Another grave? It seemed impossible, yet he couldn’t come up with another reason there would be a large area of fresh dirt in the middle of the woods.
“Come, Bruno.” Evie called her dog. Bruno looked from Evie to Cam, then back at the ground as if he expected to be rewarded for a job well done.
The dog’s alert convinced him they needed to know what, if anything, was buried there. Maybe a poacher had come through and killed some animal and buried the entrails to hide what he’d done. Maybe that was how a vagrant killer survived out here.
“Stay back, Evie. I’m going to check this out.” Cam crossed to the edge of the overturned earth. Drawing a deep breath, he bent and used his fingers to pull the dirt out of the way.
At first, he found nothing. Feeling foolish now, he continued digging through the chunks of dirt.
He flinched and recoiled in horror when his fingers felt something soft and squishy. Something was definitely buried there.
Someone? He almost prayed he was wrong as he continued pushing dirt out of the way, revealing what he’d found.
A slender bluish-tinged arm emerged from the soil. He abruptly stood and took two steps back as a horrible scent hit his nostrils.
“Who is that?” Evie’s low voice was full of anguish.
“I don’t know.” He couldn’t tear his gaze from the blue-tinged arm. Despite the obviously cold and mottled skin, he could see a tattoo of flowers encircling the slender wrist. He might not know who it was, but the victim was a woman. The arm was too slender and dainty looking with the tattoo bracelet to belong to a man.
And she’d been killed and then buried deep in the nature preserve, the way Skye Gray had been.
The difference being that this was a recent burial since the skin of the arm was still intact. He wasn’t a forensic expert, but he knew this must have been a recent murder.
From the same killer? Had to be. He couldn’t imagine these women were killed by two different people who’d decided to bury them this close together. Okay, maybe they were a few hundred yards apart, but still too close to be a coincidence.
Especially not when Bruno led them directly to this location. Trained K9 or not, Cam was convinced Bruno had latched onto the scent of the killer. And had brought them to the gravesite based on that scent.
“I can’t believe this,” Evie whispered.
“We need to call Detective Rueger.” He pushed the words through his tight throat. Finding this dead body wasn’t what he’d hoped for. He’d desperately wanted to find something concrete that would prove his innocence.
Not something that pointed directly to the work of a deranged serial killer.
5
Evie’s stomach twisted and rolled at the blue-gray skin of the slender arm with the flower tattoo encircling the wrist. A shiver snaked down her spine as she glanced around furtively. Bruno must have caught the killer’s scent from yesterday morning when he’d brought her Skye’s remains.
This poor woman had been killed recently. Not fourteen years ago.
Bruno nudged her leg, as if expecting to be rewarded for a job well done. She leaned down to stroke a hand over his silky fur. “You’re a good boy, Bruno.”
His tail wagged back and forth in acknowledgment.
A horrible thought hit her like a punch to the gut. “Do you think Bruno scented the killer while he was burying this poor girl? And when the guy slipped away, he brought me Skye’s bone to show me what was going on?”
“That’s plausible.” Cam’s green eyes held hers. “And it would explain why Bruno returned to this burial site.”
Her dog was amazing, although in this case, she almost wished Bruno was just your average pet. A dog who liked to romp and play rather than lead her through the woods to dead bodies.
“We need to report this,” Cam repeated. “Right away.”
“I’ll call the detective.” She straightened and pulled out her phone, eyeing Cam’s grim expression. This was bad in more ways than one. The worst being that if Detective Rueger believed Cam capable of this horrific level of crime, he’d be arrested and tossed behind bars by the end of the day.
She didn’t believe for one minute Cam was capable of killing young women and burying their bodies. She had called him. Cam had sounded surprised to hear from her. He’d come back to Grand Haven of his own accord.
Not because he was a killer, but because he’d been as concerned about Skye’s disappearance as she was.
Finding another dead body wasn’t part of the plan. For either of them.
