CHAPTER SIX
The therapist's office was on the second floor of a converted Victorian on East Fourth Street, wedged between a dentist and an accountant, which Isla thought was either a coincidence or a commentary on the kinds of professionals people visited only when the pain became unignorable.
The building had the over-maintained charm of old Duluth real estate—fresh paint on ornate trim, original hardwood floors that creaked with every step, the kind of radiator that clanked and hissed like it had opinions about the weather.
A small brass plaque by the door read DR. MARGARET LINDEN, PsyD, and below it, in smaller letters, LICENSED CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST.
The waiting room was small and deliberately inoffensive—two upholstered chairs, a side table with a white noise machine humming softly, a print of Lake Superior on the wall that looked like it had been chosen by someone who understood that the people sitting in this room probably spent enough time staring at the real thing.
No magazines. Isla sat in the chair farthest from the door and did not touch the tissues.
At exactly ten o'clock, the inner door opened.
Dr. Margaret Linden was younger than Isla had expected—mid-forties, maybe, with the kind of face that suggested she smiled often and meant it.
She was average height, average build, with dark hair cut to her shoulders and brown eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses that she wore pushed slightly down her nose, giving her the look of someone perpetually about to read something.
She wore a cardigan over a blouse, dark slacks, no jewelry except a thin gold chain.
Nothing sharp, nothing threatening, nothing that would give a hostile patient anything to push against. Isla recognized the strategy immediately because it was good, and because she'd used versions of it herself in interview rooms.
"Agent Rivers. I'm Dr. Linden. Come on in."
The office continued the theme of studied neutrality—warm colors, soft lighting, two chairs angled toward each other with a low table between them.
No couch, which Isla appreciated for reasons she didn't examine too closely.
The desk in the corner was cluttered with files and books in a way that felt deliberate in its ordinariness, as if to say: I'm a person who works here, not a stage set designed to extract your secrets.
A window looked out onto the street, where a delivery truck was double-parked and a man in a puffy jacket was walking a dog that didn't want to go in the direction they were heading.
Isla sat. Crossed her legs. Placed her hands on the armrests in a position that she knew projected calm and openness, because she'd read the same body-language literature that therapists read, and she wasn't above using it.
Dr. Linden settled into the opposite chair with the unhurried ease of someone who did this forty times a week and had learned that the first thirty seconds set the temperature for everything that followed.
She held a thin folder—Isla's file, presumably, whatever Kate had sent over—but she didn't open it.
She set it on the table between them and left it there, a boundary marker neither of them acknowledged.
"I appreciate you coming in," Dr. Linden said. "I know these sessions aren't always voluntary in the way that word usually implies."
"They're not voluntary at all," Isla said. "My SAC ordered a psychological evaluation as a condition of returning to active duty. I'm here because the alternative is not going back to work."
She said it without hostility, which was its own kind of performance. Not hostile. Not warm. The flat, cooperative tone of a woman who intended to check a box and leave.
Dr. Linden nodded as though this were a perfectly reasonable thing to say, which it was.
"That's fair. And I want to be upfront about what this is and isn't. I'm not here to decide whether you're fit for duty—that's a separate evaluation, and it's not what we're doing today.
What SAC Channing has asked for is a series of counseling sessions.
You and I, talking. My role is to support you, not to grade you. "
"How many sessions?"
"We'll start with six and reassess. Weekly."
Isla did the math. Six weeks. Six Thursdays in this chair while Robert Brune breathed free air somewhere in Duluth and the Armory case—she'd heard about it, everyone in town had heard about it—ran its course without her.
Six sessions of performing wellness for a woman she'd never met, in exchange for the privilege of doing her job.
"Fine," she said.
Dr. Linden let the word sit. She didn't rush to fill the silence, which told Isla she was dealing with someone who understood silence as a tool rather than an absence.
Therapists who were good with law enforcement knew that cops and agents lived in silence—stakeouts, interview pauses, the long stretches between action where the real thinking happened.
Trying to fill every gap was an amateur's move.
"Why don't you tell me what's been going on?" Dr. Linden said after a moment. Not really a question. An invitation, gently phrased, with no sharp edges to push against.
Isla gave her the version. The efficient, curated version she'd been assembling in her head since Kate had first mentioned psychological evaluation, the way she assembled case files—organized, coherent, with the relevant facts presented in the right order and the irrelevant ones excluded.
She'd been working a case. The Lake Superior Killer—Robert Brune, sixty-five, serial murderer operating for decades under the guise of accidental drownings.
She'd identified him after years of pattern analysis.
He'd attacked her partner, Agent Sullivan, at a scrapyard and put him in the hospital.
She'd continued working the case after being told to stand down, which was the insubordination that triggered the leave.
Sullivan was recovering. She was frustrated by the pace of the investigation.
She understood why Kate had made the call she'd made, even if she disagreed with it.
Clean. Professional. The testimony of a competent agent who had perspective on her own situation.
Dr. Linden listened without interrupting, her gaze steady and attentive in a way that wasn't invasive—she looked at Isla the way a good listener did, with enough focus to convey engagement but not so much that it became scrutiny. When Isla finished, Linden nodded slowly.
"That's a lot," she said. "A partner in the hospital, a suspect at large, mandatory leave. Any one of those would be significant. All three at once—that's a lot of weight."
"I can handle it."
"I believe you. Handling things seems to be something you're very good at." There was no irony in it, no hidden edge. Just an observation, offered simply. "Can I ask how you've been spending your time since the leave started?"
"Running. Visiting Sullivan at the hospital. Reading." All true. All incomplete. "Trying to stay busy."
"And the nights?"
Isla's pulse didn't change. Her hands didn't move. She held Dr. Linden's gaze with the same composed neutrality she'd walked in with, and the lie came out as smoothly as breathing.
"I go home. I eat. I watch the lake from my apartment window and think about the case more than I should.
" A small, self-deprecating half-smile—the kind that invited the therapist to see a woman with enough self-awareness to recognize her own patterns.
"I'm not sleeping great, if that's what you're asking.
But I wasn't sleeping great before the leave either. The job does that."
"The job does that," Dr. Linden agreed. "What about the dock patrols?"
The question landed like a stone in still water.
Isla felt the ripple pass through her and held everything still.
Kate had told her. Of course Kate had told her.
Whatever was in that file on the table between them included the phone call from the night of the attack, the confession Isla had made from a squad car bumper with blood on her collar and chain bruises darkening around her throat.
"I've stopped," Isla said. She met Linden's eyes and didn't blink. "Kate made her position clear. So did Sullivan, once he was conscious enough to have an opinion. I'm not going back to the docks."
It was the most important lie she told that morning, and she delivered it with the conviction of someone who had spent a career reading other people's deceptions and understood, intimately, the mechanics of a convincing one.
Steady eye contact. Relaxed shoulders. The right amount of reluctance in the admission, as if stopping had been hard but she'd done it anyway, because she was a reasonable person who listened to the people she trusted.
She had not stopped. She had gone back two nights ago. And last night.
The chain bruises had faded to a yellow-green that she covered with a scarf and, when indoors, with a turtleneck that she'd bought specifically for this purpose.
The cut above her eye had healed to a thin pink line she'd explained away as a stumble during a morning run.
She was more careful now—she stayed farther from the container yard, kept to the perimeter, and carried a can of bear spray in her jacket pocket that was technically legal and better than nothing.
She didn't go as late. She varied her route. She was smarter about it.
She was still doing it.