CHAPTER EIGHT
The sandwich sat untouched on Isla's desk, its cellophane wrapper still sealed.
She'd bought it three hours ago from the vending machine in the break room—turkey and swiss on wheat, the same thing she ordered every time she forgot to eat until her body started making demands she couldn't ignore.
James had practically forced her to take a lunch break, steering her away from the whiteboard where she'd been staring at Marcus Lang's timeline like she could will it into revealing something useful.
"Thirty minutes," he'd said. "Eat something. I'll hold down the fort."
That had been at eleven-fifteen. Now it was nearly noon, and Isla was back at her desk, the sandwich forgotten, her eyes fixed on the surveillance report that had come in twenty minutes ago.
Lang had left his apartment early. Drove directly to his studio.
Spent the morning preparing for what his website described as an "Exclusive Winter Landscape Workshop"—twelve participants at five hundred dollars a head, scheduled to run from 11 AM to 4 PM.
The surveillance team had visual confirmation of Lang leading the group through his gallery, explaining composition techniques, demonstrating equipment setups.
He'd been surrounded by witnesses all morning. Twelve paying customers, plus his studio assistant, plus the two Marshal deputies watching from a vehicle across the street. No suspicious activities as of yet, so if he was their killer, and he was planning something else, it wasn’t apparent.
"You're doing the thing again."
She looked up to find James standing in her doorway, two cups of coffee in hand. He set one on her desk and nodded at the unopened sandwich.
"The staring-at-evidence-while-forgetting-to-eat thing. We talked about this."
"I'm not hungry."
"You're never hungry when you're working. That's the problem." He settled into the chair across from her, his movements carrying the easy familiarity of three years of partnership. "What's bothering you?"
"Besides the fact that our primary suspect is not looking so suspicious after all?”
"Besides that."
Isla pushed back from her desk, running a hand through her hair. A few strands had escaped from her ponytail—they always did, no matter how tightly she secured it—and she tucked them behind her ear with a frustrated gesture.
"The staging," she said. "Assuming Lang is innocent and this wasn’t personal…
the way Paulson's body was positioned, the photograph on his camera. It was deliberate. Artistic, even. Based on what we’ve seen, someone who kills like that doesn't just stop.
They don't do it once and walk away satisfied. "
"You think there'll be more victims."
"I think—"
Her phone rang.
The sound cut through the office like a blade, and Isla's hand moved to answer before the first ring had finished. She saw the caller ID—Duluth PD dispatch—and felt her stomach drop.
"Rivers."
"Agent Rivers, this is Sergeant Morrison with Duluth PD. We've got another body. Scenic overlook near the Lester River, about eight miles north of the city. Hiker called it in fifteen minutes ago."
Isla was already standing, her free hand reaching for her blazer. "Same MO?"
A pause. Too long.
"You should see this for yourself, ma'am."
She ended the call and met James's eyes. He was already on his feet, keys in hand, his expression shifting into the controlled focus she'd come to recognize as his operational mode.
"Another one?" he asked.
"Lester River. Scenic overlook."
They moved together, the synchronized rhythm of partners who had done this a hundred times before. Down the hallway, past the bullpen where the day shift was pretending not to watch them, through the glass doors and into the parking garage where James's sedan waited in its usual spot.
Isla slid into the passenger seat, her phone already pressed to her ear.
"Give me Deputy Walsh," she said when the Marshals' surveillance coordinator picked up. "Now."
A click, a brief pause, then Walsh's voice came through, slightly breathless. "Agent Rivers. I was just about to call you."
"Where is Lang?"
"Still at his studio. He's been running the workshop since ten o'clock—hasn't left the building, hasn't even taken a bathroom break as far as we can tell. We've had eyes on every exit."
"You're certain."
"One hundred percent, ma'am. Two deputies rotating coverage, visual confirmation every fifteen minutes. Marcus Lang is exactly where he's supposed to be."
Isla felt something shift in her chest—not relief, exactly, but a recalibration. The comfortable theory she'd been building since yesterday morning, the neat narrative of jealous rival turned murderer, was crumbling under the weight of inconvenient facts.
"Don't let him out of your sight," she said. "Not for a second. And I want timestamped documentation of his whereabouts for the past six hours."
"Already on it."
She ended the call and stared out the windshield as James navigated through midday traffic.
The sky had gone gray since morning, clouds rolling in off the lake with the promise of snow.
Her reflection stared back at her from the glass—amber eyes shadowed with exhaustion, olive skin pale from too many hours under fluorescent lights.
"Lang’s still not showing any suspicious activity," she said.
James didn't respond immediately. She could see him processing, adjusting, his jaw tightening the way it did when a case took an unexpected turn. “He might not be our guy.”
The words hung between them, heavy with implication. Twenty-four hours of focused investigation, surveillance resources, the careful construction of a case against a man who had motive and opportunity and the perfect personality for cold-blooded murder—all of it potentially worthless.
James's phone buzzed before either of them could say anything else. He glanced at the screen, frowned, and pressed it to his ear while he drove with one hand.
"Sullivan." A pause. "Yeah. When did you get it?" Another pause, longer this time. "Send it through. Both angles."
He lowered the phone and glanced at her. She recognized the expression—the specific reluctance of someone about to make things more complicated.
"That was Kowalski. He canvassed Lang's block this morning, looking for security cameras. The neighbor directly across from Lang's building has one of those video doorbells—the kind that runs continuously and saves to the cloud."
"And?"
"And Lang's car didn't move. Not all night, not this morning.
Check what he sent to be sure." James focused on the road and handed off the phone so she could see the screen, where Kowalski had forwarded two screenshots from the footage.
The timestamp on the first read 11:43 PM.
The second read 5:17 AM. In both frames, Lang's black Audi sat unmoved in its assigned spot in the building's small parking area, the apartment's windows dark behind it.
"Kowalski pulled the full overnight record.
Seven hours of continuous footage. The car never moved.
The building's front entrance stays quiet until six-twenty, when an older woman Kowalski identified as a third-floor resident leaves for what he assumed was a morning walk. "
Isla studied the screenshots. The timestamps were clear, the parking lot well-lit by a sodium lamp that cast everything in flat amber. There was no ambiguity—no gap in the footage, no creative editing, no convenient technical glitch.
"Lang's building has underground parking," she said, reaching for the possibility out of habit. "The doorbell faces the street-level lot."
"Kowalski checked. Lang's lease assigns him the street-level spot. He doesn't have underground access. If he left his apartment at any point between eleven PM and six AM, he either walked or took a cab. And we both know Paulson's overlook is twenty minutes north of the city."
Isla said nothing. She watched the gray skyline through the windshield, Lake Superior somewhere behind the cloud cover, invisible but immense.
The uncomfortable arithmetic was doing itself without her permission.
Lang's car hadn't moved all night. He'd been surrounded by twelve paying witnesses by ten in the morning.
Deputy Walsh had eyes on every exit. And now there was a second body cooling at an overlook eight miles north of the city, staged with the same deliberate, patient hand as the first.
Either Marcus Lang had absolutely nothing to do with any of this—
Or he'd orchestrated two murders, twice, from inside a sealed room, without leaving a single thread for them to pull.
"He's not our guy," she said quietly.
It wasn't a question this time. James didn't bother to argue.
She stared at the screenshots for another moment, then tucked the phone back into the car’s cupholder.
The sandstone walls of Lang's narrative—the motive, the contempt, the coincidence of the locations—hadn't changed.
But the architecture underneath them had been quietly, methodically hollowed out, and now the whole structure was nothing but a facade propped against empty air.
"We should keep the surveillance anyway," she said. "Until we're certain."
"Of course. The feud was real," James said. "The hatred, the history. Lang wanted Paulson destroyed. That wasn't an act."
"Lang couldn't have done it. Not personally.
" She dropped her hands and forced herself to think clearly, to set aside the frustration and focus on what the evidence was actually telling them.
"But that doesn't mean he's not involved.
He could have a partner. Someone is doing the actual killing while he establishes alibis. "
"That's a stretch. Serial killers don't usually work in teams."