Page 72 of Murder in Calusa Cove
They hadn’t spoken in the last ten minutes. Not since he’d cut the skiff’s motor, and they’d drifted in, silent as ghosts.
Hayes’s heart pounded—not just from anticipation, but from something darker, a coiling dread that started in his spine and worked its way to the base of his skull. He’d seen some awful things and lived through worse. But tonight, the air felt...wrong.
Chloe moved up beside him, her gun already drawn. “This is it,” she murmured. “Trent said he’d been using this place on and off for years.”
He nodded, took one last breath, and pushed the door open.
The hinges groaned like something alive. The stench hit them first—rot, old water, something metallic and sour. He angled his flashlight into the space. Dust and cobwebs clung to every inch of the ceiling. The place was cramped—barely the size of his kitchen—crammed with old fishing gear, buckets, a bloodstained workbench, and a tattered sleeping bag curled like a discarded snake in the corner.
But it was the table in the center of the room that stopped him.
A wooden crate sat there, half open. Inside it were jars. Eleven of them.
He slowly crossed the room, his boots thudding against the rotted floorboards.
Chloe came up beside him. Her light steadied over the labels.
And his breath stopped.
Heather.
It was handwritten in blocky, careful script and taped to a jar filled with cloudy liquid. Inside—floating, pale and preserved—was a ring finger.
Chloe made a sound—half gasp, half sob—and sank to a crouch beside him. “No,” she whispered. “Oh, God. Heather...”
Hayes crouched too, swallowing the bile in his throat. Rage sparked behind his ribs, low and white-hot. “We know Trent’s not our killer. He’d have more trophies, and these weren’t here earlier. This is staged…our killer’s taunting us.”
One by one, he checked the jars. The names matched the three recent victims and the eight older ones. Eleven in all. It was strange, he’d chosen these eleven. But maybe not. It was about setting up Trent. Not about Dewey—the actual killer. Hayes closed his eyes for a second, letting that thought sink in. It had been rumbling around in his brain ever since Chloe’s dad had dropped the bomb about her mother’s affair.
Hayes liked Dewey…genuinely liked the man. He might have been a loner, but so what? Lots of people struggled with crowds. Hayes preferred to spend time in the quiet of his own space. But damn…a serial killer right in Calusa Cove…for decades? It was a lot to process. He blinked, turning his gaze toward Chloe.
She crossed to a rusted filing cabinet in the corner. It creaked as she yanked it open.
“Not sure what this is,” she said, pulling out a leather-bound book. “Maybe it’s actually Trent’s, or maybe it’s a fake notebook meant to trip us up more.” She flipped it open, and her mouth dropped open. “Hayes, you need to see this.” Her hands shook as she glanced over the journal.
He crossed the room in two strides.
“It’s that journal Dawson’s been looking for. The one that Anna told him about. The one that had Tripp’s thoughts about different cases he’d been working on, and there’s a passage here about Dewey.”
“What does it say?” Hayes ran his hand across her shoulder.
“He suspected Dewey of something…of hurting someone,” she said, voice cracking. “He writes it plain as day. ‘Something’s wrong with Dewey. He was at a crime scene across the state—and a second one where a friend of mine was working a missing person case…’” She flipped a few more pages. “‘I think he knows I’m watching him, but I had to when that girl went missing.’”
“Jesus.” Hayes blew out a shaky breath. “I wonder what girl that was.”
Chloe reached down and pulled something else from the bottom drawer. An envelope. She turned it over. “Hayes, this has Fedora’s name on it.”
Hayes stared at it like it might bite.
“That’s... That’s my handwriting,” he said, voice hoarse.
He took the letter with trembling fingers, unfolded it, and instantly remembered. He’d written it to Fedora years ago. A reply to the first message she’d ever sent. It was raw. Honest. He’d told her why he’d left Betsy. Why he couldn’t be the kind of stepfather she’d deserved. Why he’d had to walk out of her life.
He looked at Chloe. “This... I don’t know. Maybe he wanted us to find this. Maybe he finally wants to get caught.”
“But why go to all the trouble to make Cole or Trent suspects? Why feed Stacey information? Why have her wait until morning to give us this location if he was going to let us know it was him anyway? It doesn’t jive.”
“Maybe he’s still trying to set Trent up. Dawson did let him go.”
