“I’ll lead.” Huck eyed the distance from the body to the cabin. “Let’s walk parallel to where he probably walked, just in case.” Then he moved yards away from the body and started kicking a trail with his overlarge boots, his shoulders wide and broad beneath his jacket.

Laurel followed his tracks, listening for any signs of life in the vicinity. There was none. Only the sound of Huck moving. No animals, no rushing water, no wind.

Just silence and death.

She shivered and kept moving, feeling the chill to her soul. She sensed the weight of the body behind her.

Huck kept moving. “This does lead to an interesting question.”

Laurel nodded. “If we had a hard time discovering that Christine was purchasing this property, how did the killer know to bring her here?”

Huck ducked beneath the bough of a century-old pine tree. “Unless she told him? He could’ve held a gun to her head and insisted they go to a place that had meaning for her?”

“Maybe, but I don’t think so,” Laurel murmured, her hands freezing even in her gloves. “She’d just seen him shoot an FBI agent, and she’d probably been knocked out by him. No woman would lead somebody like that out to a remote location like this. She would’ve known he’d kill her.”

Huck paused at the front of a white clapboard cabin. “People get desperate. She might’ve told him anything so he didn’t shoot her.”

“That’s true, but she was a logical woman. Like me.” Laurel moved up to his side to look at the narrow porch. A snow-covered eave protected the weathered boards and splattered blood. Red coated the porch, the railing, and the front door of the structure. “She was murdered here.” There were two larger blood stains that had already sunk into the wood. “He cut off her hands here.”

Huck looked around the porch but didn’t proceed farther. “No ax. This is the first time he didn’t leave the ax.”

“This is the first time there wasn’t an ax on site,” Laurel murmured. “He must’ve brought his own this time.” She looked for any sign of footprints around the cabin, but the snow was too thick. “We’ll need to conduct a grid search down the driveway and road for the murder weapon.” She looked over at the driveway, and there were subtle indents in the newly fallen snow from thick treads. “He must drive a truck or SUV to have made it here and back. There’s no way a smaller car could’ve gotten through that snow.”

“It’s not much, but at least it’s something,” Huck muttered. “You want to go inside?”

She wished she’d remembered her hat back at the office. “We can take a quick look just to make sure it’s clear, but I doubt they even went inside.”