He’s always known that places have memories. The tannery brims with so many, it’s suffocating. Folded into the fabric of its darkness, they wrap him up and corkscrew into his ears. How many hides must have passed through here? How many skins salted and sawdusted and hung to dry? How many ghosts like Aurora Blum haunt this place? Urban legends say you can still see the stain where she smacked the concrete.
He flicks on his tactical flashlight. Eddie demanded he drop his rifle and unholster his sidearm. They’re weaponless; although it doesn’t seem they’ll have much trouble finding something to kill him with if need be, Axel notes as he conducts a cursory search of their surroundings. Old dusty hides flop over cedar drying racks, the stakes pointed. The wash bins are bone-dry, bags of salt slumped against them. Drums and cages for tumbling skins loom ominously along a wall, near a dust-covered workbench of broken taxidermy tools. Anything that was worth anything is long gone by now.
Industrial fans line sawdust-covered walkways. He steps over a cord and nudges Rowan to do the same. The hair on the back of his neck stands up when he reminds himself that Eddie has the higher ground. A bullet for each of them is all it would take, though judging by the other victims, Eddie prefers to kill people up close and personal.
He’s usually good at navigating in the dark. But his mind is a melee of every possible fear, with the worst rising above: What if Eddie has brought them here so they can watch him kill Chloe, his final victim?
A staircase zigzags to the second floor. Axel starts up it without looking back and feels Rowan closely behind him. Dust motes float down from the floorboards. The upper levels of the tannery are set up like a large scaffolding. On the far side, he observes an old elevator for carts, presumably, as they deliver freshly washed hides to cedar lockers on the second floor where the sawdust must be two inches thick. The third floor must have been used primarily as storage, he guesses when they arrive at it. His eyes scan the area for Aurora Blum’s things: magazines, sweatshirts, candy wrappers—items a teenage girl might have kept in her secret hideout—and discover, instead, a figure that slowly emerges from the shadows.
Instinctively, Axel steps in front of Rowan, shielding her. “Where’s Chloe?” he asks.
A humorless laugh disrupts the dust motes. Eddie Taylor smiles thinly, his sharp teeth gleaming in the hoary light that leaks through the holes in the ceiling. “Good to see you, too, Bueller,” he says. “It’s fun seeing each other out of context, right? I almost didn’t recognize you in this getup.” He makes a vague gesture at Axel’s black SWAT uniform. “And without your usual partner, of course. Hello, Rowan, how are you?” He wiggles his fingers at her.
Axel feels Rowan shift behind him, still on the staircase. She tries to take a step forward, but he forces her back. If anyone is fighting Eddie, it’s going to be him.
“Let her go,” he tries. “And we’ll walk away, I swear.”
Another smile splits Eddie’s face. “Why would I go and do a thing like that? I finally have my sister back.”
“She’s not your sister!” Rowan screams, her voice ragged. “She’s our daughter.”
“Possession is nine-tenths of the law, ain’t that right, Officer?” Eddie tilts his head and regards Axel with a smirk. “You let her go Thursday night. And who did she come to? Right … to me.”
“You planned that,” states Axel. “You killed Madison Caldwell. Because you knew that if there was a homicide, Rowan and I would have to leave the play and investigate. You knew we’d have to—” He chokes on the last two words. They tumble out, a pair of strangled things. “Leave Chloe.”
A slow clap punctuates the quiet. “You’re smarter than you look, Bueller. What else do you know?”
Crime scene images flash through his memory. Madison’s busted teeth. The marks on both her and Sari’s necks. Like a software program, his mind matches them to the ones he is now sure he left on Mark Cutler, when, in his less-than-finest moment, he grabbed him by the hoodie and choked him out in Interview Room #1. “Cross-collar choke,” he says, the name of the technique a revelation. “You walked right up to them. Maybe even spoke to them. They saw you, they just … never suspected you would murder them.”
Eddie is swathed in a literal spotlight as patches of overcast sky filter in through holes in a pockmarked roof. He seems to be enjoying it. “There’s something … utterly delicious about hiding in plain sight. I’ll admit it’s a bit of a thrill,” shares Eddie. “As I’m sure it was for Aurora, too. All these years she’s been under the guise of blond, demure little Chloe Winthorp. I should thank Cutler. After all, if he hadn’t cast her into the role of that goth character, I may never have seen it for myself. Who she really is.”
“She isn’t—”
Axel bars his arm across Rowan’s chest, preventing her from advancing.
“She told me all about her issues with those girls,” says Eddie. “And I saw it for myself, too. The shitty looks they doled out to her, the salacious sketches they left behind for their peers to come across. ‘Chloe’”—he uses air quotes—“trusted me. And when someone trusts you, there’s no end to the things they’ll tell you, or to what they will let you do to them.”
“Did Sari Simons trust you up until the moment you scooped out her eyes?” Axel asks.
A wicked grin twists Eddie’s lips. “Girls like Sari Simons don’t deserve eyes,” he says. “She saw the trouble Madison was causing for my sister. She could have stopped it. Instead, what did she do? She amplified it. Made it so much worse by sending that Snapchat around the whole school. She was dead before I took them, though. If that makes you feel better.”
A lull settles. Axel feels himself stiffening, like rigor mortis is setting in the longer he stands here and lets Eddie suck air. Carefully, he takes a step forward. The stair creaks in protest as though trying to persuade him to come back. “I can’t let you leave here, Eddie.”
“Who says I want to be left?” Eddie retreats, but not out of fear. Without taking his eyes off Axel, he reaches into a cedar locker, and pulls the door toward him. Blindly, expertly, he grabs a two-handled knife with a curved blade that must be more than twelve inches in length. He’s practiced this.
“Give us our daughter.” Axel starts to circle him. If he can keep Eddie’s attention on him, perhaps Rowan can sneak past, up one more flight of stairs, and go to Chloe. And do what with her? Rappel down the wall? It doesn’t matter. She just needs to get to her. This is where they split up. He’ll take care of Eddie.
Eddie snorts. “Your daughter is dead, gone the same way as the others, I’m afraid.” He shrugs. “The girl in the garden is my sister, Aurora.”
“Aurora fell through this floor eighteen years ago and you know it. You were there, Eddie.” He can see Eddie’s nostrils flare. A vein bulges in his forehead and Axel knows without a shadow of a doubt that he wants to kill him. Good. He keeps needling him, watching from the corner of his eye as Rowan slips away. “You watched the light dim in her eyes. You watched her blood soak into the pavement and what did you do? Not a damn thing. No wonder your mother—”
The air bursts from his lungs with the force of a freight train. His skull connects with the floor, catalyzing a cloud of sawdust to scatter into the dead air. He gasps for breath, one hand of his daughter’s would-be murderer squeezing his windpipe, the other about to bring the rusted blade down on his head.