Page 5 of Wild Tempest

Paris Delaney arrived with her camera crew and captured footage.

The dogs went crazy around the shallow grave I had discovered. Forensic investigators went to work collecting soil samples, grave wax, and other deposits.

In the middle of a meadow, one of the dogs indicated again.

A handler shouted, "I've got something!"

Responders converged on the site.

This time, the dog had indicated over a patch of ground that was overgrown with grass. Whatever was buried underneath had been there for a while.

I exchanged a look with Jack. Did we really stumble across another unmarked grave?

The dogs weren’t always 100%. Sometimes they could signal a false positive.

We started digging, not sure what we’d find. The ground was relatively soft due to the recent rains. JD and I drove shovels into the ground, excavating the site. The hole in the ground grew deeper, the mound of dirt growing taller and taller. The deeper we dug, the more cautious our shovels became, trying not to damage anything we might find.

Eventually, we unearthed a human femur bone. Or rather, a fragment of one. I knelt to the ground and started clawing at the dirt with my gloved hands. As I scooped careful handfuls, I unearthed more and more of a fragmented skeleton—the pelvis, the spine, the rib cage, then a skull.

This certainly wasn't anyone in the documentary crew.

This skeleton was old.

Really old.

Charred and blackened, like it had been burned. The bones were brittle, and many had disintegrated. An enameled gold locket had fused into the rib cage.

Dietrich snapped more photos.

"Who do you think this is?" JD asked.

"I don't know."

Brenda, the medical examiner, was on hand. I backed away, and she took over. Her flashlight beam shone across the skeleton. "Female. I’d say 20 to 30 years old. I'll know more when I get her back to the lab. But I can tell you this—if this is a homicide, the person that killed this woman is probably already dead.”

"You think the remains have been here that long?"

Brenda shrugged. "Hard to say. Looks like she's got a full set of teeth and no dental work. No fillings, no crowns, no evidence of braces. If I had to guess, this skeleton has been here well over 100 years. Maybe longer.”

I shared a look with Jack. We were both thinking the same thing.

Brenda and her crew began the painstaking process of carefully collecting remains and bagging them.

Sheriff Daniels looked on with a sour face and grumbled, “Why does it always get weird this time of year?”

The crazies came out at Halloween. Every year, the cases got stranger and stranger during the spooky season.

Paris’s cameraman grabbed plenty of shots of Brenda and her crew collecting the skeleton. The ambitious blonde approached me, and the lens closed in. "Can you speculate on the identity of the female remains?"

"I can't discuss ongoing investigations.”

She gave me a flat look, then told her cameraman to cut. "Come on, we’re out here on Whistler Cay. You find a skeleton that's gotta be a couple hundred years old. That woman was clearly burned. I mean, the connection is obvious, don't you think?”

"You think that's the Witch of Whistler Cay,” I said.

"Don't you? Legend has it she was burned at the stake out here by Ironhook’s crew."

"Let's not jump to any conclusions just yet," I said.