CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The cold woke her before the alarm.
Isla lay in the darkness of her bedroom, her breath forming small clouds that dissolved into nothing, and knew before she opened her eyes that the heater had failed again.
The radiator beneath her window sat silent and cold, its usual metallic ticking conspicuously absent.
Through the frost-etched glass, Lake Superior stretched gray and endless toward a horizon that was only beginning to lighten with the first hints of dawn.
She pulled the blankets tighter around her shoulders and stared at the ceiling, her mind already churning through the details that had kept her at the office until well past midnight.
Thomas Kramer's student lists. Thirty years of names, faces, academic records—hundreds of potential suspects reduced, through hours of cross-referencing and background checks, to a handful of maybes and a mountain of dead ends.
Isla threw back the covers and forced herself upright, her bare feet hitting the cold hardwood floor with a shock that traveled up her spine.
The apartment was freezing—not the merely-uncomfortable cold of a Minnesota morning, but the bone-deep chill that came from a heating system that had given up entirely.
Her landlord had fixed it twice already this winter, and twice it had failed again within weeks.
She padded to the kitchen in wool socks and the oversized FBI Academy sweatshirt she'd owned since Quantico, her arms wrapped around herself against the cold.
The coffee maker—the one luxury she'd splurged on when she'd first arrived in Duluth, back when she'd still believed she might learn to love this frozen purgatory—sat waiting on the counter.
She filled it with water, measured grounds with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd performed this ritual thousands of times, and pressed the button that would transform raw materials into something approaching consciousness.
While the coffee brewed, she stood at the window and watched the lake.
It was still half-frozen at this time of year, great sheets of ice stretching from the shore toward the shipping lanes, their surfaces glinting silver in the pale morning light.
In another month, the thaw would be complete—the ice would break apart, the ore boats would resume their endless journeys between Duluth and the steel mills of the east, and Lake Superior would transform from frozen wasteland to working waterway.
But for now, the lake kept its secrets beneath a shell of ice and silence.
They're still out there, she thought. Both of them.
Robert Brune, the Lake Superior Killer, hiding somewhere in the maze of warehouses and scrapyards that lined the waterfront. The photographer killer—still nameless, still faceless—stalking the scenic overlooks where artists came to capture beauty and found death instead.
Two monsters. One city. And Isla standing at her kitchen window, watching the ice and wondering which one would claim another victim first.
The coffee maker beeped. She poured herself a cup, black and bitter, and carried it to the small table where she'd spread out the files she'd brought home from the office.
The student lists stared up at her—names highlighted in yellow, notes scrawled in the margins, connections that might mean everything or nothing at all.
Steven Webb, she'd written next to one name. Kramer's teaching assistant 2015-2017. Strong opinions about "commercial corruption" in photography. Current whereabouts unknown.
Daniel Okonkwo. Thesis advisee 2011. Wrote extensively about historical preservation. Now works as archivist at Minnesota Historical Society. Alibi for Hayes murder—was at work, multiple witnesses.
Steven Laroche. Took multiple courses 2005-2008. Passionate defender of traditional techniques. Currently lives in Wisconsin—need to verify whereabouts.
Isla frowned at the incomplete notes. She and James had been interrupted multiple times last night, pulled away to interview former students who'd turned out to have rock-solid alibis for both murders.
By the time they'd finished, it was past midnight, and Kate had practically ordered them both to go home and sleep.
A few names still stood out—people they planned to look into more thoroughly today—but nothing had jumped out as a clear lead.
She pulled her laptop closer, intending to continue the background checks she'd started the night before.
The apartment was warming slightly now—her own body heat and the coffee maker contributing what the radiator couldn't—but she still pulled the sweatshirt tighter around herself as she scrolled through the database.
Her phone rang.
The sound shattered the early-morning quiet like a gunshot, and Isla's hand was already reaching for it before the first ring had finished. She saw James's name on the screen and felt her stomach drop.
Seven AM calls from your partner didn't bring good news.
"Rivers."
"There's been another one." James's voice was flat, controlled, but she could hear the exhaustion underneath it—the particular weariness that came from too many crime scenes and not enough sleep. "Gooseberry Falls. A hiker found the body about thirty minutes ago."
Isla was already moving, the laptop forgotten, her bare feet carrying her toward the bedroom where her clothes waited. "Same MO?"
"Same staging. Victim positioned behind his camera, body angled toward the falls. The kill shot looks identical to the others—single blow to the base of the skull." James paused. "There's something else."
"What?"
"Kramer was under surveillance all night.
Two officers on rotating watch, visual confirmation every fifteen minutes.
He never left his apartment. Whatever inspired these murders, Thomas Kramer didn't commit them, though we were already pretty certain of that.
" James's voice carried the particular frustration of someone who'd just watched their best lead evaporate. "We're back to square one."
Not square one, Isla thought. They had the student lists. They had patterns and connections and the beginnings of a profile. But with another body on the ground and Kramer eliminated as a suspect, it felt uncomfortably close to starting over.
"I'll be there in an hour," she said. "Don't let anyone touch anything."
"Already told them. And Isla?" James hesitated. "The victim is Robert Yamada. Award-winning nature photographer. He had a partner—a man named Marcus—who's been calling his phone for the past thirty minutes. I've got local PD on the way to notify him, but..."
But it never got easier. It never got any easier.
"I'm on my way," Isla said and ended the call.
She dressed quickly, her movements efficient despite the cold—dark pants, thermal undershirt, blazer, her service weapon holstered at her hip.
The bathroom mirror showed her a face that looked older than thirty-seven, shadows under amber eyes, the faint freckles across her nose and cheekbones more visible against skin gone pale from too many hours under fluorescent lights.
She pulled her hair back into its usual ponytail, watching a few stubborn strands escape to frame her face the way they always did.
Three victims, she thought. Three photographers. Three scenic overlooks.
And somewhere out there, a killer who wasn't Thomas Kramer, wasn't Marcus Lang, wasn't anyone they'd identified yet—someone who moved through this region like smoke, who knew its landscapes and its artists, who was turning murder into a twisted form of art.
Isla grabbed her keys and headed for the door, leaving the coffee to grow cold on her kitchen table, leaving the student lists spread out like evidence she hadn't yet learned to read.
The lake waited outside, gray and patient, keeping its secrets beneath the ice.
***
Gooseberry Falls State Park lay forty miles northeast of Duluth along Highway 61, the scenic byway that hugged Lake Superior's North Shore like a lover reluctant to let go.
The drive took Isla just under an hour, her sedan eating up miles of frozen asphalt while the winter landscape scrolled past her windows—birch forests giving way to pine, the occasional glimpse of the lake glittering between bare branches, the particular beauty of this region that drew photographers from across the country.
That drew them here to die.
She pulled into the upper parking lot at 8:07 AM to find it already crowded with official vehicles—two State Park ranger trucks, three Duluth PD cruisers, the medical examiner's van, and James's unmarked sedan.
Crime scene tape fluttered in the wind, marking a perimeter that stretched from the lot toward the overlook trail.
A uniformed officer stood guard at the trailhead, his breath fogging in the cold, his expression carrying the same blank shock she'd seen at Hawk Ridge and the Lester River.
Another overlook. Another body. Another officer trying not to think too hard about what he'd seen.
Isla badged him and ducked under the tape, following the flagged path toward the falls.
She could hear them before she saw them—the rush of water over rock, the particular music of Gooseberry that had been drawing visitors to this spot for more than a century.
The sound was hypnotic, almost peaceful.
Almost.
James met her at the edge of the overlook, his navy parka zipped to the chin, his face carrying the weariness of someone who'd been awake for most of the night and was looking at many more hours of the same.
Behind him, crime scene technicians moved with careful precision around a shape that Isla didn't want to look at yet.
"Walk me through it," she said.