On paper, Cutler is clean. He has no record with the Black Harbor Police Department or neighboring jurisdictions, as far as Axel can tell. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence—the golden rule of investigations, though Kole would challenge him on that.
Everybody lies. His sergeant’s voice echoes in his head. Axel has always hated that grim perspective, but after nearly a day of neither hide nor hair of Chloe, he’s beginning to adopt it himself. Teenage girls don’t just disappear into thin air. Someone has to be lying.
It might even be Kole. He was supposed to interview all the teachers today while Axel and Riley teamed up to take on the students. But Cutler, conveniently, wasn’t there when Kole made the rounds.
Kole is protecting Cutler and Axel doesn’t know why.
But he’s going to find out.
He unlocks his phone and scrolls through the camera roll. The crude drawings discovered at the bottom of Chloe’s locker glare at him, daring him to pick them apart. Earlier today during her interview, Libby Lucas mentioned that Madison Caldwell had been sketching during Spanish class. He needs to compare notes with Kole. Perhaps the Spanish teacher saw what Madison had been working on.
It’s a shot in the dark, but then, that’s all he has right now. If the rumor was as widespread as it seems to have been, any number of students could have harassed Chloe with these drawings, whether tormenting her in class with them or stuffing them into her locker. Swiping back and forth through them, he observes that they don’t appear to be the work of just one hand.
Scarlet leaves cling to his windshield wipers. He listens to the whispers they etch in the glass, whispers that condemn him for the things he should have known.
Chloe was involved with an older man. A man older than him, even. Mark Cutler is fifty-one. He has a wife and an adult daughter, and a grandson from what Axel dug up online. He found articles of Cutler winning Monroe Academy’s Teacher of the Year award, a photo of him at a parade holding the hand of a little boy in a blue jacket. The caption beneath read: Local teacher, Mark Cutler, attends Black Harbor’s Winter Festival Parade with grandson.
He has no social media as far as Axel can find, which means he cannot follow or befriend Cutler with the VCTF’s burner account. It doesn’t raise a red flag. Axel knows that teachers generally do well to avoid opening a portal between their personal and professional lives. Most cops—at least his generation—don’t have social media for that reason. The same cannot be said of the general public. So many confrontations could be circumvented if people just kept their personal lives off the internet. Instead, they act as if having social media is a God-given right.
Someone back at the police department will be combing through the girls’ computers now, scrolling through their online accounts, saved pictures, and hidden files. He wonders what they will find. Hate-fueled messages from Chloe to Madison? An online diary?
He can’t help but think about what Reeves Singh said this morning:… if anyone had a reason to want Madison dead … it was Chloe. But then, what had Libby said? That no one really liked Madison Caldwell. His Spidey senses tell him there is more to that story. He will catch Libby at home today, hopefully, while she’s alone, taking the garbage out or checking the mail, and engage her in a casual, neighborly chat.
Suddenly, a message from Rowan floats on his phone screen.
Where are you?
At work, he replies, which is true. His work can be anywhere, even here outside Mark Cutler’s residence. His house is on a dead-end road, tucked away at the edge of the woods, on the other side of which Axel knows is Monroe Academy. The windows are dark and opaque, reflecting black mirrored evergreens and birds that float against a stark sky. He checks the time. It’s 3:18 p.m. Cutler should be home soon. He’ll watch him pull into the drive, then he’ll get out and run circles around him before he even has a chance to get his bearings.
He wonders if Rowan is home or if she’s gone to Marnie’s. She could also be at the car wash. It’s where she goes when she’s anxious, says it’s the only way to quiet her thoughts. He is thankful for that; there are worse ways to self-medicate. And they’re all too accessible in Black Harbor.
Everyone has their remedies. Jiujitsu is his. He spars at Silva’s Academy downtown two to three times per week, crime permitting. Riley got him into it. She’s been going since she got hired at the PD. It gives her an edge on guys who think lady cops are just playing dress-up. For Axel, it’s about the release, an opportunity to shed his skin as a homicide detective and slip into a gi, in a place where no one cares who or what the hell he is. Until the death phone rings, that is.
Axel drinks coffee out of his thermos and focuses intently on the hunter-green house across the street. It’s a tri-level, given away by the staggered stories and two-car garage underneath what might be a living room or a dining room. A backdrop of evergreens looms behind it. Could Chloe be in there, her body lying in a shallow grave not twenty feet from Cutler’s backyard?
No. He shakes the image from his head.
Chloe is alive. And she’s not a killer.
She used to talk about him a lot—Mr. Cutler. It’s when she stopped talking about him, he realizes, that he should have grown concerned. It’s as though she’d picked up on his fatherly disapproval, his dislike of her having a friendship with an adult male, teacher or not. He never outright told her he didn’t like it, but Chloe was sensitive. She picked up on a lot of things.
Axel rolls down his window to listen. For what, he doesn’t exactly know. He twists the volume dial on his stereo all the way counterclockwise. The cool air wicks the warmth from his skin. He sucks in a breath through his teeth and it pricks at his gums.
He holds it for a beat, listening.
And listening.
Then he hears it: a warble coming from Cutler’s backyard. Axel leans into the open window, his ear open to the night. The warbling continues in a series, then a cackle pierces the quiet.
Laughter? Who is outside laughing? He imagines Cutler’s wife, bundled up in a flannel jacket, clutching a cup of coffee and talking on the phone. It’s possible. His own mother used to talk on the phone at all hours of the day, sitting on the front stoop and stubbing out cigarettes while she gossiped with her best friend. It was her way of filling the silence after his dad died.
The cackle is quieter this time. It isn’t Chloe, and yet, he has half a mind to walk around back and see who it is. Maybe they’d have a scrap of information to share about his daughter.
So far, nothing has come of the Amber Alert. Someone called in to report a dark-haired female matching Chloe’s stature, but when patrol responded, they determined the subject to be a thirty-three-year-old sex worker. The walking trail has yielded no more clues. Police have combed every square inch of it stretching from Monroe Academy to Belgrave Circle and beyond—but it’s the most trafficked strip of asphalt in Black Harbor. Monday through Friday, hundreds of footsteps travel back and forth to the school, and kids have a habit of dropping things: soda bottles, empty vape cartridges, key chains, scrunchies, student ID cards, you name it. A patrol officer discovered an earring with a speck of blood on it, which seemed morbidly promising, but neither Axel nor Rowan could identify it as belonging to Chloe, and besides, it was gold with a jade stone; she’d been into punching silver safety pins in her earlobes before she disappeared.
The cackling stops. All is quiet again.
He exhales and turns on the radio. The banter of the radio show fills the interior of his car.
“… disgusting! I can’t choose!”
“Elle, you have to! Come on, hair for teeth or teeth for hair.”
“Ugh, fine! Teeth for hair, obviously.”
“That’s the right answer. See, it wasn’t that hard.”
“Do I use the same toothbrush for both?”
Talk of teeth sends Axel back to the gully where Madison Caldwell’s body was discovered with hers knocked out. He wonders if Chloe could have suffered the same fate.
No. Chloe is alive.
But perhaps she wasn’t meant to be. It’s possible she was meant to be killed that night, too, which is why they are looking for connections between the two girls, shared experiences they might have had where they met someone they shouldn’t have. Someone who wanted to do them harm.
The school is an obvious connector.
And the neighborhood.
Both girls attended Monroe Academy. Both girls lived in Belgrave Circle. One girl is dead. The other is missing.
He considers the possibility that Chloe escaped her would-be murderer and is on the run. She could be hiding somewhere, anywhere. It’s safe now, he wants to broadcast to her. You can come home now, Chloe. Please come home.
But is it ever truly safe? If the world itself is a dangerous place, Black Harbor is its core, a stagnant cesspool where bad people come in and never leave. And why would they? Rent is free or cheap and there aren’t enough cops to take them all. Paddy wagons see more action than public transportation around here.
Another message from Rowan appears. What should we do for dinner tonight?
Madison Caldwell’s autopsy is tomorrow morning, he remembers. His heart rate spikes, suddenly, at the notion of discovering a new lead.
Chins, he texts. I’ll pick it up.
It might be a lie, because if Cutler comes home, Axel is acutely aware of the possibility that he might not. No one hurts his little girl.
No one.