CHAPTER TWENTY
The interview room at the Duluth Police Department was a box of institutional beige—nine feet by eleven, a metal table bolted to the floor, two chairs on one side and one on the other, and a mirror on the west wall that wasn’t fooling anyone.
The overhead fluorescent hummed at a frequency designed, Isla was convinced, to erode the human will to live.
She’d sat in rooms like this a hundred times, and they all had the same quality: the sense that time moved differently inside them, slower and thicker, as though the walls themselves were absorbing the hours and refusing to give them back.
Patricia Lang sat in the single chair with her coat folded in her lap and her hands flat on the table, the posture of a woman who had done this before and was determined to do it better this time.
They’d collected her flannel shirt—she’d been given a department sweatshirt to replace it, gray, too large, hanging from her broad shoulders in a way that made her look diminished.
The loss of her own clothes had done something to her composure that the drive to the precinct hadn’t.
She looked smaller. She looked like someone who understood that control was being taken from her in increments and couldn’t stop the process.
For two hours, Isla and Vaughn worked her through the timeline.
The town halls. The planning meetings. The morning of Welles’s murder.
The evenings when Lane and Hartley had been killed.
Lang answered with a steadiness that wavered only at the edges—her voice holding firm while her fingers pressed harder against the table’s surface, the tendons in her hands visible beneath the skin.
She’d been at the annex the night Lane was killed.
Alone, doing late inventory. She’d been at a city council reception the night Hartley was beaten to death on the mezzanine—a reception that had ended at eight thirty, giving her an unaccounted window between nine and midnight that she filled with “I went home, I ate dinner, I watched the news.” No witnesses. She lived alone.
The pattern was maddening in its imprecision.
Lang had been everywhere during this renovation—meetings, site visits, the annex, the Armory itself—and her movements were so thoroughly woven into the project’s daily fabric that separating her legitimate presence from potential opportunity was like trying to find a specific thread in a bolt of cloth.
She couldn’t definitively account for her whereabouts during any of the three murders, but neither could half the people connected to the renovation.
Being busy and being alone were not the same as being guilty.
Vaughn leaned forward. “Ms. Lang, let’s talk about Eau Claire.”
The temperature in the room dropped. Not literally—the fluorescent still hummed, the air still carried its institutional staleness—but Lang’s face underwent a transformation that Isla recognized from years of watching people confront the parts of their past they’d tried hardest to seal away.
The composure didn’t break. It hardened, like water turning to ice.
“I knew you’d bring that up,” Lang said.
“You were convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. An antique knife from your personal collection.”
“Assault causing bodily harm. The charge was reduced.” Lang’s voice was flat, controlled, and furious.
“Because the prosecutor understood what actually happened, even if the system couldn’t fully account for it.
David came at me. He’d been drinking—he was always drinking by the end—and he came at me in the kitchen, and I grabbed the closest thing I could reach.
” Her jaw tightened. “The closest thing happened to be an eighteenth-century hunting knife that I’d brought home from the museum for conservation work.
Because that’s what I do. I work with artifacts.
They’re in my home because my home is an extension of my work.
If I’d had a regular kitchen knife, nobody would have looked twice.
But because the weapon had provenance, suddenly I’m a person who attacks people with historical artifacts. ”
“You stabbed your husband,” Vaughn said.
“I defended myself against my husband.” The words came through clenched teeth.
“And I served fourteen months for it. I lost my job, my marriage, and two years of my career. I rebuilt everything from scratch—came to Duluth, started over, earned this position through a decade of work that nobody questioned until three people died and you needed someone to put in this chair.” She looked at Isla with an intensity that bordered on accusation.
“Is that what this is? You needed a suspect so you found the woman with a record?”
“We found the person with access, knowledge, opportunity, and a history of violence involving antique weapons,” Isla said.
She said it without inflection, without judgment—the clinical delivery of facts that didn’t require embellishment.
“You’re here because the evidence brought us here, Ms. Lang. Not because we needed to fill a chair.”
Lang held her gaze. The fury didn’t abate, but something behind it shifted—the recognition, perhaps, that Isla meant what she said, and that meaning it didn’t make the situation any less terrible.
“I didn’t kill those people,” Lang said.
“I cared about that collection more than anyone in this city. More than Cross, who treats the weapons like trophies. More than Margaret, who treats them like fundraising props. I spent nine years preserving those pieces, and now three of them have been used to murder people I worked with. Do you understand what that feels like? It’s like watching someone burn down a library with books you spent your life protecting. ”
The room was quiet. The fluorescent hummed. Outside the narrow window at the top of the wall, the sky had gone the deep indigo of early evening, and Isla could feel the day’s remaining light draining away like water through a crack.
She excused herself and stepped into the corridor.
***
The bullpen was half-empty at this hour—Saturday evening, the day shift gone, the skeleton crew that remained moving through their work with the unhurried rhythm of people who'd accepted the overtime.
Isla found an open desk near the window and sat down with her laptop, the case files, and the particular feeling of a puzzle piece that didn't quite fit but couldn't be discarded.
Lang was hiding something. Isla could feel it—not with the certainty she wanted, not with the clean, declarative confidence of a profiler who’d read the subject and rendered a verdict, but with the quieter, more unsettling instinct that something about this picture was incomplete.
Lang had access. Lang had knowledge. Lang had a history that rhymed with the present in ways that were impossible to ignore.
But the woman in that interview room was angry and afraid and defensive, and anger and fear and defensiveness were not the same as guilt.
They were the responses of a person whose worst moment was being used to define her, and who knew the difference even if the system didn’t.
Isla opened the victim files and started again from the beginning.
Thomas Lane. Construction worker. Six years with Northland. Clean record, stable marriage, no known enemies. Killed with a Civil War bayonet in the space designated for the Civil War exhibit.
Clara Hartley. Interior designer. Three years in Duluth, building her practice. No criminal history, no personal entanglements. Killed with a medieval mace on the mezzanine planned for the medieval gallery.
Zach Welles. Restoration specialist. Fifteen years of experience with fragile artifacts. Contracted specifically to catalog the non-weapon pieces for the new exhibits. Killed in the basement with a Revolutionary War musket from the overflow collection.
Three people. Three weapons. Three eras. The only connection was the Armory.
Except Isla had been assuming that was the only connection, and assumptions were the thing that got people killed. She’d learned that in Miami. She’d learned it standing in a doorway watching Alicia Mendez die because she’d assumed she knew who the killer was, and she’d been wrong.
She pulled up Welles’s file again. The restoration contractor had been the anomaly from the start—killed in the basement, in a space not designated for any exhibit, with a weapon from the overflow collection rather than the display cases.
The pattern had broken with Welles, or the pattern was more complex than she’d mapped. Either way, Welles was the key.
At first she’d wanted to believe he was a victim of opportunity—wrong place, wrong time, a man who’d wandered into the basement alone and encountered a killer who was already there.
But the utility door had been closed behind him.
The weapon had been retrieved from the climate cabinet.
Nothing about Welles’s death was opportunistic. It was planned.
Why Welles?
She dug into his work files. The precinct had obtained access to his email through the restoration firm’s cooperation—a folder of correspondence related to the Armory project, mostly technical exchanges about artifact conditions, catalog entries, and scheduling.
She scrolled through them methodically, reading each one with the attention she’d give a witness statement, looking for the detail that didn’t belong.
She found it fourteen emails in.