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.”
