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Finn leaned down and looked closer. He could see a thick set of chains around the man, pulling his limbs together. Somewhere underneath, to the back of the dock, Finn was sure the man had been chained.
Amelia, following closely, inhaled sharply at the sight. "This is just... terrible." She turned and looked back up the sloping ridge along from the cliffs. Finn did the same and could see Kirsty, the woman who was helping them around the island, disappearing over the crest. The woman still had her back to them and didn't turn before she vanished, clearly not wanting to see the body of a man she knew.
"We need to get Ivar Ward out," Finn whispered, almost to himself. His empathy for the victim was evident. "No one deserves this."
Amelia nodded in agreement, her expression resolute. "Agreed. Let's see what we can do."
They both approached the two officers who were busily looking at an array of tools lying slapdash on the metal dock. One of them, a man with red hair and a grizzled look on his face, stood up when he saw Finn and Amelia nearing.
They shook hands. “Are you the cavalry?” the man remarked.
“I'm Inspector Winters,” Amelia said. “This is Finn Wright, he's a consulting...”
“Oh, the American!” the man's face suddenly lit up. He shook Finn's hand. “I've seen your work on the television. The last two cases worked out well then?”
Finn felt his shoulder wince in the cold at the mention of it. It still hadn't healed completely from the gunshot wound. “Yeah, they went well. Now, we're just trying to solve this one. How did Ivar Ward get identified if we haven't gotten to the body yet?"
The man scratched his head. “I think some of the guys found documents on what was left of his boat. We found his wife and she had reported him missing, said it was the same boat, though she didn't understand how he got here.”
“The storm probably brought him in after fishing for some herring,” the other officer piped up while trying to tape one pole onto another. “It looked like he ran aground and jumped off.”
“Then someone on the island killed him,” Amelia said.
“That's what I think,” the younger of the two officers said. “But Wilson here thinks otherwise.”
The man with the red bear rolled his eyes. “I never said I believed the stories. I just said that if something bad lived off the coast, you could see it making Huldra island its home.”
“What have you tried so far?” Finn asked the two men.
“We tried to hook the body with some poles, but so far no luck,” Wilson said.
The younger officer went back to taping two long poles together, one of them with a hook on the end. Finn recognized it as a type of pole used to hook crab lines out of the sea.
“I don't think that's going to work,” Finn said. “We need something to get through this dock metal.”
“I don't know what metal this is, “Wilson said, “but this stuck is rock solid. You'll need something with a bit of grunt to get at it.”
“We could go back to Storn and see if our station or the local fire crew has something,” the younger officer said.
Amelia shook her head, looking frustrated. Finn could tell she wanted to examine the body and get ahead of what was happening.
“That's going to take too long,” she said. “We're already two victims behind.”
“You think there'll be more?” Wilson asked.
Amelia peered down at the body, staring up at them from under the dock. "No one does a thing like this and just stops. This is a blood thirst."
As Amelia conversed with the two officers about trying to find something that could get at the body on the island, Finn suddenly saw something up on a ridge nearby. A subtle movement caught his attention. Glancing up, he noticed a figure silhouetted against the gray sky. Standing atop a nearby rock outcropping, the man observed the scene with an inscrutable expression.
“We've got an audience,” Finn said. He looked up at the man and had a strange sense of unease staring at him. The man looked almost peaceful, despite the horrendous scene down below him. "There's something off about that guy," Finn murmured to Amelia.
She followed his gaze. "Do you think he could be observing his handy work?"
Finn had read most of Valerie Law's work from the Criminal Psychopathy Unit back at Quantico. She had served there at the same time as him, though she had, in the last couple of years, left to start a detective agency with her old partners. Her work had helped Finn understand more than one killer, and this was no different. In the protocols she had developed, she advised investigating agents to post someone in the crowd of onlookers in plain clothes, to see if they could catch anyone exhibiting strange body language in the crowd. On more than one occasion, serial killers had been known to watch the police investigation from the sidelines, getting a perverse joy from it.
And Ivar Ward's death definitely qualified as an abhorrent act.
"I'm going to have a chat," Finn eventually replied, curiosity piqued. "Maybe he knows something."
