her neck had been carved open by five crude slices. One for the mouth, two for each eye. X and X.
Dead cartoon eyes.
In Makani’s imagination, this scene, this smiley face, had been tidy and precise, but in reality . . . it was a bloodbath. The head was tilted too far back to see Haley’s real eyes. The longest cut was deep and vicious, and her neck skin flapped open in a jagged, ugly gash. Her hair, clothing, and bedsheets were soaked with enough blood to curdle a butcher’s stomach. Blood had dried inside her nostrils.
Makani closed the file with a shaking hand.
“Bad, right?” Ollie said.
It wasn’t just bad. It was horrific.
A real dead body looked different from the ones on television or in the movies. There was nothing artful about it. Nothing positioned. Haley’s body looked lifeless—but not like life had been taken away from it. Like it had never had life.
Ollie pressed his fingers to his temples. “I should have warned you.”
“You did.” Makani hugged herself. Was Matt in that stack of photos, too, or did he have a separate file? The brutality of the crime overwhelmed her. Someone did this. A real person had crept into Haley’s house and murdered her in her own bed.
“Any chance the police have a lead?” she asked.
Ollie shook his head. “But they do think it’s probably someone a lot smaller than Matt.”
“So, not another football player.”
“Right.”
“Why?”
He waited for her to meet his eyes. “Are you sure you want to know?”
Makani nodded.
“Before the killer did . . . what they did, they stabbed Matt in the gut. But his abdomen had nothing to do with the final display of his brain. So, he was probably attacked by someone who physically couldn’t go straight for his head. They had to weaken him first. Bring him down to their level.”
Perhaps the killer was female, after all.
Dead cartoon eyes. Blood inside her nostrils.
Makani became aware of a dinner plate being pushed gently against her stomach.
“Hey,” Ollie said. “It’s nicer in my room.”
She stared down at the warm plate. Was Matt stabbed once in the abdomen or had it taken multiple jabs for him to go down?
Wordlessly, she accepted the burritos. Ollie carried their water glasses. As the stairs creaked beneath their feet, Makani wondered how many gruesome pictures he’d seen since his brother became a cop. Sure, there had never been deaths in Osborne this violent before, but people died by accident all the time. People like his parents.
Did it get easier to look at the photos? Or did it get harder, knowing that so many people died so young—and in such awful ways? Did seeing the proof of this make you more paranoid or more careful? Or did it just harden you?
Old photographs were everywhere. A framed studio portrait of his whole family hung at the top of the upstairs landing. Ollie was so little that his mother held him on her lap. What was it like for him to look at this one every day?
“It’s this one,” he said, pulling the phrase from her mind.
Makani had assumed that his bedroom would be as black and unembellished as his wardrobe, so when he opened the door, she blinked in surprise.
The room was filled with sunlight and signs of life. Even the kitchen clung to a whiff of abandonment, but here, Ollie’s ubiquitous paperbacks were spread across every surface. There were too many for his shelves, so they’d spilled onto his rug, been stacked on top of his desk and under it, and even lay in messy piles on his unmade bed. With its heap of mismatched blankets, the bed looked like the coziest spot in the entire house.
Makani set down the plate on his desk and picked up the closest book, Jupiter’s Travels. “Four years around the world on a Triumph,” she read aloud. On the cover, a man in an old-fashioned leather jacket rode an old-fashioned motorcycle. The paperback smelled old, too, like dusty shelves and faint mildew. She used it to gesture around the room. “I knew you liked to read, but . . . wow.”
Ollie shrugged with his hands in his pockets. “I get them from garage sales and the used bookstore in East Bend. I haven’t read them all. I just keep picking them up.”
“I wasn’t making fun of you. My last boyfriend read a lot, too.”
Shit. Double shit.
Ollie wasn’t her boyfriend. They barely knew each other. She wanted to know more about him—she wanted him to be her boyfriend—but they were each still standing behind a wall of unspoken history. She decided to act like she hadn’t meant anything by it and casually picked up another book. Glanced at him. His pale skin was unable to hide an emotional flush. At least he didn’t seem turned off by the idea.
Makani had been surprised in Darby’s car yesterday morning when she’d realized that Ollie was more shy than he was rebellious, but she was even more surprised now to realize that she found his shyness attractive.