CHAPTER ONE
The ice cream was a terrible idea.
Isla Rivers stood outside The Scoop on Superior Street, her double scoop of salted caramel threatening to drip down her wrist despite the thirty-four-degree temperature, and wondered what had possessed her to order ice cream in early March.
The answer was currently standing three feet away, a thirteen-year-old with her father's blue eyes and her mother's dimples, who had declared that ice cream was "scientifically proven to taste better when it's cold outside. "
"She's not wrong," James Sullivan had said, and that had been that.
Isla had learned a long time ago that arguing with James about his daughter was pointless.
In the almost three years they'd been partners—three years of crime scenes and stakeouts and long drives through Minnesota winters—she'd watched him negotiate with drug dealers, stare down suspects twice his size, and sit patiently through eight-hour interrogations without breaking a sweat.
But when Emma Sullivan deployed those blue eyes and that particular tilt of her chin, the man folded like a cheap suit.
It was, Isla had to admit, one of his more endearing qualities.
Now she watched as Emma demolished her cotton candy monstrosity with the single-minded determination of a teenager who had learned that adults could be persuaded to make poor decisions on Sundays.
James stood beside his daughter, his own modest vanilla cone already half-finished, the late afternoon light catching the gray at his temples.
He was wearing the navy parka today—the one that had seen better days, the one he refused to replace despite the duct tape holding together a seam near the pocket.
Isla had teased him about it once, and he'd told her it had been with him through every Minnesota winter for the past decade.
"It's got character," he'd said.
"It's got hypothermia waiting to happen," she'd replied.
But she understood. Some things you held onto, even when they were falling apart. Especially then.
James Sullivan had been her partner since almost the beginning of her time in Duluth.
A native of the city, former homicide detective turned FBI agent, he knew these streets and these people in a way Isla never would.
Where she brought profiling expertise and a keen eye for behavioral patterns, he brought deep local connections and the kind of methodical patience that had cracked cases she would have approached too aggressively.
They balanced each other. Complemented each other.
And somewhere along the way, he'd become the person she trusted most in the world.
"You're not eating," Emma observed, gesturing at Isla's cone with her plastic spoon. "It's going to melt."
"It's thirty-four degrees."
"Doesn't matter. Ice cream waits for no one."
Isla took a dutiful bite, the sweetness sharp against her teeth.
Around them, downtown Duluth moved at its Sunday afternoon pace—families wandering between shops, a couple with a golden retriever pausing to read the menu posted outside a brewery, a cluster of college kids laughing about something on one of their phones.
The harbor stretched beyond the buildings, Lake Superior a gray-blue expanse beneath a sky threatening snow.
Almost three years she'd been here now, and she still wasn't used to it.
The way the lake dominated everything. The way it seemed to breathe.
The way it kept its secrets.
Stop it, she told herself. You're off duty. You're eating ice cream. You're allowed to have one normal afternoon.
"Dad says you've been working too hard," Emma said, entirely too casually.
Isla shot James a look. He suddenly became very interested in his vanilla cone.
"Did he now."
"He says you're at the office before he gets there and you're still there when he leaves. He says it's not healthy."
"Emma." James's voice carried the particular tone of a parent who had just watched their child deploy classified information in a civilian setting. "That's not exactly—"
"You said it at dinner on Tuesday."
"Context matters."
"You said she was going to work herself into the ground and somebody needed to say something."
Isla felt something twist in her chest—not quite embarrassment, not quite pleasure. Something in between. "Your father worries too much."
"He says that about you, too."
James rubbed the back of his neck, a gesture Isla had learned to recognize as acute discomfort.
His hands were large and calloused—equally capable of taking detailed notes at a crime scene or building the elaborate dollhouse she'd seen in photos of Emma's room.
A faded scar ran along his right hand from a fishing accident in his youth, one of the many small details she'd catalogued over their years together.
"I think we've established that I say a lot of things at dinner.
Most of them are requests for you to eat your vegetables. "
Emma grinned, the triumphant smile of a teenager who had successfully embarrassed her parent in front of a colleague.
There was nothing malicious in it. That was the thing about Emma—she was sharp, perceptive, occasionally too honest for comfort, but there was a warmth underneath it all that reminded Isla of Claire.
The way her sister could see straight through Isla's defenses and choose kindness anyway.
They walked as they ate, drifting south along Superior Street toward the harbor.
Isla had suggested the walk when James mentioned he had Emma for the afternoon—shared custody with his ex-wife Stacey, an arrangement that seemed to work well enough for everyone involved.
She'd meant it as a casual thing, a break from the files that had been consuming her for weeks.
But somewhere between her apartment and downtown, it had become something else.
Something that felt dangerously close to normal.
She watched James point out something to Emma—a mural she hadn't noticed before, bright colors splashed across the side of a building—and felt the familiar ache settle behind her ribs.
He moved through Duluth with the easy confidence of someone who had spent his whole life here, who knew which shortcuts to take when the tourists clogged the main streets, who could tell you which restaurants had been around for decades and which ones wouldn't last the winter.
It was so different from how Isla moved through the world—always analyzing, always assessing, never quite belonging anywhere.
Three years, she thought. Almost three years of working beside him, of learning his tells and trusting his instincts, of those moments in the car or at the office when their eyes would meet and hold for just a beat too long. Three years of wondering what it would be like to close that distance.
But she never did. And neither did he.
It was the job, partly. Partners who got involved complicated everything—the chain of custody on evidence, the testimony in court, and the simple ability to think clearly when the other person was in danger.
Isla had seen it go wrong before, back in Miami.
Watched colleagues torpedo their careers for relationships that burned bright and fast and left nothing but wreckage.
And then there was the other thing. The thing she didn't like to examine too closely.
She was thirty-seven years old. Her last real relationship had ended in a different city, a different life, with Reggie Stamos standing in her apartment doorway saying I can't do this anymore, Isla.
I can't watch you disappear into a case and pretend it doesn't matter.
She'd told herself she was fine that the work was enough.
That she didn't need someone waiting for her at home, didn't need the weight of another person's expectations pressing against her chest.
But sometimes, on afternoons like this one, watching James laugh at something Emma said, she wondered if she'd been lying.
"Penny for your thoughts," James said, falling into step beside her. Emma had wandered ahead, distracted by something in a shop window.
"Just enjoying the day." Isla forced a smile. "It's nice. This."
He studied her for a moment, those deep-set blue eyes seeing too much as always.
His face bore the weathered look of someone who'd spent considerable time outdoors in harsh conditions, with a strong jaw and a nose that had been broken at least once.
She'd asked him about that once, during a late night at the office.
Bar fight in his twenties, he'd said. The other guy looked worse. She'd never been sure if he was joking.
"You sure?" he asked. "You've got your case face on."
"I don't have a case face."
"You absolutely have a case face. Your jaw does this thing." He gestured vaguely at her. "Gets all tight."
"My jaw is perfectly relaxed."
"If you say so." But he was smiling now, that slight crinkle at the corners of his eyes that made him look younger than his thirty-nine years. "Seriously, though. You okay?"
The honest answer was complicated. The Lake Superior Killer was still out there—Robert Brune, sixty-five years old, forty years a fisherman, quiet and unassuming and responsible for God knew how many bodies at the bottom of the lake.
They'd identified him two months ago, had his face plastered across every news station in the Upper Midwest, and still he'd slipped through their fingers like water.
The leads had dried up. The sightings had stopped.
And Isla lay awake at night, staring at her ceiling, wondering where he was hiding. Wondering who he might be hunting.
James knew all of this. He'd been beside her through every frustrating dead end, every false alarm, every press conference where they'd had to admit they still had nothing.
He'd been the one to bring her coffee when she forgot to eat, the one to remind her that even the FBI's best couldn't catch every monster on their preferred timeline.
He'd been steady and patient and present in a way that made her chest tight if she thought about it too long.
But today was supposed to be different. Today she was supposed to be a person who ate ice cream and took walks and didn't think about the monster in the dark.
"I'm good," she said. "Really."
James held her gaze for another moment, then nodded. He didn't push. He never pushed. It was one of the things she—
Her phone rang.
The sound cut through the afternoon like a blade, sharp and insistent. Isla's hand went to her pocket automatically, the motion so ingrained it was almost involuntary. She saw the number on the screen—Coast Guard, Duluth station—and felt the ice cream turn to lead in her stomach.
"Rivers," she answered.
"Agent Rivers, this is Officer Dave Scale with the Coast Guard.
" The voice was professional, clipped, but she could hear something underneath it.
Something that made her spine go rigid. "We've recovered a body from the lake.
Male, appears to be in his fifties or sixties.
There's trauma to the back of the head, and the positioning suggests—"
"Where?" She was already moving, her free hand finding James's arm, squeezing once. His expression shifted instantly from relaxed to alert—the transformation so familiar it was almost comforting. This was what they did. This was who they were. "Where did you find him?"
"About two miles northeast of the harbor. A fishing vessel spotted him caught up in some debris near the shore. We've got the scene secured, but given the, ah, circumstances..."
He didn't need to finish. Given the circumstances. Given the manhunt that had been dominating local news for two months. Given the fact that they'd been waiting—dreading—exactly this.
"We'll be there in twenty minutes," Isla said. "Don't let anyone touch anything."
She ended the call and stood for a moment, the phone still pressed against her ear, the world tilting around her. The sunlight felt wrong now, too bright, too cheerful for what was coming.
"Isla." James's voice was quiet, steady. The voice he used at crime scenes, when witnesses were falling apart and evidence was slipping away. The voice that had talked her down from more than one dark moment over the years. "What is it?"
She turned to face him. Emma was still at the shop window, oblivious, pointing at something inside.
"Body in the lake," Isla said. "Head trauma. It's him, James. It's LSK."
She watched the understanding dawn in his eyes, watched his jaw tighten in an echo of her own.
For almost three years, they'd worked side by side.
She knew his tells the way she knew her own heartbeat.
The slight flare of his nostrils when he was angry.
The way he went still when he was thinking.
The particular set of his shoulders when he was bracing for something bad.
All of those tells were present now.
"Christ," he breathed. "How long has the body been in the water?"
"They didn't say. We need to get down there."
For a moment, neither of them moved. The afternoon hung suspended around them—the families walking by, the laughter from the college kids, the mundane beautiful normalcy of a Sunday in early March. All of it suddenly fragile. All of it suddenly far away.
Then James nodded once, decisive. "I'll drop Emma with Stacey and meet you at the scene. Text me the coordinates."
"James—"
"Twenty minutes." He was already turning toward his daughter, his shoulders set with that particular tension she knew too well. "Don't go in without me."
She watched him go, watched him say something to Emma that made her face fall before she masked it with teenage indifference.
Watched them walk away together, Emma glancing back once with an expression that was too knowing for a thirteen-year-old.
The girl had grown up with a father in law enforcement; she understood what an interrupted Sunday meant.
The ice cream was melting in Isla's hand. She threw it in the nearest trash can and started walking toward her car, her sensible boots clicking against the pavement, the lake glittering cold and indifferent in the distance.
Robert Brune had fed the lake again.
And Isla was going to find out who he'd taken.