CHAPTER NINETEEN #2
The interior was sparse but organized. A living room with a worn couch, a coffee table stacked with museum journals, shelves holding books on American history and material culture.
A few artifacts on display—a framed daguerreotype, a pair of antique spectacles in a glass case, a piece of pottery that looked Native American.
Nothing overtly military. Nothing that screamed weapons collection.
But the ordering of the space told Isla something: this was a woman who lived with objects the way other people lived with pets, attentively and with a respect that bordered on devotion.
They sat. Lang took the armchair across from them and folded her hands in her lap. Her posture was upright but not rigid—the posture of a woman who’d been interviewed before and knew the choreography.
Vaughn led the questioning. She started with the basics—Lang’s role at the museum annex, her involvement in the renovation, her access to the collection.
Lang answered everything directly. Yes, she had access to the full weapons catalog.
Yes, she’d been involved in the exhibit planning from the beginning.
Yes, she knew the building intimately—she’d been working in and around the Armory for nearly a decade.
“Ms. Lang, can you tell us where you were on the morning of March twenty-ninth, between seven and eleven AM?”
Lang’s hands tightened fractionally in her lap.
“I was at the annex. I’ve been doing inventory assessments all week—the renovation has everything in flux.
Pieces being moved, recataloged, reassigned to different exhibits.
” She paused. “I was also at a meeting at City Hall on Thursday evening about the project timeline. And I attended the town hall on Wednesday. This week has been—I’ve been all over the place. ”
“Was anyone with you at the annex this morning?”
“Not the whole time. Margaret Dunlop stopped in around nine to sign off on a transfer form. Before that I was alone. After that—” She hesitated. “I went to the Armory around ten to check on the storage units in the basement. The ones that hadn’t been moved yet.”
Isla felt the stillness that descended the way weather changed—a pressure shift, invisible but real. Lang had been in the Armory that morning. The morning Zach Welles was killed in the basement.
“How long were you there?” Isla asked.
“Maybe forty-five minutes. I was checking condition reports on the textile pieces stored in the east utility closet. I didn’t go near the main corridor where—” Lang stopped. “I heard about Zach later. From Margaret.”
“Did you see Zach Welles while you were in the building?”
“No. I came in through the loading door and went straight to the east utility. I didn’t go through the main hall.”
“Can anyone verify that?”
The silence that followed was the kind that answered the question before words did. Lang looked at her hands. “No,” she said. “I was alone.”
Vaughn glanced at Isla. The glance was brief but it carried the weight of a shared calculation: Lang was verifiably in the building at the time Welles was killed, and without a precise time of death, her account of being in a different part of the basement was unverifiable.
Isla shifted her attention from Lang’s face to her clothes—the flannel, the thermal, the jeans.
The kind of thorough, automatic scan she’d learned to do in her first year at the Bureau, when her training officer had told her that evidence didn’t announce itself and the best investigators were the ones who looked when they weren’t expected to be looking.
Lang's right sleeve. Just above the cuff, on the inside of the forearm, where the flannel folded over itself. A small, dark stain. Not large—the size of a dime, maybe slightly bigger. But it was there, and it was the particular brownish-red that blood turned when it dried on fabric.
“Ms. Lang,” Isla said. “Is that blood on your sleeve?”
Lang looked down. Her expression did something complicated—surprise first, then something that might have been annoyance, or might have been the look of a person who realized they’d been careless about something that suddenly mattered very much.
“I had a nosebleed this morning,” she said. “I get them when the air is dry. It’s been a problem since—it’s a recurring thing.”
It was plausible. Late March in Duluth, the heating systems still running, the air stripped of moisture by months of winter—nosebleeds were common enough that the explanation didn’t require any particular stretch.
But plausible and verified were different things, and the stain on Patricia Lang’s sleeve was the first piece of physical evidence they’d collected in three murders.
“Ms. Lang,” Isla said, keeping her voice level, “we’re going to need you to come to the precinct with us to continue this conversation.”
The shift in Lang’s face was immediate. The resignation cracked, and beneath it was something harder—defiance, or fear, or the particular outrage of a person who understood exactly what was happening and objected to every part of it.
“Am I under arrest?”
“No. But we have additional questions, and given your access to the building and the collection, and the fact that you were present in the Armory this morning, we need to conduct a more thorough interview. We’d also like to collect that shirt for testing.”
Lang stood. She was trembling slightly—not dramatically, not the way guilty people trembled in interrogation rooms when the walls closed in, but the fine, controlled vibration of a woman fighting to maintain her composure while the ground shifted beneath her feet.
“This is absurd,” she said. “I’ve dedicated my career to preserving those artifacts. I would never—”
“Ms. Lang.” Vaughn’s voice was quieter than Isla’s but carried more weight, the tone of a local cop who understood the difference between sympathy and softness. “The sooner we can clear this up, the sooner you can go home. But we need your cooperation.”
Lang looked between them. Her jaw worked, the muscles visible beneath the skin, and for a moment Isla thought she might refuse—might dig in, demand a lawyer, invoke the rights that twelve years of distance from a conviction hadn’t erased from her memory.
She didn’t. She grabbed a coat from the hook by the door and walked out ahead of them into the thin late-afternoon light, her shoulders set in the rigid posture of a woman who was cooperating and wanted everyone to know it cost her something.
They drove to the precinct in silence. Isla sat in the passenger seat and watched Duluth scroll past—the gray lake visible between buildings, the sky already beginning to darken at the edges, the streetlights coming on one by one as if the city were waking up for an evening that Isla suspected would be very long.
She thought about Patricia Lang’s hands. Strong hands. Careful hands. The hands of a woman who spent her days handling fragile things and understanding, intimately, how much damage the wrong touch could do.