Already Dead (Laura Frost FBI)

Waters nodded, his concentration broken momentarily by the distraction. “Um. The candle… she was kind of holding it in her arms, like this?” He held his own hands across his chest, crossing them and cupping them around the base of an imaginary candle. “It was lit, and the wax had started to melt down. There were a few drops on her hands and her chest, but I don’t think it had been burning for long.”

Laura nodded. She reached out and put a hand on Waters’s shoulder for a moment, a brief reassurance. “Thank you. Was the first body similar? Evelina Collins, right?”

“Right,” Waters said. He turned his back on the spot where Ashley Christianson had lain, as if he needed to put it out of his head. “Yes, it was almost identical, I’d say. She was clothed, the same thing with her neck and the blood. She had the candle in her hands the same way. It was earlier in the evening, though. We had that one called in by a local who was walking by the alley and saw her.”

Laura checked her watch. It was already ten in the morning. If this pattern held up – a body at night after two days – then they only had until nightfall to make some progress here.

Standing in the street wasn’t going to facilitate that.

“Let’s go to the coroner,” she said to Waters as well as to Won. “I need to see these bodies.”