CHAPTER TWO
The body had been in the water long enough to bloat.
Isla stood at the edge of the rocky shoreline, her boots crunching on frost-hardened gravel, and forced herself to look. Really look. The way Dr. Delgado had taught her back in Quantico, back when she'd been young enough to believe that training could prepare you for moments like this.
See the victim, he'd said. Not the horror. The victim.
This victim had been identified as Mitch Connelly via the wallet in his pocket, according to the first responders.
He laid on his back where the Coast Guard had positioned him, his work clothes waterlogged and stiff with ice, his face turned toward the gray March sky.
The bloating had distorted his features—cheeks swollen, eyes bulging beneath closed lids, skin taking on that particular waxy pallor that came from extended submersion in cold water.
But Isla could still see the man beneath the damage.
Broad shoulders. Thick chest. The kind of build that came from decades of physical labor.
The kind of build that would have made him hard to overpower.
"Body was caught in debris about fifty yards out," Officer Dave Scale was saying, gesturing toward the water.
He was a compact man in his forties, his Coast Guard uniform crisp despite the circumstances, his voice carrying that carefully neutral tone she'd heard from a hundred first responders at a hundred crime scenes.
"Fishing vessel spotted him around noon. We got him to shore about an hour ago."
"You moved him."
"Had to. Ice was breaking up in that section, and we couldn't risk losing him." Scale met her gaze steadily. "We documented everything first. Photos, measurements, the works. My team knows how to handle evidence, Agent Rivers."
Isla nodded, the tension in her shoulders easing slightly. The Coast Guard had been good partners throughout the LSK investigation—better than some law enforcement agencies she'd worked with over the years. They understood the lake. Understood what it could do to evidence, to bodies, to hope.
"Walk me through it," she said.
Scale gestured toward the water. The lake stretched out before them, gray and choppy, whitecaps forming where the wind cut across the surface.
Two months ago, this whole section would have been frozen solid.
Now the ice was retreating, the annual thaw beginning its slow transformation of Superior from frozen wasteland to shipping lane.
It was early for a body to surface—usually the lake held onto its dead until late spring, when the warming water released them like secrets reluctantly confessed.
But Mitch Connelly hadn't been in the water that long.
"Debris field is recent," Scale said, as if reading her thoughts.
"Storm last week broke up some of the ice near the shore, created a pocket where things can collect.
Body probably got caught in the current and pushed toward it.
" He paused. "You can see the trauma to the back of the head. That's what made us call you."
Isla crouched beside the body, her knees protesting against the cold ground. The wound was there, just as Scale had described—a depression at the base of the skull, the kind of impact that could have come from a fall onto a dock or a collision with a boat hull.
Or a calculated blow designed to look like an accident.
"Dr. Henley," Isla called over her shoulder. "What are you seeing?"
Dr. Patricia Henley approached with the measured pace of someone who had spent decades walking toward the worst humanity had to offer.
The medical examiner was a tall woman in her late fifties, her gray-streaked hair pulled back in a practical braid, her face weathered by Minnesota winters and the particular exhaustion that came from spending your career cataloguing the dead.
She'd been one of the first people to take Isla seriously when she'd started connecting the dots between supposed accidents along the lakeshore—the "drowning victims" who all seemed to have head trauma, the bodies that surfaced with injuries too consistent to be coincidental.
Henley knelt on the other side of Mitch Connelly's body and pulled on a fresh pair of gloves. Her hands moved with practiced efficiency, examining the wound first, then tilting the head to study the angle of impact.
"Blunt force trauma to the occipital region," she said. "Similar placement to the others—base of the skull, consistent with our Lake Superior cases." She paused, her fingers probing the edges of the wound. "But something's off."
"What do you mean?"
Henley looked up, her eyes meeting Isla's.
"The bleeding pattern. With a wound like this, if the victim were alive at the time of impact, we'd expect significant hemorrhaging—the heart would still be pumping, blood would pool and spread.
" She shook her head slowly. "But this wound barely bled at all.
The tissues around the injury site show minimal blood infiltration. "
Isla felt her pulse quicken. "You're saying the head wound was inflicted post-mortem."
"That's exactly what I'm saying. This man was already dead when someone struck the back of his skull.
" Henley's gloved hands moved to the victim's throat, pressing gently against the swollen flesh.
"And I think I know what actually killed him.
Look here—even with the bloating, you can see the bruising pattern around the neck.
And the petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes and face is significant.
Burst blood vessels, consistent with asphyxiation. "
"He was strangled."
"Manually, from the looks of it. Someone wrapped their hands around this man's throat and squeezed until he stopped breathing.
" Henley sat back on her heels. "The head wound came afterward—probably an attempt to make this look like one of your Lake Superior accidents.
Blunt force trauma, body in the water, just like all the others. "
Isla stared at the body, her mind racing through the implications.
In all the cases they'd attributed to the Lake Superior Killer—the dozen confirmed, the thirty-odd suspected—the head wound had always been the cause of death.
A single blow, quick and efficient, followed by submersion in the lake.
Robert Brune's signature was its simplicity: hit them, dump them, let the water do the rest.
But this killer had strangled his victim first. Held Mitch Connelly's throat in his hands, watched the life drain from his eyes, felt the struggle slow and stop. And then—almost as an afterthought—he'd struck the back of the head anyway, trying to make it fit the pattern.
This might not be him, Isla loathed to admit. But she needed to see more.
"Time of death?" she asked.
"Hard to say with precision given the water exposure, but based on decomposition and the condition of the tissues, I'd estimate he's been dead for three weeks, give or take a few days. The cold water would have slowed things down considerably."
Three weeks. Mid-February. Right when the manhunt had been at its peak, when every law enforcement agency in the Upper Midwest had been searching for Robert Brune. When they'd all assumed he'd fled the region, gone underground somewhere far from Duluth.
He hadn't run at all. He'd been here the whole time, hiding in the shadows, close enough to kill again.
"Do we have an ID?" Isla stood, her knees cracking in protest. The cold was seeping through her layers—she'd grabbed her blazer and a thin thermal undershirt, stubborn as always about the heavy winter gear—but she barely felt it. The chill in her chest had nothing to do with the temperature.
"Working on it," Scale said. "Wallet was missing, no ID on the body. We're running prints now."
"He was a worker." Isla gestured at the body's clothing. "Work boots, heavy-duty pants, that jacket—it's maritime. Someone who spent time on the water or near it."
"Could be a lot of people in Duluth."
"Could be." But Isla's gut was already pulling her in a specific direction, toward a shipyard she'd visited dozens of times over the past year, toward the workplace of the monster they were hunting.
"Get me those prints as soon as possible.
And I want everything you have on that debris field—where the current would have carried the body from, potential entry points into the water. "
Scale nodded and moved off, already reaching for his radio. Isla turned back to the body, to the man who had been alive three weeks ago, walking and breathing and living a life that had intersected fatally with a killer.
Why you? she thought, studying the ruined face. Why did he choose you?
The strangulation was the key. She was certain of it.
LSK's kills had always been efficient, almost clinical—quick and impersonal, designed to look like accidents.
But strangling someone took time. Required sustained effort, face-to-face contact, the intimacy of watching the life drain from another person's eyes.
Then trying to cover it up with the post-mortem head wound, staging the scene to match his usual pattern.
The sound of boots on gravel made her turn.
James Sullivan was picking his way down the rocky slope, his navy parka zipped to the chin, his face set in that particular expression she'd come to know so well over the years—controlled concern, analytical focus, the mask he wore when things were bad and likely to get worse.
"Emma's with Stacey," he said as he reached her. His eyes went to the body, took in the bloating and the wound and the waxy skin, and his jaw tightened. "Hell."
"Welcome to Sunday."
James moved to stand beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating from his heavy coat.
Part of her wanted to lean into it—into him—to let herself be anchored by his solid presence the way she had so many times before.
But she kept her spine straight, her shoulders back, her walls firmly in place.