“Dean's here?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “He and Xavier showed up about half an hour ago.”
“How is he?” I ask.
“Quiet. But seems really eager to get into the case.”
“Really?”
Sam nods and heads for the door while I pick up another couple of boxes and bring them into the house. As soon as Dean and Xavier see us with the containers, they follow us out to the car and help us bring in the rest in one trip. My office is too small to accommodate all of us and the sheer volume of paperwork within those cases, so we take them to the dining room instead.
This is the room where I can remember weeknight dinners with my grandparents, and my mother's angel biscuits for Christmas. Dinners were always perfectly served, and the family ate them gathered around the table. The same went for breakfasts and lunches most of the time, too.
As much as I would like to keep up the tradition and make my grandmother proud, I have to admit my dining room doesn't see very many formal meals anymore. If we eat at the table, more often than not, it's in the kitchen. When we aren't in there, we're eating in the living room or out on the patio.
But the dining room does serve very well as a makeshift war room when I'm at home and need more space to spread out than my office allows.
While Sam and Xavier start to organize the cartons so we can dig through the cases according to the timeline, I pull Dean aside.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" I ask. "You don't have to."
"Yes, I do."
"Dean, I know…"
"Emma, you threw yourself back thirteen years to find out what happened to Julia Meyer. Because you never let go of it. I've never let go of this. Our lives overlapped in this park. Three years after Violet disappeared, Julia did. The police wouldn't listen to either of us. You got your ending. I haven't gotten mine. I need to do this."
I nod. "All right. Then let's do it."
Chapter Twenty-Two
"I know the anniversary is a central thread among all of these, but why? Violet's death was the first, but was that for a reason?"
“You mean was she killed on that date for a specific reason, and everybody else was killed around that date because of her?” Sam asks.
“Exactly,” I nod. “It’s what you always say: no coincidences. We need to figure out why this date. And what about other threads that they share? There have to be other similarities. I can't imagine this was just a random thing. Some killer who goes up to the campground and knocks people off just because he sees them. So, look at the victims. The circumstances of the deaths and disappearances. How are they related?”
“They're not,” Dean says. “That's the problem. Violet was a four-year-old girl. The next year the two kids who went missing were, what, fourteen? Then the two years after that, the victims were teenagers, too. Except for the twenty-year-old. It was mostly male victims, but there were also two females.”
“That's true,” I say. “And none of them has any family links except for the cousins in the last group. They didn't know each other or go to the same schools or have any friends in common with the other groups. The last four victims were known to have visited Cabin 13, where Violet was staying with her parents.”
Saying the words “Cabin 13” out loud sends a silent chill down my spine, but I push it away. The exact same number as the cabin I stayed in in Feathered Nest all those years ago, the same one that became the central hub of so many unraveling mysteries in my life. That has to be just a coincidence. Right?
“Weren't the ones from the second year staying nearby, too?” Sam asks.
“Yes,” I say. “You're right. Cabin 12, the next one over. But not any of the other groups. They were staying on the other side of the lake. So even that isn't a complete link.”
“Neither is the cause of death,” Dean says.
I look over the papers spread out across the dining room table. I shrug.
“Well, you can't really say that. The cause of death was identified in two of the four victims confirmed deceased. They were both asphyxiated. Most likely by manual strangulation. Animals had gotten to another of the bodies and scattered the bones. Some of those who disappeared were never recovered, so there was no way to conclusively determine death. And Violet was too badly decomposed to clearly determine death,” I say.
"But it was unlikely to have beenmanual strangulation," Xavier points out. "There's no mention of a broken hyoid bone."
"That's true," I nod. “Which means there are inconsistencies in the causes of death. But that isn't completely unheard of in serial killers. Some choose different methods of killing depending on the victim. There are similarities in how the bodies were found. Violet was in the cave, sitting up and resting back against the wall as if she was just relaxing, or as if she was playing hide-and-seek. Logan Boyer was in a sleeping bag, looking as though he was asleep. Terrence Walker, one of the victims from the third year, was found sitting up against a tree at the swimming hole.”
“What’s your point?” Dean asks.
“They were staged. The bodies found were staged to look as if they were doing something in life. There’s obviously no way to know for sure, but if I had to make a guess, I would say the body that was found scattered around had also been staged in some sort of position out in the open, where the animals were able to find it. That tells me this is the same person. This isn't some sort of copycat thrill killer, where people come back to the campground year after year and kill random people. This is the same person coming back to his hunting
