Outside The Light (Isla Rivers #11)

PROLOGUE

The cold was the first thing that came back.

Not the pain—that arrived second, a deep, pulsing wrongness in his skull that seemed to radiate outward in waves, turning the frozen ground beneath him into something that tilted and bucked like the deck of a ship in heavy seas.

James Sullivan lay face-down on the ice-crusted gravel of Hendrickson's Salvage & Scrap, and for a span of time he couldn't measure, he understood nothing except that he was cold and that something terrible had happened.

Then the memories came flooding in like water through a cracked hull.

The shipping container. The footprints in the snow.

The doors exploded outward with a force that had driven the breath from his lungs and sent him sprawling backward onto the ice.

And the man—gray-bearded, gaunt, moving with the desperate speed of something feral—swinging an item hard and heavy toward his head.

Brune.

James tried to move. His body responded in fragments—fingers twitching against the ground, one leg shifting an inch before the pain in his head detonated like a flashbang and the world whited out again.

When he surfaced, the sky had changed. Or maybe it hadn't.

The darkness above the scrapyard was absolute, the towers of crushed cars blocking whatever moonlight might have reached him, and he had no way of knowing how long he'd been lying here.

Minutes. Hours. Long enough for his blood to freeze into the ground beneath his cheek, binding him to the earth like the lake binding ice to its shores in winter.

Get up. Get up, Sullivan.

He couldn't get up. He knew that with the clinical detachment of a man who had spent fifteen years assessing crime scenes—reading the evidence of violence the way other people read newspapers.

His head was wrong. The wet warmth matting his hair had gone stiff and cold, which meant the bleeding had either stopped or slowed, but the wound itself pulsed with a deep, nauseating rhythm that made the scrapyard spin around him every time he tried to lift his face from the gravel.

His phone.

The thought surfaced through the fog with sudden, desperate clarity.

He'd had his phone in his pocket—his left pocket, always his left pocket, a habit born from years of drawing his weapon with his right hand while calling for backup with his left.

If he could reach it, he could call Isla.

Could tell her what he'd found. Could tell her—

He tried to move his left arm, and something ground in his shoulder that shouldn't have been grinding.

The sound he made wasn't quite a scream—more a strangled exhale that fogged in the air and dissipated into nothing.

But his arm moved. Inch by agonizing inch, his hand dragged across the ground toward his hip, his fingers numb and clumsy, fumbling against the fabric of his parka.

The pocket was empty.

No.

James forced both of his eyes open wider, fighting against the swelling that had begun to close the left one, and scanned the ground around him.

There—three feet away, maybe four, catching the barest glint of ambient light.

His phone, lying screen-down on the gravel, had been ejected from his pocket during the fall or the blow or whatever had happened in the violent seconds between standing and ending up here.

Three feet. It might as well have been three miles.

He reached for it anyway. Extended his arm across the ground, his fingers stretching, the shoulder screaming in protest, the pain in his skull building to something symphonic and awful.

His fingertips brushed the phone's case, and it skittered away from him—half an inch, but enough to make something close to a sob catch in his throat.

Isla needs to know. She needs to know he was here. That the container—

He tried again. Pushed himself forward with his right leg, the only limb that seemed to still be fully cooperating, and gained an inch. Then another. His fingers closed around the phone, and he dragged it toward him with the desperate tenderness of a man retrieving something sacred.

The screen was shattered. A spider web of cracks radiated from the center, and when he pressed the power button with a trembling thumb, nothing happened. He pressed again. Again. The glass bit into his fingertip, drawing blood he couldn't feel, and the screen remained dark.

Dead.

James let his forehead drop back to the frozen ground. The cold seeped into the wound above his temple, and the pain flared white-hot before settling into something duller, almost manageable, the kind of hurt that whispered just close your eyes with the seductive patience of hypothermia.

He thought about Isla. About the way she'd looked on the tailgate of the ambulance only hours ago, small and broken in the thermal blanket, blood on her hands that wasn't hers.

He'd held her hand and stayed in her apartment and waited until she was sleeping before slipping out to come here, to this graveyard of rust and silence, because he couldn't stop being the person who had to check one more thing, clear one more corner, push one more door.

Should have waited for backup. The thought was tired, worn smooth by repetition, like a stone tumbled in the lake. Should have called it in.

He knew better. That was the part that would haunt him, if he survived long enough to be haunted. Every protocol, every year of training, every lesson written in other people's blood had told him not to open that container alone. And he'd done it anyway.

The darkness pulled at him again, persistent and cold, and this time he let it take him a little deeper. The scrapyard dissolved into gray static, the pain receding to somewhere far away, a signal growing weaker with distance.

When he surfaced again, something had changed.

Sound. Distant but growing closer—a wail that rose and fell in a pattern his fading mind recognized before his conscious thoughts could name it.

Sirens. Emergency vehicles, their lights not yet visible beyond the walls of scrap metal, but their sound carrying through the air with the clarity that only deep cold could produce.

Someone called it in.

The scrapyard employee. Drake—that was his name, Drake Johnson, the morning shift guy who'd been cooperating with the search teams. He would have arrived for his shift, would have seen James's sedan parked at the gate, would have found—

James tried to move again. Tried to push himself up, to signal, to do anything that would tell the approaching responders that he was here, alive, still breathing. His arms trembled and gave out. The gravel pressed against his cheek like a pillow made of broken glass.

But the sirens were getting closer. He could hear them splitting the morning silence, could almost feel the vibration of heavy vehicles on the access road, and somewhere in the rational part of his brain that hadn't been scrambled by a blow to the skull, he understood that he just needed to hold on.

Just needed to keep breathing, keep his heart pushing blood through a body that wanted very badly to shut down.

The shipping container. That was what mattered.

Not whether he lived or died, but what the empty container meant.

Brune had been here—had been living here, hiding in plain sight while search teams combed the city.

And now he was gone, fled into the night, and the container would hold evidence.

Had to hold evidence. Forensics would find something—traces of where he'd been, clues to where he was going, the accumulated detritus of a killer who heard whispers in the water and fed the lake its dead.

Isla would understand. She'd see the container, see the footprints, read the scene the way she read every scene—with that fierce, almost frightening precision that made her the best investigator he'd ever worked with.

She'd know what it meant. She'd pick up the trail where he'd been forced to drop it.

Just find him, Isla, before he finds someone else.

The sirens were very close now. Red light began to pulse against the metal walls, painting the towers of crushed cars in alternating shades of crimson and shadow. James heard voices—shouting, urgent, the cadence of first responders who didn't yet know what they were responding to.

He tried one more time to call out. What emerged was barely a whisper, lost in the crunch of boots on gravel and the slam of vehicle doors. But that didn't matter. They were here. They would find him.

The darkness reached for him again, and this time it felt less like an enemy and more like a mercy.

The pain was very far away now, the cold almost comfortable, and the last thing James Sullivan was aware of before consciousness finally released its grip was the sound of someone shouting his name—or maybe just shouting—and the distant, rhythmic crash of Lake Superior's waves against the shore, steady as a heartbeat, patient as the dead.