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all the pieces together. It would mean Toby had done some horrible things, and well . . . he couldn’t have. Sure, he was moody, and he certainly had a temper, but the person who was doing all those killings was some kind of monster. After all, these women in the paper had been raped, mutilated, carved, stabbed, and dumped like trash in the woods. And their fingers ...
    And that probably wasn’t the worst of it. She’d read somewhere that police always held back some of the details of the crime so that they could weed out the crazies who confessed to things they didn’t do. So there was probably more. The Toby she knew, as much of a dick as he could be, just wasn’t capable of such brutal things. Okay, so he was uncomfortably weird with her sometimes, the way he stared at her, at her body, with a kind of hungry, angry expression. But people had rough patches in life where they did things, maybe wanted things, that didn’t really define them, per se, that they eventually outgrew. Toby had lived most of his life in a rough patch, really. Then there was that old dog he’d said he found dead, and he’d told her he was only cutting into it to see what it was like on the inside—no worse than hunting, really, because he’d found it already dead. But people experimented, didn’t they? Dad said the boy needed an outlet for that temper of his....
    He killed that dog, and you know it. You knew it then, the voice told her. He killed it like he killed those women.
    No. Just no. No one related to her, with the same blood in his veins and the same DNA and the same formative childhood, could possibly do horrible things like that to other people.
    So maybe Toby had found the box. Kathy picked it up gingerly, the tiny rattle of bones inside turning her stomach as she turned the box. Maybe he’d gone out on a long drive and then a walk in the woods and had come across it just lying there. Maybe.
    Or maybe , that little voice in her head, so sure of itself, suggested, maybe he boiled the flesh off the finger bones of each of his murder victims and kept them as trophies so he could fantasize again and again about the kills . Maybe that was why he had yanked her so violently away from the closet. He hadn’t wanted her to find his little box of treasures.
    She rose on unsteady legs, her shaking hands causing the contents of the box to knock around inside, and carefully made her way back to the closet. She’d put the box back where it had been, and . . . think. She’d think about what to do next. Maybe she could talk to Toby first and tell him what she’d seen. Maybe if she just asked, he could explain everything, and maybe that explanation had nothing at all to do with the local murders. Maybe there was a perfectly go—
    A sharp pain at the back of her head made her cry out. Before she could register it as fingers tangled in her hair, pulling, the box had flown out of her hand, spilling the contents again, and she was on her back on the bedroom floor with Toby straddling her. The usual dead look in his eyes had been replaced by one of abject rage, not like fire but like an ice storm, a screaming, swirling maelstrom of hate.
    It took her several moments longer to see the knife. It was shiny. Clean. It looked brand new. Its polished, silvery blade caught and froze time itself for what seemed like several long minutes before Toby’s distorted voice finally broke through.
    â€œWhat. The FUCK. Are you doing?” His words dropped like stones from his mouth, each segmented phrase punctuated by his hand on her throat picking her up and knocking her head against the floor. He reeked of cheap whiskey.
    â€œI—I,” she croaked. She couldn’t manage more than that. His hand was heavy, and she felt both words and breath forced back down inside her, causing the pounding of her heart to ache in her chest.
    â€œOh, Kat. Silly, stupid Kat.” He brought the point of the