CHAPTER ELEVEN
The call came at ten minutes to eight, which was early for Kate Channing and therefore ominous.
Kate was a nine o’clock woman—precise in her scheduling the way she was precise in everything, from the crease of her suits to the calibration of her reprimands.
A pre-nine call meant something had changed overnight, and in Isla’s recent experience, overnight changes were never the kind that came with good news and a fruit basket.
She was standing at the kitchen counter in running clothes, breathing hard from the lakeshore, staring at the psych eval paperwork she still hadn't completed.
Dr. Linden's question had attached itself to her like a burr—what it looks like when you're not presenting it for evaluation—and she'd been running it out of her system for five miles without success.
The paperwork stared back. Her phone buzzed against the counter, and she picked it up, expecting Claire, or possibly Ben, with another off-the-record update he'd regret later.
Kate Channing’s name on the screen stopped her mid-sip of water.
“Rivers. I need you in my office at eight thirty.”
“Kate—”
“Eight thirty. Don’t be late.”
The line went dead.
Isla stood in her kitchen and listened to the silence the call left behind.
The lake was visible through her window, flat and gray under the morning overcast, the kind of still that looked peaceful from a distance and felt like something holding its breath up close.
She set the phone down and considered the possibilities, all of which ended with some variation of permanent disciplinary action.
Kate knew about the docks. Kate had known for days.
The fact that she hadn’t yet brought the hammer down officially—beyond the leave, beyond the evaluation—had felt less like mercy and more like a woman assembling her case before presenting it.
She showered, dressed—blazer, turtleneck to cover the last faded traces of the chain bruises, boots—and drove to the field office with the particular calm of someone walking into a sentencing hearing they’d had time to prepare for.
The FBI field office in Duluth occupied a floor of a federal building near the waterfront, modest by Bureau standards but efficient in the way Kate insisted everything under her purview be efficient.
Isla had spent almost three years walking through its doors, and the familiarity of the hallway—the industrial carpet, the fluorescent hum, the faint smell of burned coffee from the break room—hit her with an unexpected sharpness.
She hadn’t been here in over two weeks. It felt simultaneously like coming home and like trespassing.
Ben Marshall was at his desk as she passed the bullpen.
He looked up, saw her, and his expression did something complicated—surprise, then concern, then the careful blankness of a man who didn’t know whether to acknowledge her or pretend she was invisible.
She gave him a small nod and kept walking.
Whatever happened in Kate’s office, she didn’t need an audience for it.
Kate’s door was open. That was unusual. Kate closed her door for conversations she didn’t want overheard and opened it for the ones she wanted the office to witness. Isla cataloged the detail and walked in.
Katherine Channing sat behind her desk with her reading glasses on, which meant she’d been reviewing documents, and her wedding band catching the overhead light, which meant nothing except that Kate never took it off and Isla’s brain noticed everything when she was anxious.
The office was immaculate. It always was.
The bookshelves lined with Bureau manuals and legal references, the framed commendations, the single personal photograph—Kate and her late husband on a sailboat, both of them squinting into the sun with the easy happiness of people who didn’t know what was coming.
“Sit down,” Kate said.
Isla sat. She placed her hands on the armrests the way she’d placed them in Dr. Linden’s office—open, relaxed, the body language of composure—and waited for whatever Kate had assembled.
Kate removed her reading glasses and folded them on the desk. She regarded Isla with those gray-blue eyes that missed nothing, and for a long moment neither of them spoke. The silence had the quality of something being measured.
“How’s Sullivan?” Kate asked.
The question surprised her. Not the topic—Kate asked about James regularly—but the placement.
If this were a termination meeting, small talk wouldn’t come first. “Better. They’re talking about discharge within the week.
He’s doing PT twice a day and complaining about it, which Dr Patel says is a good sign. ”
“Good.” Kate picked up a folder from her desk and opened it, not to read but to have something in her hands. Isla recognized the tactic. “I’m going to say a few things, and I’d like you to let me finish before you respond.”
“All right.”
“You know about the Armory.”
It wasn’t a question. Everyone in Duluth knew about the Armory.
Two murders in ten days, both committed with historical weapons from the building’s collection, had pushed the story from local news to national coverage with the velocity that only unusual violence achieved.
Isla had followed it from her apartment, from Ben’s carefully worded updates, from the news coverage she’d consumed with the frustrated intensity of a surgeon watching an operation through glass.
“I know about it.”
“Duluth PD has requested our assistance. Chief Briggs called me last night after the second killing. They need profiling, forensic support, and an agent who can work a complex homicide scene with local law enforcement without turning it into a jurisdictional war.” Kate closed the folder and set it aside, and when she looked at Isla again, her expression had shifted into something harder to read—not anger, not approval, but the practical, unsentimental calculation of a woman who ran an office and needed her people where they could do the most good.
“I’m putting you on the Armory case.”
Isla blinked. Of all the sentences she’d rehearsed responses to on the drive over, that hadn’t been among them.
“Kate. I’m on mandatory leave.”
“You were on mandatory leave. As of this morning, you’re reinstated to active duty.
” Kate held up a hand before Isla could speak.
“This is not a reward. And it’s not me forgetting what you did on those docks.
We are going to have that conversation, and it’s going to be unpleasant, and it’s going to come with conditions that you will not enjoy.
But right now I have a case that requires someone with your specific skill set—criminal psychology, behavioral analysis, experience with serial offenders—and I have that someone sitting on her couch doing unauthorized night patrols that could get her killed. ”
The words landed precisely where Kate intended them. Isla felt the heat rise in her face and held it there, absorbing the blow without flinching.
“Conditions,” Isla said.
“You continue sessions with Dr. Linden. Weekly, for the duration. You check in with me daily—not when it’s convenient, not when you remember.
Daily. And you do not—” Kate leaned forward, and for a moment the diplomatic veneer cracked and something raw showed through.
“You do not go looking for Robert Brune alone in the dark. You work the case you’re assigned.
If any leads on the Lake Superior Killer surface, they go through proper channels.
Not through you, not at midnight, not without backup. Am I being clear?”
“You’re being clear.”
“Because here’s what I’ve realized, Isla.
” Kate’s voice quieted, and in the quiet was something that sounded, improbably, like concern.
“You on leave is more dangerous than you on duty. At least on duty I know where you are. At least on duty you have a badge and a weapon and the institutional support that might keep you from getting strangled in a container yard.” She opened her desk drawer, removed two items, and placed them on the desk between them.
Isla’s badge. And her service weapon in its holster.
The sight of them produced a reaction she hadn’t anticipated—a tightness in her throat that had nothing to do with the fading bruises.
She’d carried that badge for over a decade.
She’d felt its absence over the past two weeks in the way an amputee felt a phantom limb, reaching for it reflexively at her belt and finding nothing.
“This is not optional,” Kate said. “If you want to keep your career, you take this case. You work it properly. You let me help you, and you let Linden help you, and you stop acting like the only person standing between this city and the dark.” She pushed the badge and the weapon forward with two fingers. “Do we have an understanding?”
Isla looked at the badge on the desk. She thought about her appointed psychiatrist, Dr. Linden’s question and James’s quiet insistence and the docks at night and the chain around her throat and the simple, stubborn fact that Kate Channing—for all her precision, for all her diplomatic containment—was offering her a lifeline disguised as an order.
She reached across the desk and picked up her badge. Clipped it to her belt. The weight of it settled against her hip like a missing piece clicking back into place.
“We have an understanding,” Isla said.
Kate held her gaze for another moment, reading her the way everyone in Isla’s life seemed to be reading her lately—carefully, skeptically, hoping to find something worth trusting. Then she nodded once.
“Detective Sarah Vaughn is the lead from Duluth PD. She’s expecting you at the Armory at nine. Try not to step on her toes. She’s good, and she’s earned the right to be territorial.” Kate put her reading glasses back on, the universal signal that the meeting was over. “And Isla? Welcome back.”
Isla holstered her weapon, stood, and walked out of Kate’s office with her badge on her belt and the particular feeling of a woman who’d braced for a fall and been handed a parachute instead—grateful, disoriented, and not entirely sure the parachute wasn’t also a leash.