“Julie and I have searched unsuccessfully for a house for her to rent,” he said. “We don’t have the space in our home, and I won’t let her sleep on the couch for a month, but Chris found her a place down the street,” he said, referring to the island’s real estate agent.
“That’s great. It’ll be nice to have her close.”
Bruce’s lips curved. “She’s an opinionated character, so she’ll fit in just fine on Widow’s.”
“Bruce!” Tessa yelled from the grave site. “Bring some water.”
He grabbed two more bottles and went back to work.
Cate’s instinct urged her to examine the grave site, to search for clues as to why the woman had been buried in such a remote area. Her brain wanted the challenge of solving the puzzle, working the investigation. She’d done it for years. She’d loved her job, but after she was shot on a routine interview, her mind couldn’t handle the stress any longer.
She tried to distract herself from the grave and thought about relaxing on the big rock. Maybe stretch out in the sun. It’d be a perfect lounger for sunbathing if it wasn’t in the middle of nowhere. And that’d be rude when three people were tirelessly working close by. Instead she closed her eyes and listened for sounds of the forest beyond the digging and low conversations.
A faint electrical tickle went up her spine as a pocket of cold air touched her neck and arms. Her eyelids flew open, and she scanned the meadow.
Twenty yards away, a wisp of rising steam hovered above the grass. And then vanished.
“Ruby?” Cate whispered. Infamous Ruby Bishop was the island’s ghost. Some locals believed they had seen her on the cliff on the island’s southern edge known as the Widow’s Walk. But Cate had a special connection to the spirit: Ruby was her great-great-grandmother.
The chill. The electricity in her spine. The wisp.
No one else had mentioned those sensations when they’d claimed to have seen Ruby.
Cate had encountered her long-dead ancestor a few times since she was a child but had kept her sightings—and sensations—to herself, worried she’d sound like a nut.
She felt the tickle again, and an overwhelming urge to act now made Cate hop off the rock and approach Tessa and Henry, who had their heads together, closely examining something on Tessa’s palm.
Drawing closer, Cate watched Tessa remove a locket from a dirty plastic bag.
Her lungs stopped as her gaze locked on the large piece of jewelry. She didn’t recognize it. She was positive she’d never seen it before.
Tessa flicked it open as Cate arrived. “Shit,” muttered Tessa.
The image inside was water damaged, but Cate could see the bound hands of the naked woman in the photo. She froze, her vision locked on the picture.
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
