"I'll be back in less than five minutes. Which flower bed was Nutmeg digging in?"
Her arms trembled, but she stood a little straighter. "The one with the hibiscus on the side of the house."
Thankfully, that was specific enough. Only one of the beds near the house had hibiscus.
He stepped away from her just long enough to shove on his shoes. He'd been sleeping in jogging shorts and a T-shirt. That was good enough for this investigation. He wasn't going to leave his gun behind though.
Lena sat on the sofa, hugging herself, Nutmeg at her feet.
He scooped up Nutmeg and deposited him in her lap, which seemed to comfort both of them. She wrapped her arms around the little dog and held him to her chest like a child hugging a teddy bear, which was exactly what Nutmeg looked like anyway.
"I'll be right back. Remember, don't open the door."
"I won't."
He hated leaving her, but he needed to see this for himself.
He set the alarm and sprinted to the main house. When he found the flower bed Lena had described, he turned on his phone's flashlight and shone it around the ground. It didn't take him long to find a disturbed area. If Nutmeg hadn't alerted Lena to his find, no one would have looked behind the flowering bush in the narrow space between the bush and the house.
He knelt in the soft earth and immediately saw part of a hand exposed, likely female. A foot away, blond hair protruded from the freshly disturbed soil.
He hated what he was about to do. But he absolutely had to do it.
The task sickened him. Not because he had a weak stomach, but because it broke his heart. No way on earth he wasn't looking at a murder victim. And by the look of the hair and the hand, it was a young woman. But he had to get a positive ID.
To describe her resting place as a shallow grave was a gross understatement. This was done in haste. Desperate haste. Which is why Nutmeg had uncovered part of her so quickly. He brushed away just a few inches of soil, guessingwhere the face was. He examined the woman with his flashlight.
He didn't know who she was, but he'd studied enough pictures to know the woman lying in Emil Van Horn's hibiscus bed was not Cassidy. Relief flooded through him.
He'd have good news for Lena, but this poor soul was still a murder victim. And she'd been killed in the last few hours. Right under his nose.
He took several pictures of her face from different angles for WhiteRock to use for identification. Calling the police on this island wasn't a good idea. Jason had explained how things worked around here when he first hired Nash. The authorities could be on the murderer's payroll.
WhiteRock would ID the woman and get justice for her if they could.
He took the pictures he needed and carefully replaced the soil over her body. It wasn't a proper burial, and he would do his best to rectify that later, but right now his main objective was making sure whoever put her there did not realize she'd been discovered.
He erased his tracks, Lena's tracks, any evidence that Nutmeg had been there. Which took longer than he hadintended. He jogged back to his apartment, disabled the alarm, and went in.
Lena sat rigid on the sofa, still clutching Nutmeg, eyes red and swollen from crying. Her gaze locked on his when he walked in.
"It's not her, Lena."
She blinked, but showed no sign that she had processed what he said.
"Lena, I'm telling you the truth. I checked. It's not her, I promise." He held up his phone. "I even took pictures to send to my team."
Tears welled in her eyes. "Are you sure? You're sure?"
He sat beside her, laid his phone on the coffee table and took her hands in his. "I'm positive. I don't know who she is yet, but she is not Cassidy."
She opened her mouth and closed it again. "Wait, what do you mean you took pictures?"
"I removed just enough soil around her face to get the pictures we would need to make an ID. Then I reburied her."
Her eyes bulged. "You what?"
"Lena, whoever that is, she was obviously murdered in the last twenty-four hours and hastily buried on thisproperty. We don't need to let whoever put her there know that we found her. That would put us in danger."
