Page 6 of The Guilty Trial

“This one’s a little outside our usual scope. Appreciate you making the drive out here.” Fisher gestured toward the cabin. “Better if I show you. Fair warning though. It’s not pretty.”

They followed him across the clearing. The house looked even smaller up close. A few deputies stood outside near their vehicles, speaking in low voices. Fisher led them through the doorway, stepping aside to let them take in the scene.

Allie stopped just inside and let her eyes adjust to the gloom. She covered her nose against the overwhelming acrid scent. The cabin’s main room was small, perhaps fifteen feet by twenty, with a kitchenette in one corner, a small bathroom in another, and a sofa against the far wall. But what dominated the space was the chaos. Furniture overturned, papers scattered, a lamp lying broken on the floor. It looked as though an indiscriminate storm had passed through.

The body was near the sofa.

The victim lay on his back, his shirt open and his skin pale in the dim light. A dark stain of blood had spread beneath him and blackened the wooden floor. A long smear of it led from the center of the room to where he now rested, telling the story of his final moments.

Allie studied the victim’s face. He was middle-aged and lean, with thinning hair and features that might have been sharp once but were now slack. His eyes were closed, his mouth slightly open. He looked almost peaceful, as though he had simply fallen asleep. But the rest of him told a different story.

“The victim’s wife got worried when she didn’t hear from him last night,” Fisher said in a low voice. “He’d called her yesterday morning from the cabin’s landline and told her he’d seen a bear. That was the last she heard from him.”

Jason’s gaze swept the room. “Who found him?”

“The property manager. The wife called the rental company when she couldn’t reach him, and the manager drove out here this morning to check on things.”

Allie’s eyes moved over to the victim’s torso. A single wound was located just below the sternum. The cut was clean and precise, suggesting a sharp blade. But it was what lay above the wound that made her brows draw together.

In the center of the man’s chest, seared into his flesh, was the number 14. The digits were thick and bold, surrounded by a circle that had been burned just as deeply. The skin around it was charred black, the edges raised and blistered. The branding had been done with enough heat to cauterize the tissue and create a sunken, blackened canyon in the shape of the numbers. The smell Allie had noticed when she entered was the scent of burned flesh and some acrid chemical.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Fisher said, his eyes on the victim.

Allie swallowed, forcing herself to remain detached. She’d seen worse. Not often, but enough times to know how to compartmentalize. Still, there was something particularly disturbing about the deliberateness of it. The killer hadn’t just killed. He’d marked his victim. Claimed him, in a way.

“Who owns the cabin?” Jason asked.

“It’s an online rental,” Fisher replied. “One of those short-term places. The owner lives in Seattle and rents it out through a website. According to his wife, Mr. Sterling arrived here Wednesday afternoon and planned to stay through Sunday.”

Allie’s gaze lingered on the body. Thomas Sterling had been a prominent prosecutor. His death would create shockwaves throughout the legal community.

“By the looks of things,” Fisher continued, “he’s been dead for the better part of a day. We’ll know more after the autopsy, but I’d say he died sometime Friday evening.”

Jason crouched near the body. “Any sign of a weapon?”

“None. And the scene has been mostly processed.”

“What about the lock?” Allie asked, nodding toward the front door.

“It was picked,” Fisher explained. “Clean job too. There’s a little damage to the frame where it may have been kicked in. But there’s no damage to the lock mechanism. Whoever did this knew what they were doing.”

Allie considered that. A rental cabin meant a steady stream of guests, each one leaving behind fingerprints, hair, fibers. It would take weeks to sort through all the evidence, and even then, they might not find anything useful. The killer had chosen his location well.

“Robbery?” Jason asked.

Fisher shook his head. “His wallet and watch are still on him. Nothing’s obviously missing, so it doesn't look like it.”

Allie turned, surveying the room again. She stepped carefully around the blood trail, her eyes catching on a loose sheet of paper near the overturned desk. She bent down, pulled on a pair of gloves she slipped from her jacket pocket, and picked it up.

The page was covered in single-spaced text. The letters were uneven, with some darker than others, the hallmark of a manual typewriter. Allie scanned the first few lines. It read like fiction. A protagonist in some kind of trouble, heading downstairs to a basement.

“This looks like a novel,” she said aloud.

Fisher glanced over. “His wife mentioned he was working on a book. Said he’d been talking about it for years.”

Allie’s gaze moved across the room to where a typewriter lay upside down on the floor. The machine looked old and heavy, more like a relic that belonged in a museum. Its ribbon cartridge had come loose in the fall, trailing black ink across the floorboards like a thin, dark vein. She handed the page to a nearby evidence technician, a young woman with a camera slung around her neck.

“Can you photograph all the pages?” Allie asked, pulling out her card and handing it over. “Send them to me when you’re done.”