CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR #2
Suicide by cop. The oldest trick in a desperate man's playbook, and she'd walked right into it.
Isla eased off his back, keeping her weapon trained on him as she assessed the damage.
The wound was worse than she'd initially thought—the bullet had caught him in the shoulder, but the cold was accelerating the blood loss, his body unable to maintain the pressure needed to slow the bleeding.
His skin had gone gray-white, his breathing shallow and rapid, his eyes beginning to take on the glassy quality that spoke of approaching shock.
"Stay still," she said, holstering her weapon and pulling off her gloves. "I need to put pressure on this—"
"Don't." His hand came up, surprisingly strong, catching her wrist before she could reach the wound. "Please. Just... let me finish."
"Finish what? You're bleeding out, Ethan. If I don't stop this—"
"Then I die here. At Enger Tower. Where my father created his greatest work." His eyes found hers, and in them she saw something that made her chest tight—not madness, not malice, but a kind of exhausted peace. "That's what I wanted. That's all I wanted."
"I'm not going to let you die."
"You don't have a choice." He coughed again, more blood this time, his body shuddering against the frozen ground.
"Your backup is—what, ten minutes away? Fifteen?
By the time they get here, by the time anyone can do anything.
.." He smiled, a thin expression that cracked his bloodless lips.
"I did the math, Agent Rivers. I've been doing the math for a long time. "
Isla looked at him—really looked—and saw the truth of what he was saying.
The wound, the cold, the time until help arrived.
The equations didn't balance. Even if she got pressure on the injury now, even if she sacrificed her own warmth to try to keep him alive, the blood loss combined with the hypothermia would claim him before the ambulance could reach the tower.
He was dying. Had been dying since she pulled the trigger. Had wanted to die since he drove up this hill.
"I have one request," Ethan said, his voice barely audible above the wind. "Please."
Isla should have said no. Should have focused entirely on the futile attempt to save him, on maintaining the professional distance that the situation demanded. But something in his voice—something human beneath all the horror—made her pause.
"What?"
"Let me look through the viewfinder." His eyes drifted toward the observation deck, toward the camera that still stood waiting on its tripod. "Let me see if the composition is right. If the shot my father never got to take... if it's perfect."
"You want me to help you up there so you can look at your camera?"
"I just want to see it. One time. Before..." He trailed off, but they both knew how the sentence ended.
Isla looked at the observation deck, at the camera silhouetted against the floodlights, at the composition that Harold Benson had captured fifty years ago.
She thought about the three photographers who had died to create Ethan's twisted monuments, about the families who would never understand why their loved ones had been turned into "living postcards. "
She thought about her father's old watch, the one she'd inherited when her parents died—how she'd kept it even though it didn't work anymore, because it was the last piece of him she had left.
And she thought about Ethan Benson, bleeding out on the frozen ground of Enger Tower, asking for one last look at the legacy that had consumed his entire life.
"Can you walk?"
"If you help me."
She shouldn't do this. Every protocol, every procedure, every lesson she'd learned in her career told her to stay where they were, to focus on stabilizing the victim until backup arrived, to treat this like any other crime scene where a suspect was down.
But Ethan wasn't a suspect anymore. He was a dying man.
And she was the only one with him.
Isla holstered her weapon and reached down, pulling Ethan's good arm over her shoulders. He cried out as the movement jostled his injured side, but he gritted his teeth and pushed himself up, leaning heavily against her as they took their first stumbling steps toward the stairs.
The observation deck felt miles away, each step a battle against ice and cold and the weight of a man whose body was failing with every heartbeat.
Ethan's blood soaked through her parka, warm against her skin for a moment before the cold stole that heat too.
His breathing was shallow, ragged, punctuated by wet sounds that spoke of internal damage beyond what she could see.
But he kept moving. Kept pushing toward the camera that waited at the top of the stairs.
They reached the observation deck just as Ethan's legs gave out. Isla caught him, lowering him to the stone floor with as much gentleness as she could manage, her own body trembling with cold and exhaustion. He lay there for a moment, his eyes closed, his chest barely moving.
"Ethan."
His eyes opened. Found the camera.
"Help me up."
She did. One more time, one more impossible effort, pulling him upright and supporting him as he staggered toward the tripod that held his father's legacy. His hands—shaking, bloody, barely under his control—reached for the viewfinder.
"The composition," he whispered, his eye pressed to the glass. "My father spent two years waiting for the perfect conditions. The lights of the city, the curve of the harbor, the way the tower frames everything into thirds."
Isla watched him adjust something—a minute correction, the kind of detail that probably mattered in ways she would never understand.
"It's close," Ethan said, his voice wondering. "So close to what he saw. So close to—"
He pressed the shutter.
The camera clicked—a soft sound, almost lost in the wind, but somehow the most significant noise Isla had heard all night. Ethan sagged against her, his weight sudden and complete, his eye still pressed to the viewfinder.
"Let me see," he breathed. "The image. Let me see it."
Isla reached around him, her bloody fingers finding the camera's display button. The screen lit up, showing the photograph that Ethan Benson had just captured—the last image he would ever take.
It was beautiful. The city lights of Duluth spread out below, the harbor curving toward the distant horizon, the stone of Enger Tower framing everything with the precision that had made Harold Benson's composition famous.
The floodlights cast their cold glow across the observation deck, turning the ice crystals in the air into diamonds suspended in frozen time.
A perfect recreation of a perfect photograph.
Except.
Ethan made a sound—something between a laugh and a sob—as he saw what Isla had already noticed. A smear across the image, a blur that disrupted the careful composition in its center. Red and dark, the color of something that belonged inside a body rather than on a camera lens.
Blood. His blood, transferred from his fingers when he'd reached for the viewfinder, smudging the glass that was supposed to capture his father's final legacy.
"No," he whispered. "No, no, no—"
"Ethan—"
"I ruined it." His voice cracked, broke, dissolved into something raw and wounded.
"The one thing I needed to get right, the one photograph that was supposed to matter, and I—" He tried to raise his hands to the camera, tried to wipe the lens clean, but his arms wouldn't respond anymore.
His body was giving up, systems shutting down one by one as the cold and the blood loss completed their work.
"I'm sorry," he said, and she wasn't sure if he was talking to her or to his father or to the three people he'd killed in pursuit of a vision that had just slipped through his bloodied fingers. "I'm so sorry. I tried—I tried to make it right—"
"I know," Isla said, because she did. Because she understood, in that terrible final moment, what it meant to carry a weight that was never supposed to be yours, to fail at something that felt more important than your own life.
Ethan's eyes found hers one last time. "Tell them," he whispered. "Tell them about my father. About what he created. About what they stole."
"I will."
He nodded—or tried to. The motion barely registered, his body settling against her with the particular heaviness of someone who had stopped fighting.
"The lens," he said, his voice barely audible. "I got blood on the lens."
"I know."
"He would have been disappointed."
Isla didn't respond. There was nothing to say to that, nothing that would matter in the few seconds that remained.
Ethan Benson took one more breath—shallow, rattling, final—and then he was gone.
Isla lowered him to the observation deck's frozen stones, his body settling into the position where he would stay until the ambulance arrived.
The camera still stood on its tripod, its screen glowing with the image he had tried so hard to capture, the smear of blood marring the composition that was supposed to complete his father's legacy.
In the distance, she could hear sirens—James, finally, backup that had come too late to change anything.
She should move, should secure the scene, should prepare to explain how a routine stakeout had turned into a shooting, a confrontation, a death that would haunt her in ways she couldn't yet predict.
But for a long moment, she just sat there, holding the hand of a man who had killed three people in pursuit of a photograph, who had died trying to correct a smudge he would never be able to wipe clean.
The wind howled across Enger Tower, and Isla let herself feel the cold.