CHAPTER TWO #2
There would be time for comfort later after they caught the monster.
"What do we know?" James asked.
"Male victim, fifties or sixties, been in the water approximately three weeks." She glanced at him. "Cause of death was strangulation. The head wound was inflicted post-mortem."
James's eyebrows rose. "Post-mortem? So someone killed him, then bashed his head in afterward?"
“The staging, the placement of the head wound—it's all consistent with LSK's pattern.
But the actual murder method is completely different.
" Isla turned back to the body. "Our guy held this man's throat, watched him struggle, watched him die.
Then hit him afterward to disguise the cause of death.
Make it look like just another accident victim who fell and hit his head before ending up in the lake. "
"That's a significant deviation from LSK’s MO."
"I know. My head tells me this could be a copycat, but…”
James was quiet for a moment. She could feel him studying her, assessing, running through the same calculations she'd already made. "You really think this is LSK? The strangulation is a pretty big change.”
“That’s what makes me think it still could be.
He could be trying to perform his ritual but change just enough to throw us off.
” The words came out flat, certain. The more she spoke about it, the more sure of herself she was.
"The post-mortem wound proves it. A copycat would have used the head trauma as the actual murder method—that's what's been in the news, what people know about.
But Brune strangled this man first, then added the head wound to make it fit his pattern.
Only the real killer would know to stage it that way. "
"Or someone who'd studied the cases closely enough to—"
"James." Isla turned to face him fully. "I know it's him. Something about this victim made him change his approach, made him kill up close instead of quick and clean. But it's still him."
James held her gaze for a long moment. She could see him weighing her certainty against the evidence, against the deviation from pattern that would make any investigator pause. Then he nodded slowly.
"Okay. So what made this one different?"
"That's what we need to find out." Isla turned as Scale approached, phone pressed to his ear, his expression carrying news she already knew she didn't want to hear. "Starting with who he was."
"Agent Rivers?" Scale's voice cut through the wind. "We got a hit on the prints. Mitchell Connelly, age fifty-eight. Last known employer..."
He didn't need to finish. Isla saw it in his face.
"Northern Star Shipyard," she said.
Scale nodded. "He worked inventory and shipping. Been there almost twenty years."
Twenty years. Two decades at the same workplace where Robert Brune had spent his career, where they'd hauled cargo and weathered Lake Superior winters and shared whatever passed for camaraderie among men who spent their lives on the water.
Mitch Connelly hadn't been a random victim.
He'd been a coworker. Maybe even a friend.
And that explained everything.
"That's why the strangulation," Isla said, the pieces clicking into place.
"Connelly recognized him. Found him wherever he was hiding, and Brune couldn't let him walk away.
But this wasn't planned—it was reactive, defensive.
He had to kill Connelly quickly, quietly, with whatever method was available.
Then afterward, he tried to stage it to look like his other kills. "
"He never left," James finished, understanding dawning in his eyes. "Brune never left Duluth. He's been here the whole time, hiding somewhere close enough to run into people he knew. Close enough to be recognized."
Isla nodded, her mind racing. If Brune was still in the area, if he'd been lying low somewhere near the shipyard or the docks, there had to be evidence. Signs of habitation, traces of his presence, some thread they could pull to unravel his hiding place.
"We need to search everything," she said. "The shipyard, the warehouses, every abandoned building within a five-mile radius. He's been living somewhere for the past two months, James. Eating, sleeping, surviving. That leaves traces."
"That's a lot of ground to cover."
"Then we'd better get started." Isla was already reaching for her phone, pulling up the contact list she'd assembled over months of coordinating the LSK investigation.
"I'll get the Marshals involved. They've had teams on standby since we ID'd Brune.
And local PD—we'll need their manpower for the grid search. "
James caught her arm, his grip gentle but firm. She looked up at him, saw the concern in his eyes that he was trying to hide behind professional focus.
"Isla. This is good news, in a way. It means he's close. It means we can find him."
"It means he killed again while we were looking the other direction." Her voice came out sharper than she intended. "It means while we were assuming he'd fled, while we were tracking down leads in Wisconsin and Michigan and God knows where else, he was right here. Hunting. And I missed it."
"We missed it. This isn't on you alone."
But it felt like it was. It always did. Alicia Mendez's face flashed through her mind—the elementary school teacher in Miami, twenty-eight years old, dead because Isla had profiled the wrong suspect and arrived too late to save her.
Three years ago, the weight of it still pressed against her chest every time a case went sideways.
She couldn't let that happen again. She wouldn't.
"I need to make some calls," she said, pulling her arm free. "Can you work with Scale on the evidence recovery? Make sure we get everything from that debris field, trace the currents, find out where Connelly went into the water."
James held her gaze for a long moment, and she could see the words he wasn't saying—the concern, the caring, the things that lived in the space between them that neither of them ever acknowledged. Then he nodded, professional mask firmly back in place.
"On it."
Isla watched him walk toward the Coast Guard team, his broad shoulders set against the wind, and felt something twist in her chest. Later, she told herself. There would be time for everything later.
Right now, there was a monster to catch.
***
The Northern Star Shipyard sprawled across twelve acres of Lake Superior waterfront, a maze of warehouses and loading docks and rusted equipment that had seen better days.
Isla stood at the entrance as the search teams assembled, her breath fogging in the late afternoon air, her eyes scanning the industrial landscape like she could will Robert Brune into existence through sheer determination.
"Twenty-three buildings total," SAC Katherine Channing said, appearing at Isla's shoulder with a tablet displaying an aerial map.
"Six primary warehouses, four storage facilities, the administrative building, and a dozen smaller structures—maintenance sheds, equipment storage, that sort of thing. We'll need to clear all of it."
Kate Channing carried herself with the commanding presence of someone who had spent twenty-five years climbing the FBI's ranks through a combination of brilliance and sheer force of will.
At fifty-five, she could have been riding a desk in Washington, playing politics and eyeing the deputy director's chair.
Instead, she'd chosen to run the Duluth field office, trading power for the kind of hands-on work that had drawn her to law enforcement in the first place.
Isla respected that choice. Admired it, even. Kate had been in her corner since the beginning of the LSK investigation, fighting for resources and manpower when Washington wanted to write off Duluth's "accident" victims as statistical noise.
"What about the surrounding area?" Isla asked. "The scrapyard to the north, the old cannery buildings?"
"US Marshals are taking point on the outer perimeter.
They've got forty agents on the ground, plus local PD support.
" Kate zoomed out on the tablet, showing the search grid they'd established.
"It's the biggest coordinated search operation this region has seen in twenty years.
If Brune is anywhere in this area, we'll find him. "
If. Isla didn't miss the conditional. They'd been so certain, two months ago, that Robert Brune would be in custody within days.
His face had been everywhere—news broadcasts, wanted posters, social media campaigns that reached millions.
He was sixty-five years old, a lifetime fisherman with no obvious resources for extended flight, no family to shelter him, no network of criminal contacts to help him disappear.
And yet he'd vanished like smoke.
"Agent Rivers?" A young Marshal approached, tablet in hand. "Teams are in position. Ready to begin on your signal."
Isla looked out at the shipyard, at the rusted bones of an industry that had built Duluth and was slowly dying along with the dreams of the people who'd depended on it.
Somewhere in this maze of metal and neglect, Robert Brune had found a hiding place.
Had lived and eaten and slept while the world searched for him.
Had walked among the ghosts of his former life until one of those ghosts turned out to be a living man who recognized his face.
"Begin the search," she said.
The teams moved in.