Sari Simons is one of those bodies that doesn’t look real. It looks like something out of a graphic novel—lying supine and encased in a camouflage jacket, skin pale and dusky. The two front teeth peek out from the edge of the top lip that has lost its color. It doesn’t help that the crime scene is a haunted house, wherein Rowan had to trek through a forest of hanging artificial body parts to get here.
Kole wasn’t exaggerating about the eyes. They’re gone, a pair of gaping cavities in the middle of the girl’s skull. She crouches carefully, leans to hover over the victim’s face, but everything in her peripheral vision floods her focus. Her gaze flits to footprints and fingerprints and smears of fake blood. Everywhere. Shit. With so much scene contamination, they have better odds of winning the lottery than they do of finding the killer’s DNA.
As is the nature of all scary things, the place looks less threatening with the lights on. Torn black tarps are draped over plywood partitions, and warnings like TURN AROUND and GET OUT are clearly the work of teenagers. Masks lie on picnic tables, empty and shapeless. A crinkled granola bar wrapper catches the reflection of a strobe light. The cocktail of death and spray paint makes her head swim.
“Will someone pull the plug on that strobe?” she asks. “It’s giving me a headache.” That isn’t the whole truth. It’s worsening the headache she had before—the one she brought upon herself after a good old-fashioned carbon monoxide poisoning. The same one she was so close to sleeping off before her phone ripped her out of a REM cycle. Finally, the incessant flashing stops.
“Thank you,” she breathes.
She closes her eyes and feels them flicker. Just twenty minutes ago, her ringtone woke her up from a dead sleep. She answered the unidentified number to hear Sergeant Kole.
“Winthorp,” he growled. “We got another one.”
“A what?” Where was she? Was this one of those lucid nightmares? She coughed to clear the hoarseness from her voice.
“Another teenage girl. Appears to be a homicide. At the Compound, 216 Pruitt Avenue.”
“I’m on my way.” She swung her legs over the edge of the couch, disturbing Fry, who leapt onto the floor and sauntered over to his water dish.
“Rowan.” His utterance of her first name gave her pause. She was “Winthorp” to most cops, with the exception of Axel, of course.
A long pause followed, until she said, “Nik?”
Kole exhaled, causing the line to crackle. “We’ve never seen one like this before.”
Now, she stands inside the shell of an old warehouse, her shoes and shins caked in gravel dust, staring at a corpse whose eyes have been plucked out of its skull. The sight can only be described as horrifying and gruesome. Rowan whips around, slamming into someone.
The woody, amber scent of Axel’s cologne mixed with sweat infiltrates her senses. It soothes her, and for a moment, she dreams she could slip back into sleep. She wants to bury her face in his sweatshirt, feel his lips plant a kiss on her forehead, but this is neither the time nor place.
“I know,” he says quietly, shaking his head.
“Did you find them?” Rowan asks.
“Her eyes?”
“Not yet.” Entering their vicinity, Riley answers for him.
“An animal could have taken off with them,” suggests Axel, and Rowan agrees. Coyotes have been known to lurk around these parts. They’re mangy things, half the size of coyotes elsewhere and starved. But, with the Compound teeming with people for the Halloween season, she doubts any coyotes would have gotten too close. Not to mention, if that were the case, there would most likely be other injuries to the body. Bite marks, scratches—of which Sari Simons has none.
“Or the killer did,” she offers.
Gloved up, Rowan lifts the girl’s wrist. It’s still warm and flaccid. Watching her, she imagines she can see the muscles stiffening, the fingers of her left hand curling into a claw as rigor encroaches. The body won’t turn cold for another six or seven hours yet, though. We lose a degree and a half of body temperature for the first hour after death, and one degree for every hour thereafter, until we match the atmospheric temperature. Textbook, of course, Rowan thinks, as she takes the girl’s reading. There are factors that can manipulate the numbers, such as dying on a cold slab of concrete or decomposing under a beating sun. Neither applies here.
She reads the thermometer. The digital numbers show 97.3. Assuming Sari started out with a base temperature of 98.6, she couldn’t have died more than an hour ago.
Rowan touches the victim’s neck for a pulse, despite knowing there won’t be one. “Time of death…” She turns her wrist to read her watch. “Saturday, October 21, 2250 hours. I don’t suppose the ice cream scoop was left behind, was it?” She says it to no one in particular, and yet a retort cuts through the crowd of sworn personnel.
“Shut up, that isn’t what he used.” She hears the whisper of Kole’s leather bomber jacket as he bends toward the corpse for a closer look. “Is it?”
“I mean … it’s possible,” she says, noting the lack of blood indicates the injuries are—
“Postmortem?”
She nods.
“Fuck,” says Kole, and Rowan knows it is not because the postmortem mutilation means that Sari Simons did not suffer the torture of her organs being carved out of her skull, but because he knows that just two nights ago, another girl was found with her teeth knocked out in a manner that was also determined to be postmortem.
He points his chin at the mutilated body. “What other marks does she have?”
Sliding her fingers under the collar of Sari’s camo jacket, she exposes the marks she feared would be there. “These are perimortem.” She points to a graze on the girl’s neck. It looks like a burn, almost, or—
“Rope burn?” Kole echoes her next thought.
But Rowan is already shaking her head. “There aren’t any ligature marks, though.”
She leans over the body to peek at the other side where a corresponding injury glares at her. Extracting a ruler from her bag, she measures each abrasion. “About an inch and three quarters,” she mutters, then palpates the throat. “Hyoid bone is still intact.”
“So, she wasn’t strangled?”
Rowan shrugs. “I didn’t say that.” She recognizes the landed-on cause of death for Madison Caldwell. The marks on Sari Simons’s neck look similar, but are they the same? She will have to compare photos back at the office.
She continues to deliver her report in real time, gently turning the victim’s head from side to side. “And … the eyes, obviously, they’re—”
“MIA,” offers Kole.
“Yes.” Continuing to deliver her report, she leans over the corpse and peers into the bloodless orbital cavities. Her gaze roams the areas around them, then. “Petechiae,” she notes, waving an index finger over the jaw, near the ear. “Madison Caldwell had that, too.”
Kole nods. He will no doubt have seen the preliminary autopsy report from this morning. Therefore, he will know that the cause of Madison Caldwell’s death was strangulation and that she had not one, but two postmortem injuries: the teeth, and the word carved inside her mouth.
BITCH.
It’s all Rowan sees when she closes her eyes now, as though the five letters are scored on the insides of her eyelids. Although she’s loath to admit it, she is too afraid to peel down the dead girl’s lip and see if another ugly word is carved into the soft meat.
Why? Because she might recognize Chloe’s handwriting?
Kole makes a slow circle around the corpse, like a wolf surveying a fresh kill. “So, he grabbed her … probably from over here.” He walks to a faux wall and kicks it. The black tarp bows inward. “Then he dragged her back here. Strangled her. And scooped out her eyes.” Kneeling now, he looks up at Rowan. His irises are cold and colorless. They pin her in place and stare at her so intensely, she swears he can see her skeleton.
Her heart crawls into her throat. She draws her hand up to her neck to hide her quickening pulse from him.
“But with what?” Kole persists. “An ice cream scoop would be too dull.”
“I was mostly kidding about that,” admits Rowan. A poor time for a joke, she knows, but, call it a coping mechanism or whatever you will, at this point, morbid humor is just part of her makeup.
“Mostly,” he repeats, sounding thoughtful and not sarcastic as she might have expected. “’Tis the season for sharp objects, right? Pumpkin carving and all that. Everyone’s got knives and shit.”
“It had to have a good edge,” she says, thinking out loud. “Whatever instrument the killer used had to be … made for this kind of thing.”
“Like a surgical tool?”
“That would be my guess.”
“And my guess would be he didn’t really know what he was doing.” He points with a black gloved hand. “That’s a hack job if I ever saw one.”
Rowan follows his finger that points at the torn flesh around the injuries. “Or they were working fast.”
“Or that.” He sighs, his breath issuing a plume of vapor. “Ah fuck, Rowan, why do we live here?”
“No better place to be if you’re a cop, right?” Rowan repeats a line she used to hear from Axel, whenever he’d come home all electrified after making an arrest or testifying on the stand. Those days are long over. Now, he’s utterly defeated. A husk of the man she married.
“I used to think like that, but now I don’t know,” admits Kole. “Dead kids everywhere you turn. Not my cup of tea.” He sighs again, and draws himself back up to his full height. “So, why’d he take them? A ritual? Something satanic, maybe?”
“Revenge.”
Both Kole and Rowan step aside to give Axel the floor.
“Revenge?” Kole raises a brow.
Axel doles Rowan an apologetic look, then explains to them both that, mere hours ago, Sari Simons had sat in Interview Room #3 and confessed to staging and circulating a photo that, for all intents and purposes, destroyed Chloe’s reputation at Monroe Academy. “They stole Chloe’s shirt out of her bedroom,” he narrates, and Rowan feels a quiet rage simmering inside her. “… stuffed it in the drama teacher’s bag.” He goes on to share what Sari told him at the end of her interview. “She said, ‘I’m afraid your daughter is going to kill me next.’” He pauses to draw in a deep breath.
“And you let her go?” Kole’s voice crescendos with each word. “To, what, just wander around town? Did you at least tell her not to get murdered?”
“We took her home. Her dad’s gone for military training until tomorrow night. She had nowhere else to go. We had Patrol checking on her every couple hours. Last they reported, she was at home, alive and well, when they stopped around 1900 hours. Must’ve slipped out after that.”
Kole splays his hand over his eyes and squeezes his temples. Either he’s suddenly experiencing shooting pains in his skull or he simply finds this conversation excruciating. As badly as he might wish for there to be a rebuttal, however, Rowan knows there isn’t one. With no family in Black Harbor, and her best friend dead, where, but home, would Sari have gone? They cannot keep her at the police station. They’re not set up for it, and besides, they have a murder and missing persons investigation to conduct, not to mention all the other crimes that don’t magically stop, like turning off a faucet.
Rowan runs through everything Axel has just shared. “You think that Chloe had something to do with this? Or Mr. Cutler?”
Axel clenches his jaw as all eyes land on him. His expression is glazed as though he’s set himself on cruise control. He has split himself in half; the detective searching for an answer remains out front while the father searching for his daughter disappears somewhere inside of him. He wets his lips. “Maybe both,” he answers. “Why else would it be these two girls, so soon after that rumor was started?” The silence that falls is suffocating. Finally, he adds: “It’s also possible that Cutler has Chloe and he’s…”
“Saving her for later?” Rowan finishes when he can’t.
“Right.”
“What about our witnesses?” interrupts Kole. “The kids who discovered her?”
“They didn’t see anyone,” Axel says. “But … Libby said Sari had a backpack with her.”
As Kole turns to confirm there’s no backpack anywhere near the body, Rowan’s brows knit together. “Libby? As in Marnie’s Libby?”
“And Reeves Singh.”
“Oh fuck you,” says Kole, turning about face. “Reeves Singh found her?”
“And Libby Lucas. Our neighbor.” He draws an imaginary line between himself and Rowan, who checks her phone. There are three missed calls from Marnie and a text: Headed to the Compound. Are you out there already? Tell Lib and Daniel I’m OMW.
“Shit.” Rowan’s gaze ricochets off the walls like a racquetball. “Marnie’s here?”
Kole looks from Axel to Rowan. “So you know her well.”
“She’s my best friend’s daughter,” says Rowan. “We’ve been neighbors for … sixteen years?” Yes, Libby was a newborn when they moved next door.
“Good.” Kole tilts his head toward the exit, where Reeves and Libby both wait on the other side with Investigator Riley. “Go find out what she’s lying about.”
Rowan watches Axel’s face scrunch in confusion, and feels hers mirroring it. “Why do you assume she’s lying?” she asks.
“Because everybody lies, Winthorp. Her withholding information is obstruction, same as a bold-faced lie. She’s at the scene of this crime with the BFF of Thursday night’s dead girl. She lives ten feet away from your daughter, who’s gone missing. You can’t tell me she doesn’t know more than she’s letting on.”
Rowan flinches at the sensation of something tugging at her heartstrings. Missing. Chloe is still missing, a mystery, and no one but Rowan can fathom why this has happened.
It’s karma. Comeuppance. The universe teaching her a lesson.
Earlier today, she sat in her poisoned car, lamenting over the obituary of a girl long dead. A girl she killed.
An eye for an eye. That’s the only reason Chloe is gone.
She took someone else’s daughter. Now the universe has taken hers.
It isn’t Libby that Kole’s got dead to rights. It’s her. She is a liar for this information she’s withholding and yet, it will do nothing for the investigation besides close the lid on it. Even if this is all because of her, it doesn’t change the fact that she is desperate to find her daughter, karma be damned.
The word “revenge” is bitter on her tongue. She turns to Axel, shaking her head. “You think Chloe did this.” The rage inside her burns hotter. “You actually think our daughter—our fifteen-year-old, one-hundred-pound-soaking-wet daughter—killed her friends.”
“They weren’t her friends.” Deep lines of latitude crease his forehead. “Friends don’t … steal each other’s clothes and spread rumors like that.”
“Oh, okay, I get it. Chloe was a victim of bullying; therefore, she must be a murderer. Real good detective work, Axel. Tell me, does the City give you a bonus for jumping to irrational conclusions?”
Kole steps between them, but Rowan leans back and walks around him.
“I just…” Axel swallows, gathering his bearings. “Sari Simons told me she thought Chloe would kill her next. And here she is … less than eight hours later.” His chest heaves. His breath is ragged. “Is it possible that just maybe, Chloe could have—”
“Don’t,” she warns.
He strides toward her, closing the distance between them. The air around them is charged. “Rowan, listen to me!” Axel grabs her bicep, forcing her to look at him. Here it is, she thinks, as Axel opens his mouth to speak again. His incessant need to solve this case trumps protecting their daughter’s memory. He’s throwing her under the fucking bus. Accusing her of murder when she is not here to defend herself.
Because she’s fucking dead.
Oh God. The trueness of that sentiment has all the force of that hypothetical bus careening into her. Chloe is dead, her body buried beneath someone’s porch or hidden away in the one place they haven’t yet looked.
Her bottom lip quivers. A whimper escapes.
“Row, the truth is that our daughter is out here, and she could be ki—”
She slaps him. The crack is satisfying, like an ax splitting a block of wood. Her whole palm tingles.
He lets her go, pressing his hand to his cheek as though to keep it from falling off his face.
“Chloe is dead!” she yells, and is mortified by the screech of her voice. She doesn’t recognize it as her own. It’s shrill and desperate, and more than a little psychotic. “Whoever is killing these girls is sending us a message!”
“A message for what, Rowan?”
That is the ever-burning question. The one whose flames lick the back of her skull, charring her skeleton while she sleeps, while she eats, every waking and sleeping moment since Chloe has been gone. Turning her into smoke and ash with a silhouette so fragile, the barest touch would cause her to splinter, to snap like a piece of used-up charcoal.
She knows the answer. She’s just too afraid to speak it. Saying it makes it real, makes it something she cannot rescind or redact like blacking out names in a police report. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because the truth is that, regardless of what human guise this killer may wear, it’s karma.
Karma killed her daughter.
Because Rowan killed someone else’s.
“Come on.” Kole’s voice is quiet, but stern. He touches her arm and she swats him away. Stomping toward her kit, she yanks out a polyethylene bag and lays it on the cement. There’s only one saving grace for tonight, and that’s zipping up the victim before she gets too stiff.