The body belongs to Cutler. His skin is as pale as a fish belly, devoid of blood flow. It pools in his left cheek and on that side of his body, the purple lividity disappearing beneath his clothes, leading Axel to guess that’s how he smacked the water.
Rowan’s joined them now. Crouching beside the corpse, she estimates out loud that he jumped around 2200 hours. He watches as her black-gloved hands lift up Cutler’s collar and he knows she’s searching for the marks on his neck that won’t be there.
Cutler killed those girls. He kidnapped Chloe. And he knows police were closing in on him, so he jumped.
Fucking coward.
“Axel.” His name from her lips brings him back to the here and now: standing on the leaf-strewn riverbank near Forge Bridge, at approximately 0400 hours.
He approaches her and, leaning in for a closer look, observes a pair of red chafe marks on both sides of Cutler’s neck.
“Fuck.” Kole steals the word from Axel’s mouth. His voice is a sharp whisper in his ear as he comes to stand next to him. “Any mutilation?”
“None that I can see,” says Rowan. “Unless it’s concealed beneath his clothing.” She shimmies Cutler’s sweatpants off to check. Everything’s intact. Shriveled, but …
“He got all his toes?” asks Kole.
Axel helps Rowan remove the victim’s shoes. She pinches the toe of his black sock and pulls straight up. It dangles from her fingers like a deflated balloon. “Seven, eight, nine, ten,” counts Kole. “All accounted for.”
“Where’s his jacket?” asks Rowan, and Axel knows why she’s asking. For one, it’s thirty-seven degrees out here, and two, jumpers always leave something behind. Cutler didn’t come here without a jacket.
“Miserelli!” Riley calls. “Bring his jacket over here.”
A flashlight orb bobs toward them and the titian-haired patrol officer appears, clutching a paper bag, the top of which has been scrunched into a handle. She holds the bag while Rowan extracts the article: a navy-and-grey sherpa-lined flannel jacket. She shoves her hands into the pockets wherein Axel knows she will find his keys: car, house, and classroom, probably. He can hear their metal teeth grating.
She shines her flashlight on the jacket, checking for blood. “There, on the bottom.” She points to a series of rust-colored flecks.
Axel leans in. His gaze flicks to Rowan first. She looks awful, unrested. Dark circles cup her eyes and her features look as if they’re being dragged toward the ground. He might have thought he’d get some sick satisfaction out of it, a little schadenfreude, but he doesn’t. Seeing her like this makes him sad.
He’s sure he doesn’t look much better. After getting worked to the floor earlier, his face probably mirrors Cutler’s with the purple bruising.
“Looks old,” says Kole, and Axel snaps toward him, forgetting that they’re talking about the blood on the jacket and not Rowan.
“Might be,” she says. “Wonder what it’s from.”
“He’s got a chicken coop.” It’s the first thing Axel’s said since she arrived on-scene. “His chickens used to attack one another.”
Rowan draws her head back in a suspended nod. Her gaze moves from Axel to Kole back to the jacket. “Aren’t chickens illegal in the city?”
“Cutler’s technically not in the city of Black Harbor,” explains Kole. “His property is on the other side of the woods that surround Monroe.”
Axel stares at Rowan, watching the gears turn behind her eyes, and he knows what she’s thinking. That perhaps he wasn’t crazy to think Cutler was guilty after all. He lives on the other side of the woods, where young girls are ripe for the picking.
Girls like Chloe, whose last known location was the walking trail.
Rowan hands the jacket back to Miserelli. Kole and Riley wander away, and Rowan and Axel are left in the shadows. “You think he jumped because of the rumor … resurfacing?” Rowan’s voice is low.
“That would be my guess.” He stops there, short of confessing that they dragged Cutler into an interrogation just hours before he jumped.
“If he’s the one, Axel … if he’s been killing all these girls, then maybe…”
He feels his brows knit. “You think we have a chance at finding Chloe? If we can get into his house?” They have his keys; they wouldn’t even need to ram his door.
“Don’t you?”
“She’s dead, remember? According to you, anyway.”
Steam puffs out her nose. He can see he’s done it. Her wall is coming back up as visibly as the window in a limousine. He wants to ask her about yesterday, why she was with Deschane, but now isn’t the time or place. She begins to walk away. “Rowan, wait.” He grabs her arm at the same time Kole announces he’s heading back to the bureau.
“Walk with me,” says the sergeant.
Axel lets Rowan go and follows Kole up the bank. They stand at the top, overlooking the scene. Yellow placards peek through foliage, and Cutler’s skin glows under the moonlight. Axel remembers when Chloe was a kid, catching frogs under the little stone bridge where Madison Caldwell’s body was discovered. Hours after she came inside, he discovered a tick on her ankle, so bloated and drunk on her blood it had turned white. That’s what Cutler’s head looks like, or like one of those mushrooms you mow over in the yard and take satisfaction in stomping on.
Forge Bridge groans. The water is a black snake, slithering beneath it. Its waves lap the rocks like tongues, the river thirsting for another body.
“I’m gonna ask you one time,” says Kole. “Not as your boss, but as your friend and your brother. And if you lie to me, I’ll murder you myself.”
Axel meets the sergeant’s gaze. They hold hard on each other’s stares.
Finally, Kole speaks. “You didn’t do this, did you?”
The question smacks Axel like a bullet in the chest. “What?”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“No. I didn’t.”
Kole works his jaw. “Okay.”
“You don’t believe me?”
Kole narrows his eyes. He swallows, and his expression softens. “He might have murdered your daughter, Axel. Or at the very least, done something bad to her. Who wouldn’t have wanted to push him off the bridge?”
Axel knows what’s happening here. This is how Kole gets guilty people to confess. He aligns with them, empathizes with them. He chooses his next words carefully. “I didn’t do it.”
“Okay,” says Kole, as though that’s the end of it. His footsteps are oddly loud as he walks toward his Impala. Axel stands there, flinching when he hears the door slam. The wind comes, then, and tears at his skin, threatening to carry him off the same way as Cutler. But dread keeps him weighted down.
This is far from the end of things.