Light pollution blots out the stars. Axel’s gaze cuts to his rearview mirror where he watches twin clouds of steam spew from the power plant’s cooling towers at the edge of the county. They curl and twist in a whimsical dance before dissolving, the way snowflakes melt on asphalt. The sky is a bruise-colored backdrop, torn at the edges by the tree line’s craggy silhouette.
The cloud factory—that’s what Chloe used to call it. Whenever they passed it while driving home, she would hold her arm out the window, point like E.T., and draw, as though she could command the direction of the vapor. For years she believed she could, believed that it was she who created the chubby Pegasus and the tombstone shapes. When did she stop?
Probably when he and Rowan stopped paying attention. Over the years, they’ve both gotten so wrapped up in their own work that he wonders, now, if Chloe ever felt abandoned. She must have. There’s a fresh death at least once a week in Black Harbor, which means, for Rowan, that there are autopsies to attend and reports to write. For him and the Violent Crime Task Force, the crimes they investigate span every brutal variety, from gang fights to civil disputes turned deadly; shootings, stabbings, you name it. And they are constant.
He is never home. That’s what he realized sometime around midnight when he lay on the floor of the VCTF office, determined to get a few winks on a makeshift bed of Mylar blankets, his jacket wadded up for a pillow. Even when he is home, physically, he isn’t present; his mind always has a million tabs open, mentally crawling through nooks and kinks and crannies of whatever cases he’s currently working.
Which was why he couldn’t lie there a second longer. If ever there is a case to work himself to the bone on, it’s this one. His daughter is out there, somewhere. She could be in danger, or worse—dead.
With the blankets rolled up and tucked beneath his arm, Axel paused on his way to the cabinet. There was a light on in the old tannery. Apparently, whoever bought it was getting an early start on restoring it. Or maybe they’re living in it?
He squinted and let himself be lured toward the window as if by some magnetic force. Here in the lighthouse, three stories above the ground, he could see the rooftop where it appeared renovations were already underway. Even with his eyes having adjusted to the dark and what faint light shone from the tannery’s window, it was hard to discern exactly what it was, but it appeared to be a greenhouse or garden in the making.
That would be wise, he thought. Some sort of sustainable, eco-friendly initiative would probably go a long way as far as securing grants for whatever project the new owner has in mind. If only they could find a way to tack some solar panels onto the PD—maybe then they could get a dime to spruce the place up. At the very least, they need a new boiler system. The building is constantly having hot flashes, ice-cold one moment and stifling the next. Not that he and the rest of the VCTF have to deal with that much anymore.
These thoughts all followed him down the stairs and out to his vehicle, five miles down the road, to where he now sits. And watches. His eyes drift back to where they were before the clouds in the rearview wafted into his peripheral vision. The house across the street is a black hole, pitch dark until suddenly, a light flips on. Axel adjusts in the driver’s seat, leans forward for a slightly closer look. He has studied the residence on real estate websites enough to know that this is the master bedroom. He waits. In a moment, someone passes in front of the window. It’s a man, judging by the build.
Cutler.
Fifty-one years old. Married with one child—a daughter who’s grown and out of the house. Caucasian. Occupation: teacher at Monroe Academy.
More specifically, he was Chloe’s drama teacher. And maybe more.
Her confidante.
Her co-conspirator.
Her captor.
Axel watches to see if a second person rises and meanders in front of the window. According to the background check he conducted in Onyx, Cutler is married, but Axel knows as well as anyone that what Onyx says and what actually is are sometimes two very different things. Cutler is married on paper, perhaps, but his wife may be living somewhere else. Not that he would blame her. In fact, he wishes he could talk to her, find out what she knows about her husband’s doings.
He’s been watching the place for the past two hours, ever since he woke up with a start after falling asleep at his desk, the space bar imprinted on his forehead. He couldn’t go home last night, not when he and Rowan are so divided. She’s on one precipice, and he’s on another, an ocean of “what ifs” roiling between them.
In his mind, there are only two distinct possibilities: either Mark Cutler killed Madison Caldwell and Sari Simons alone, or Mark Cutler killed Madison Caldwell and Sari Simons with Chloe’s help.
He knows where Rowan’s head is at. She would rather believe their daughter to be dead than guilty. But, at least if she’s guilty and they find her, they can get her help. No. He’s lying to himself and he knows it. He knows what happens to kids like that. She will spend her days sedated and sitting in front of a cement wall, drooling into a Dixie Cup.
That’s not the life he dreamed of for his daughter. This isn’t the life he dreamed of at all, for any of them.
Axel chews his thumbnail. He drags the sharp edge of it across his lip as he stares intensely at the hunter-green home, as if it might sprout legs and walk off. He bounces his foot. His coffee thermos is empty now, and he has to pee, but he can’t leave. Not when Cutler could be coming out any minute.
He bites and rips a small chunk of skin off with his nail. The metallic tang of blood fills his mouth as he continues to watch and stew about his and Rowan’s disagreement last night. His cheek stings with the tactile memory of her slap, and yet, that isn’t the worst part. The worst part is that he had felt the weight of all her resentment behind it.
It was true that they dreamed of leaving Black Harbor one day. Who didn’t? They wanted to live in a place where the crime rate was only average, where cars weren’t hot-wired and stolen out of driveways. Somewhere that little girls weren’t discarded like broken dolls and murder was kept to a minimum.
Wanting something doesn’t mean you can have it, though. Axel learned that during all his years growing up in Rainbow Row with two brothers, a sister, and parents who made just enough between them to keep the lights on and mouths fed. They were all gone, now. His siblings had their own families and lived scattered across the US. His parents were both dead by the time he was thirty. Chloe never knew them.
At the age of twenty-one, he entered the police academy after graduating with a degree in criminal justice from the local community college. He walked a beat for twenty years, responding to domestic abuse calls, dead babies, shots fired, and dog attacks. When Chloe was three, he got promoted upstairs to the Detective Bureau so he could get off nights and start pulling more overtime to keep the family afloat.
Peace and quiet come at a cost. Tuition at Monroe Academy is twenty grand per year, and their mortgage on Belgrave Circle is close to three thousand dollars a month; add taxes and sundry essentials such as groceries, phone bill, internet, and more, and Axel is staring down the barrel of sixty-plus hours a week for the rest of his career.
While they desperately want to leave, they can’t afford to, not when he’s vested with the City and has several years before he can draw from his pension. Rowan knows this and yet, it never stops her from counting down the days on an imaginary calendar. Sometimes he’ll roll over at night and catch her staring up at the ceiling, her eyes vacant, and he swears she’s scheming ways to disappear.
It’s always the following morning when he wants to tell her to just take Chloe and go. Away from Black Harbor. And when she gets to whatever place finally makes her happy and at peace, to text him the address so he can send a monthly check and visit on holidays—if he can get the time off.
People in Black Harbor have a penchant for murdering one another on holidays.
Despite her knowing that they cannot reasonably leave the crime-ridden city that signs both of their paychecks, Rowan still blames him. The slap said it all, like, See, I told you we should have left. Now Chloe is gone and it’s all your fault.
She’d slapped him not noticing how close he was to breaking all on his own. Cracking under the pressure of providing for his family—and failing miserably.
He recalls the screenshot on Sari’s phone, of Chloe’s shirt in a man’s messenger bag and the words Daddy Issues taunting. Do Chloe’s peers really believe that she has daddy issues?
He considers the stereotype: a female needing attention from an older man because she allegedly has a troubled relationship with her own father. And then he thinks of all the times he’s picked Chloe up from school and asked about her day, how many evenings they listened to Bon Jovi and CCR on vinyl together. The weekends they spent skipping stones off the pier and walking Fry through the neighborhood. But it had been a long time since they’d done any of that. At least a year for sure, but even before then. When he thinks of his evenings, he sees a faceless suspect sitting at a stainless-steel table in Interview Room #1, the empty stare of a cadaver peppered with bullet holes; he sees negligent caregivers and neighbors of the deceased and the lies that tumble from their lips. When had he let work become more of a priority than his daughter?
The dead can wait. They’re not going anywhere. Unfortunately, it’s taken him until now to fully comprehend that.
The worst thing about a lie is there’s always a kernel of truth to it. Perhaps Chloe had sought comfort in another man, a father figure of sorts. Mr. Cutler was her drama teacher. During the school year, especially during play season, she’d spent more time with him than she had with either Axel or Rowan. Perhaps even more time than either of them realized.
Axel rolls down his window. The early morning air is crisp and cool. His frustration and anxiety begin to evaporate just a little, and then his ears prick to the strange cackling sounds he remembers having heard before. He squints, his eyes roaming Cutler’s yard for shadows and silhouettes with their heads thrown back in laughter.
A louder noise booms as the garage door peels upward. Axel watches as the brake lights of an SUV flash red. A blur of sneakers race across the opening as a boy in a blue hockey jersey runs to claim shotgun. A dark-haired man is staring down at something in his hands—keys or a phone, maybe?
Axel opens his door and steps out. The moment he’s been waiting for has finally arrived. He slams his door and the sound is masked by the lake slamming into the shoreline less than two blocks away. It swallows the sound of his footsteps, even, but Cutler has already seen him by now.
They make eye contact. Axel stares hard at the man who knows something about his daughter’s disappearance. It isn’t that cold out, but Cutler totes a navy parka under his arm, rolled like a sleeping bag. His face is pinched, like an invisible hand is twisting his nose, twisting his whole face into a deprecating sneer that Axel can’t stand.
“Papa, who—” the boy starts.
“Get in the car, Michael,” says Cutler. “I’ll be right there.”
The boy is obedient. He shuts the vehicle door.
“Your grandson?” Axel asks, even though he knows it is.
“Yes,” answers Cutler. Axel steals a few seconds to scrutinize the man’s jet-black hair, the wrinkles that fan out from his eyes but are not yet deep creases in his skin. Two longitudinal lines cut across his forehead. He’s mapping him, committing his face to memory. File > Save. “Been waiting long?” Cutler juts his chin toward Axel’s Impala.
“Long enough to watch a few episodes of The Wire,” admits Axel.
Cutler doesn’t smile or flinch. Instead, he says, “Listen, I know you’re here to rough me up about—”
“No one’s roughing you up.”
“You’re here to interrogate me—”
“You’re not a suspect. No need for an interrogation.”
“—and I already told—”
“Hey!” Axel raises his voice. “Mark, right? I’m not here to interrogate you.” He sighs and feels his resolve crumbling. “Father to father, right. Is Michael’s mother your daughter?”
Cutler nods.
“If she ever went missing … how would you feel? What would you do? You’d look everywhere you could for answers, right? Talk to everyone who knew her to try and piece things together.”
Cutler says nothing. His gaze falls on the ground.
Axel can feel the air wicking the moisture from his lips and every inch of exposed skin.
He doesn’t want to ask the questions he’s about to ask. But he has no choice. He didn’t spend the last four hours sitting on this house not to. “Were you close?” The words are awkward, breaking as they leave his tongue. “Chloe was your student. But was she more than that?”
“God no,” says Cutler. There’s a tinge of disgust in his tone. “Not like—those girls were just making problems for her. With that picture.”
“What picture?”
Cutler stares at him, tilts his head. “I’m sure you’ve got it saved on your camera roll, Detective. No need to play dumb.”
“The one of Chloe’s shirt sticking out of your messenger bag.”
“Yeah, that one.” Cutler sighs. “There was nothing lewd or lascivious going on, I promise you. She just used to come talk to me sometimes. During lunch or before class.”
This is news to Axel. He imagines his daughter sitting on a desk, swinging her legs back and forth and clutching her books to her chest. She’s in her goth getup—plaid skirt and black razed tights, plastic choker slicing her neck. “About what?” he asks.
Cutler shrugs. “Anything. TV shows, what happened in so-and-so’s class, things of that nature.”
Axel feels his brows inching toward each other. “Why’d she come talk to you? She had friends.”
Cutler’s mouth curls into a sardonic smile. Axel resists the urge to slap it off. “Friends, sure. The same friends who started that rumor?” Cutler searches his face, his eyes scanning Axel up and down. “Listen.” He slips into a softer tone, one he’s no doubt used with Chloe. “I think she turned a blind eye sometimes, only because we all, to some degree at least, want to be accepted by our peers. Even if we don’t necessarily like them or want to be like them.” Cutler pauses, as if deciding whether or not he should go for it. “Walk with me for a second, would ya?”
Axel takes a look around. Cutler’s house is sequestered against a backdrop of evergreens. They sway in the wind, their branches reaching toward him like thousands of arms ushering him into their darkness. Had Chloe gone in there? Had she gotten a ride from Cutler after the play, followed him around back like Axel is about to do?
There’s a rustling noise, and the sound of quick feet tearing at the dirt. Voices are warbled, like trying to speak underwater, and he recognizes them from when he sat watch the other day.
Curious and a little afraid, if he’s being honest, Axel follows Cutler around the side of his house. His heart launches into his throat when he sees it: what looks like a child’s playhouse is in the backyard, attached to some kind of man-made enclosure. Chicken wire stretches across each panel. Axel peers inside to see a row of nests.
“I turned Michael’s old playhouse into a chicken coop,” says Cutler. He says it like a man who doesn’t take on a lot of home improvement projects. Like stapling chicken wire to a couple of 2x4s is the epitome of honest work.
“Innovative,” notes Axel. “You want me to collect eggs or what?”
Cutler ignores the sarcasm. Instead, he bends down over a five-gallon pail and slides off the board that sits across it.
He watches as Cutler reaches inside it, then, and grabs a chicken by the foot. It’s white and speckled with black, with the bluest eye Axel’s ever seen. The bird doesn’t struggle. It’s frozen stiff. “This is Penguin,” says Cutler.
“I hate to break it to you, but Penguin’s dead.”
“Yes, as of yesterday.”
“How?” There’s a rustling noise, accompanied by the sounds of talons scratching in dirt. Axel looks over at the coop where three white chickens have come out to watch.
Cutler turns the bird in a sort of macabre rotisserie until Axel sees the naked torn flesh. The bloodied hole where the other eye is missing. “You might notice Penguin doesn’t look like the others. Chickens aren’t the brightest animals, but they noticed it eventually—that she was different—and when they did, they tore her apart.”
Axel considers Cutler, this man who holds a dead, mangled chicken upside down with chapped hands. This man whom his daughter had confided in, whom she’d probably spoken to more than she had Axel in the days leading up to her disappearance.
“Jesus, what don’t they eat?” Axel asks, noting the skeleton of a watermelon rind and scraps of scrambled eggs.
“I wouldn’t fall down in there,” warns Cutler. “They’d peck you clean.”
“Yeah?”
Cutler shrugs. “It’d take ’em a while, but sure. They’re raptors, after all.” Then, he does something that makes Axel’s stomach turn. He opens the latch and tosses the stiff carcass of Penguin inside. The three hens swarm it.
“You’ve heard the saying fox in the henhouse?” Cutler’s voice is muted by the feeding frenzy. “Sometimes the fox is just a distraction. The hens are so concerned with the proverbial predator, they fail to recognize that the real danger is among themselves.”
Over the cacophony of the chickens, Axel can barely hear the sound of tires shushing on the pavement. Someone has parked on the asphalt driveway. Assuming it’s Cutler’s wife, he waits for the sound of a woman’s voice, but hears a deeper one with a serrated edge instead.
“Mark, good to see you again.” Suddenly, Nikolai Kole stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Axel and gives him a less-than-friendly nudge. “Time to go.”
Forge Bridge is a charred, blackened skeleton that stretches from bank to bank. There’s no telling how it begins or ends. Evergreens shoot up on either side. Against a pale sky, their needles look like ink from a blown-out tattoo. Aspens with titian tops add splotches of lurid color to the landscape. In a week they’ll be naked, their trunks stripped to resemble bones that have been licked clean by Black Harbor.
Axel sits in the passenger seat of Kole’s SUV. His own vehicle sits empty in a nonexistent parking space to his right. The yellow lines have completely faded, decimated by time and weather.
A bracelet is looped around Kole’s rearview mirror. It’s made of black cord and plastic beads, the kind of tchotchke you’d find on vacation at a souvenir stand. White beads stamped with black letters spell the name HAZEL and Axel knows better than to ask. She’s one of the few people who left Black Harbor of her own volition, and rumors say she took a piece of Kole with her. The sergeant never talks about the transcriber, but Axel knows from experience that sometimes the people we don’t talk about are the ones we miss the most.
They’ve been sitting in silence for almost five minutes when Kole finally speaks. “Cutler’s not our guy.”
Axel clenches his jaw. A fire builds inside him. His ears are hot. He imagines the tips of them are as red as branding irons. “How’d you know I was there?”
“I got eyes and ears everywhere, Winthorp. Plus, his grandson called me.”
Axel thinks back to approaching Cutler’s garage. He must have given Michael his phone with instructions to call Kole as soon as he got in the car. Which means he knew there was going to be trouble.
“Why would he have—”
“I already checked into him. He’s squeaky clean. His A-name’s got nothing but a couple of speeding tickets.”
“That’s not ‘squeaky clean,’ then,” argues Axel.
“It is for Black Harbor.” The silence returns, creating a barrier between them. Kole shifts in his seat to better face Axel. “Trust me, he’s not our guy.”
Axel stares at him hard. He feels his eyes narrow as they block out everything but Kole. What he has to say is all that matters right now. Kole takes the intensity as a prompt to explain.
“I got a call from Brewer,” he says, mentioning the name of the school resource officer. “He told me about this rumor that was circulating, about a teacher and a student, and wanted me to look into it, which I did. I talked to Cutler, scoured his record every which way to Sunday, spoke to a couple of his colleagues, and closed the book.”
“Without consulting me.”
“Damn straight.”
“How could you do that?” Rage claws its way out of Axel’s throat.
“I just told you how. I interviewed a few teachers at Monroe to get a read on him. No one had jack to say about him, beyond the fact that he’s a nice guy, family man, cares about his students, blah blah blah.”
“Why then?” Axel changes course.
“To protect you.” Kole lets the statement simmer between them for a few seconds, before firing: “Tell me you wouldn’t have gone apeshit if you found out there was scuttlebutt about a teacher defiling your little girl.”
Axel sucks in a breath so deep, his chest strains against the fabric of his shirt. “I would have,” he admits. “But still, you should have—”
“No.” Kole shuts him down. “I did exactly what I should have done. What I had to do. You remember Dylan, right?”
Axel nods. He thinks he knows where this is going. Investigator Dylan was fired from the Black Harbor Police Department six years ago for tampering with an investigation regarding his own daughter dealing drugs. “I moved the heroin from Sarah’s music box to her boyfriend’s dresser drawer.” Kole taps his middle finger against his sternum, taking all the blame. “He was a drug-dealing, lowlife piece of shit anyway. I thought it would give her a chance to get clean, back on the straight and narrow. Instead, it made things a whole hell of a lot worse. She turned on her own father and accused him of planting the drugs. Dylan fell on the sword and was exiled from the PD, and Sarah went on to make dear old dad proud when she became the Candy Man, peddling pills to kids and catalyzing an epidemic of overdoses.” His gaze flicks back to Axel. “So, don’t tell me what I should have done when I learned the hard way what not to do.”
Axel swallows some of his anger. He believes Kole, that he did what he thought was in Axel’s best interest, and yet—
“You’re my second-best homicide detective, Axel. I can’t afford to lose you. Especially now.”
Axel can’t help but smile a little at the jab. He knows Kole favors Riley; they both do. And yet, here they are, putting their heads together to solve a double murder and a missing persons case.
“Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence,” he remarks. Just because they haven’t found clues pointing to Cutler having been at any of these crime scenes doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. It doesn’t mean he didn’t kill those girls.
“Trust me, I know,” Kole agrees. “But indulge me for a moment.”
“Okay.” Axel continues staring through the windshield. Silver clouds skate across the sky. It’s almost calming.
“What do the victims tell us?”
Axel feels his brows knit. “The autopsy for Sari Simons isn’t scheduled until later,” he says.
“You need an autopsy report to know that the girl was murdered?”
“No.”
“Good. What else do we know about her?”
Axel swallows. Grotesque images of Sari’s sightless eye sockets, mouth open in a silent scream, and the angry marks on her neck flash through his memory. “She was probably strangled.”
“And then…” Kole prompts. When Axel is quiet, he adds: “Don’t overthink this, Winthorp. What did the killer do after he strangled her?”
“He cut out her eyes.”
“Very good. Now, what kind of person does that?”
Finally, Axel turns to him. “What do you mean?”
Kole’s stare could turn him to stone. “Kills them quietly and then mutilates them.”
Axel shakes his head. He hadn’t thought of it like that before. “Someone who’s … angry?” He doesn’t realize how every sound around them has quelled to create a quiet so intense it’s suffocating until the name Kole gives steals the air from his lungs.
“Someone like Libby Lucas?”
“Libby?” Axel frowns. “You’re serious?”
“She’s an outcast. You mentioned once that your own daughter didn’t want to be friends with her because she’s strange. You don’t think she gets teased, maybe has some pent-up aggression?”
“Maybe, but…” Axel shakes his head in an attempt to part his colliding thoughts. There could be merit there. She was evasive in her interview with him and Riley on Friday, and last night, she’d been at the murder scene of Sari Simons.
“I got a call from Patrol about an hour ago … I’d literally just fallen asleep. Anyway, I was confident we were looking for a male aggressor, but…” He leans toward Axel as though he’s going to whisper in his ear. Instead, he reaches for the backseat and retrieves what looks like a little black CD binder. He hands it to Axel, who studies it. “This was wedged in a pallet and partially obscured by a tarp about ten yards from the body.”
The zipper groans as Axel drags it along the track, and the case unfolds to reveal an array of sharp objects: scissors, scalpel, bone shears. A tag above an empty compartment identifies the kit as: PROPERTY OF LIBBY LUCAS.
“I’m guessing whatever goes there was the spoon or scalpel or whatever used to gouge out Miss Simons’s eyes.” Kole points to the vacant slot.
Axel is shaking his head, all these shards of evidence forming a mosaic in his mind. The busted teeth. The gouged-out eyes. Libby’s taxidermy kit. “So, you think—”
“I think you should interview Libby Lucas again. Find out why the hell she would bring a taxidermy kit to a haunted house.”
Axel gnaws at the hangnail that’s now a pulsing pain in his thumb as he considers all of Libby’s potential excuses. She might say she forgot she had the kit on her, although it’s too big to conceal in a pocket and Libby didn’t have a backpack. Sari Simons did, which, as far as he knows, is still missing. She might claim it isn’t hers and that someone wrote her name on it as a plant; however, the fingerprints on the tools could tell them otherwise. Or, she might simply deny any knowledge of how it got there, in which case—
“Listen,” says Kole, interrupting his thoughts. “Everybody lies, Axel. And everybody has a tell.” He pauses for dramatic effect, long enough for Axel to swivel his gaze away from the bridge and back to him. “Your ears get red, did you know that? Riley runs her tongue across her teeth. You mean to tell me you’ve lived next door to that girl for practically her entire life and you don’t know her tell? Because if that’s the truth, then I failed as your supervisor.”
Axel sits quiet for a moment, thinking back to the interview with Libby. How had it only been two days ago?
We have reason to believe that the same person who killed Madison Caldwell also took Chloe. If you have any idea who that person is, you have an obligation to tell us.
He remembers telling her that before she was dismissed on Friday, remembers her staring at him with those ink-black eyes, her mouth twisting into a grimace. He remembers her hand creeping toward her throat and closing around her locket.
And then she smiled.