Not again.
“Cate?” Henry asked sharply. “What is it?”
She jerked her gaze away from the locket, meeting his concerned eyes. “There’s more,” she said quietly. “There will be more graves here. We need to search the whole area.”
Henry listened as Cate quickly spoke to him and Tessa. He was watching Cate for signs that she felt faint again. She’d gone white when she’d first seen the locket in Tessa’s hand, but now her color was back and her speech was rapid, her tone higher than usual as she explained what she’d meant about more graves.
“It’s been eight years,” Cate said. “I was assigned to support a case in a rural Central Washington community. Several graves had been discovered in a wooded area.” She glanced around at the firs. “Not unlike this one. Six women had been killed. All from different cities but within a two-hundred-mile radius.”
“Did you catch him?” Tessa asked.
Cate nodded. “We did. His name was Jeff Lamb, and he confessed.” She looked at the skeleton again. “Each victim was buried with a locket of some type. Inside was a photo of the woman not long before she’d been killed. They were always bound and had tape over their mouths.”
“An odd MO,” Henry said. “You’d think he’d keep the images instead of burying them.”
“Lamb kept images,” Cate said in a grim voice. “We found tons in his home. There were photos from his victims’ everyday lives that he must have taken as he stalked them. And then there were the images of the women being tortured before he killed them.”
Henry watched the fast pulse at Cate’s neck. She seemed stable and in control now, but her face was somber, and he recognized she’d transitioned into work mode. Alert. Focused. Challenged. He hadn’t seen her like this since she’d officially left her FBI job.
It suited her.
He’d often worried she’d find the pace of her bakery and bookstore too slow after the intensity of being an FBI agent.
Does she regret her decision?
He’d asked her a few times, but she’d always asserted she loved the slower speed and having less responsibility.
“Lamb must not have told you about this grave because it was in a different location.” Tessa scanned the immediate ground. “Or possibly graves.”
Cate frowned. “He admitted to the ones we found. I believed him when he said there weren’t more.”
“So this grave is at least eight years old,” Tessa said.
Henry raised a brow. “Don’t you think that’s a big assumption? You can’t be certain he did this. It could be a copycat . . . or coincidence.”
“Good point,” agreed Tessa.
Cate shook her head. “It can’t be a copycat. The public knew a photo had been left with each victim, but they were never told that the photo was in a locket or that the women in the photos had been tortured. I can’t see something this specific being a coincidence either.”
“Someone working the murders could have talked about it to their family or friends,” Tessa pointed out. “Sometimes a hundred people can be involved in a case that size.” Studying the ground, she walked a couple of yards to their left. “See the subtle depression here? I want to dig here next.”
Henry knew that when buried bodies’ torsos collapsed from decomposition, a depression could be created in the ground above them. He saw the faint dip that had caught Tessa’s attention.
“Call the FBI first,” Cate said. “You need someone who knows the background of the Lamb case, if this turns out to be what I think it is.”
Tessa eyed her. “I have someone. You.”
“Absolutely not,” Cate stated. “I’m done with that.”
Henry heard a faint questioning tone behind her firm words.
She wants to be involved.
“I’ll call, but what else can you tell me first?” Tessa asked Cate. “Why did he choose the women he did?”
Cate closed her eyes, her brows coming together in concentration. “He wouldn’t say. They were all mothers. They all had young children.” Her lids flew open. “I almost forgot. He always kidnapped them on the fifth of the month. Not every month, but always on the fifth.”
“Shit,” said Bruce. “That’s just days away.”
“This skeleton has been here for a few years,” Henry pointed out. “I think we would have heard if women were disappearing every month.”
Bruce grinned sheepishly. “True.” He turned to Cate. “Did he tell you why he picked that date?”
“He said it was a coincidence.”
“Six coincidences?” asked Henry.
“A psychiatrist theorized that the date and the fact that the victims were young mothers had to do with some trauma from his childhood.”
Henry didn’t respond. He respected psychology. But not killers. Mental health issues were real; he’d seen more than he could count in a Los Angeles ER. But plenty of people had shitty childhoods and trauma without turning into murderers.
“What’s going on?”
Henry spun around to find Luke Ruell watching them. Luke’s gaze went to the excavation site, and he pushed his hair out of his eyes.
“Is that a skull? Cool.”
His tone was diffident. Henry hadn’t interacted often with the island resident who avoided most people and rarely talked—a rarity on Widow’s Island. Luke’s age was uncertain. Somewhere between thirty and fifty. It was hard to tell behind the thick beard and the hair in his eyes. Luke shaved the sides of his head, exposing intricate tattoos on his skull, but let the dishwater-blond top grow long.
He didn’t have tattoos anywhere else.
That I can see.
Luke owned the kayak-rental shop near the bay, but his business was very seasonal. Henry didn’t know what the man did to support himself the other nine months of the year. He was an odd duck on an island full of unique people.
Even Jerry Hooper thought Luke was weird.
“This is a police investigation,” Tessa told him. “Please leave the area.”
“You don’t own the park,” Luke told her. “I have every right to hike through here.” His gaze went to the grave again. “Got a murder?”
“Deputy Black politely asked you to leave,” said Bruce, stepping between Luke and his view of the grave.
“You gonna make me, big guy?” Luke’s tone was bored.
Luke was pencil thin with spiderlike limbs. His kneecaps protruded and looked as if a mild blow would knock them off. How he managed to lift a kayak was a mystery.
If Henry were Luke, he wouldn’t challenge Bruce Taylor. The deputy was young and muscular.
“Beat it, Luke,” Tessa told him. “Or I’ll tell everyone here what I caught you doing behind the ice creamery.”
Luke flushed. Even his tattoos on his skull reddened. He turned and left without a word.
Cate snorted as Luke vanished into the woods. “What’d he do?”
Tessa wrinkled her nose. “It was last summer. One of the insanely hot days. He was using ice cream like suntan lotion on his chest and shoulders and legs.” She raised a brow. “He was just about to start on body parts that don’t need suntan lotion when I found him.”