Chapter Twelve
A Prayer for the Dead
Ava swallowed hard. The victim lay where Wax Saint wanted them to find her, a candle close by. Wax glazed her skin. It covered her throat and arms, pooled at her collarbones, and crusted on her hair. For his finishing touch, Wax dripped the candle paraffin around the area like sparkling ice chips.
No! Ava couldn’t get words to come out but a disjointed prayer slipped through her mind for their victim.
She realized tears clogged her throat. She hadn’t prayed for a long time.
Even though she occasionally attended her dad’s church outside of Woodland Park, she hadn’t found it in her heart to pray.
The bitterness that had encased her heart after escaping Wax wouldn’t let her.
Now, the words and tears for a victim she didn’t know flooded her mind.
Lord, why? Please, help me understand why. Please let us catch this man before he hurts another innocent woman.
She kept her face turned away while she gathered her emotions.
Ava pulled in a breath. Let it go. Then she turned to her team. “No one touches anything until the ME and ERT arrive. Photo everything. Cordon off the perimeter.”
Caleb reached for her gloved hand, his full attention on her. He’d seen the crack in her resolve. “You’re doing great. And I’m right here with you no matter what.”
Those simple words were enough to center her. She wasn’t alone in this. She had Caleb. He wouldn’t let her fall apart.
She smiled at him. “Thank you.”
He squeezed her hand before letting it go.
Rachel, a seasoned agent like Ava, appeared shocked for a second before steadying herself and beginning to photograph the scene alongside Shackelford.
“We have no idea how long she’s been dead,” Rachel managed.
“Pour pattern appears uniform, layered, controlled. Matching the first victim.” She looked over at Ava. “And the others.”
Ava let her heartbreak turn to anger and settle into a steely focus. Shadow edged forward drawing her attention. The search wasn’t over yet. The dog was fixed on something. She crouched beside her partner. “Show me what you see.”
The Malinois flicked his eyes along what appeared to be river stones. Ava followed the line and saw it. One “stone” wasn't a stone at all, but an old chess pawn covered in wax. The killer’s mark etched at its base, a cross intersecting a circle.
Ava pointed at the object. “Over here.” Caleb followed her to the spot and waited for Rachel.
“Evidence item one,” Rachel said tightly. “Wax pawn, twenty-three inches from the victim’s left shoulder.”
“Bag it. We’ll check for trace DNA and prints,” Ava told her team.
Larabee flashed his light near the victim’s hairline. “There’s glass embedded along the wax at her temple.”
This new evidence grabbed Ava’s attention immediately.
“More glass. That means they’re important clues.
The glass fragments from the lady in the lake crime scene are now here.
The glass is important. He left the laurel traces on the lady in the lake as well as the laurel flowers at the lodge.
Laurel for place. Glass for a craft perhaps.
The pawn. He’s in control.” She exhaled, white vapor writing in the cold.
“This is all for me. He’s challenging me.
Seeing if I can solve the puzzle pieces and prove myself worthy of him. ”
Shadow’s head snapped left. A low growl rolled through his chest. He stared past the body toward a darker seam in the fir trees. Not a natural trail. A cut. Narrow. Man-made.
Ava rose. “We have our primary crime scene here with the victim. ME can work without us. Agent Novak, I need you and Shackelford to secure the scene until ERT and the ME arrive. Caleb, Larabee, and Rachel are with me. Grace, we’ll need your and Caleb’s wilderness skills, especially through that dangerous stretch.
We’ll check the cut. He obviously wants us to follow it. There’s a reason.”
With Caleb, Ava and Shadow taking the lead, the team threaded single file to keep from contaminating any possible unseen evidence.
The manmade cut was a yard wide and choked with snow and downed branches.
Ava stopped when she spotted the boot prints.
She zeroed her light on them. “We have a set of tracks here.”
Caleb knelt beside the prints. “Looks like the ones we saw at the cabin. No indication he’s carrying anything heavy now.” He sniffed the air. “Do you smell that?”
Ava nodded and directed her light to the trees lining the path. Wax resin was painted on the bark.
“He wanted us to know he came this way.” Ava carefully avoided the boot prints as she and Shadow continued. She’d taken only a handful of steps before her cell phone rang. “It’s Micah,” she told them before putting the call on speaker. “What’s happening there?”
“We have an abandoned car,” Micah confirmed.
Caleb’s gaze locked with Ava’s.
“Any ID on the victim?”
“We have registration for Jennifer Salvado. She’s from one of the neighboring counties.”
“Secure the scene. I’ll call the deputies at command. ERT is on its way here, along with the medical examiner. I’ll send some of our ERT agents your way as well to gather evidence from the car.” Ava paused. “We found our victim. She’s dead. Same MO as before.”
“Geez,” Micah muttered under his breath. “That’s two victims. There should be one more and then...”
“He’s not getting a chance to take the third. We’re going to find him before that happens.” Ava said with emotion. But she wondered how they could stop a killer who was one step ahead of them at every turn.
“I’ll let you know when ERT arrives and what we find.”
“Thank you, Micah. Stay safe.”
Caleb waited until the call ended before challenging her. “At this point we can’t guarantee he won’t take multiple victims, Ava. I think we have to face the possibility there may be more.”
That was Ava’s worst nightmare. She shook her head. “I don’t want to think about that. Let’s keep going.”
Sixty yards down, the path sloped toward an old mining camp. An outbuilding hunched on the lower shelf, little more than three walls and a roof. The fourth had long since yielded to the weather.
“Watch your backs,” Ava told her people. “And be on the lookout for anything that might be a clue no matter how insignificant it might be.”
Ava drew her weapon and advanced on the building. Her people fanned out. She and Caleb entered first with Shadow.
Inside was a sagging wooden bench that held an old miner’s helmet, an old window frame missing its glass, and a sheet of newspaper stiff and covered in wax.
No...Wax had left them another clue to decipher.
“Search,” Ava told Shadow and released his lead. The dog circled twice, stopped at the bench, and sat. On the paper, stamped into congealed wax were HL—the same letters they’d found before.
“Taunt by brand and location?” Larabee asked, photographing and bagging.
Rachel stood in the doorway, tablet against her hip. “Thermal search of the Hidden Lake area didn’t reveal anything useful. We were hoping to find his hideout but no such luck.” She shrugged. “Hidden Lake was a side-jaunt for whatever reason.”
“Or HL doesn’t stand for Hidden Lake but something else,” Ava said and wondered why she hadn’t thought of this before.
“You mean like maybe it’s Wax’s initials?” Caleb eyed the trademark. “That’s pretty cocky thinking we won’t figure it out.”
“He’s obviously confident we won’t.”
Caleb appeared doubtful.
“Think about it,” she said while the notion continued to grow.
“It's smart actually. I’m thinking he was from this area at one time. He still has a strong connection with it, and I don’t think it’s a good connection.
Something bad happened to him here and he’s seeking his revenge.
We need to dig into anyone who might have had a connection to the park or the surrounding area, maybe even the town of Cedar Creek. ”
“I’m on it,” Rachel confirmed and went to work on the tablet.
But what Ava didn’t understand was the perceived connection Wax had to her. She’d never been to this area until she’d been assigned to the FBI’s field office. Yet Wax’s poem was directed at her and him. And the woman in the lake.
Ava followed Caleb’s gaze as he eyed the rear wall where a square cut into the planks had been nailed shut long ago, yet new nails glinted among the old. Three bright, one dull, one all wrong. He pressed his palm to the wood. Cold bled through like an answer. “This opens.”
Ava called command, relaying what they’d found. “We have our third crime scene. We’ll need ERT here as well. I’m sending you the coordinates now.”
“Copy,” Deputy Vaughn confirmed. “ME is thirty out, ERT fifteen.”
She ended the call and met Caleb’s look with one that didn’t need words. The place was old. No one would have lived here in years. There was no fuel, no food supply. This was for staging only. Perhaps the killer was carrying his tools to and from.
Shadow pressed his nose close to one of the nails. Ava eased him back with a palm to prevent contamination.
Caleb slid his knife under the odd nail head. It bent without protest to reveal it was a hook and not a nail. The plank shifted. A dank draft blasted through the opening mixed with the scent of wax.
“Get your masks on,” Ava told the team. “We don’t know what’s in there.” And she wouldn’t put anything past Wax, including trying to harm her people.
Soon, masks came out and snapped into place. Larabee fed a sensor wand into the gap. The camera’s feed showed on Rachel’s tablet. A deep pocket that held a metal stand with a shallow dish covered in wax and a cracked pane of glass against a rock. On the pane, there was a single name written.
Hailey.
And below it was a note to Ava:
Figure it out and solve the riddle to your past.
The skin across her shoulders crawled. “Who is Hailey?”
“Starts with an H. Maybe he’s giving us hints at the identity of the woman in the lake,” Caleb said. “HL?”
“Maybe, but he wants me to know this is all about what happened before. I got away. I rejected his offer to be his student. This is war and he’s coming for me.”
Shadow barked, startling everyone inside.
Rachel’s voice thinned. “Wait, is that a thumb drive?” She pointed to the screen.
“I think so,” Ava whispered. “We need to get all those items out.
Caleb watched the screen. “It’s too narrow to send anyone down. How’d he get them in place?”
Ava pulled in a breath. Let it go. “There has to be another way in.”
Shadow’s chin tipped up, his gaze pinning a knot-hole high in the plank corner.
“What is that?” Caleb asked. He climbed up on the bench and peered inside. “It looks like one of those old-fashioned camcorders. Another clue from the past.” He looked back at Ava.
Another hint from Wax for her.
They resealed the plank and marked it for trace evidence.
“We need to find the entrance,” Ava told them. “Let’s spread out. But no one goes alone.”
By the time they returned to the clearing, ERT techs moved quietly through the woods. Professional stillness settled over the grove as the ME approached the victim.
When the doctor nodded and went to work, Ava stepped away, and in that small sliver of space she let him see what she wouldn’t give the rest. How much it cost her to be back on the hunt for Wax.