CHAPTER ONE #2
"He didn't tell me because he knew I'd insist." Isla's voice was quiet now, stripped bare. "He knew I'd go with him, and he thought I needed rest more than he needed backup, and now he's in there with a fractured skull because I was sleeping on my couch."
Kate returned the note. Her hand lingered on Isla's wrist—a brief pressure, firm and warm, so unlike the SAC's usual reserve that it landed like a shock.
"Sit down," Kate said. Not unkindly.
Isla didn't sit down.
She stood at the window, looking out at mostly darkness—the parking lot, distant buildings, bare trees, and beyond all of it, somewhere past the edge of the city, Lake Superior.
She couldn't see it, but she could feel it.
She'd always been able to feel it, ever since arriving in Duluth almost three years ago with a dead woman in Miami haunting her sleep and a transfer she'd viewed as punishment.
The lake was always there—patient, cold—holding its secrets beneath water so deep that nothing surrendered to it was ever returned.
Brune was out there. Following whatever mad compass the lake's whispers provided. He'd been cornered in that container and come out swinging with the desperate violence of a caged animal. He'd put James on the ground and walked away, and the city had swallowed him whole.
But the city wouldn't hold him forever. Brune was compelled. The lake called and he answered, and sooner or later the compulsion would drive him to the water, to the docks, to the places where people became vulnerable to a man who made murder look like accidents.
He would kill again. If he hadn't already.
Isla pressed her forehead against the cold glass. Behind her, Kate was on the phone—quiet, controlled, issuing orders that would set a manhunt into motion. More agents, more search teams, every port and dock and marina from Duluth to the Canadian border.
But Isla's mind was already at the scrapyard, standing in front of the shipping container where James had nearly died.
The container would tell a story. Every crime scene told a story, if you knew how to listen.
And Brune's story had been writing itself across this city for decades in a language of drownings and dock accidents and bodies the lake never gave back.
She'd been learning that language. She'd found him once—identified him, named him, forced him into the light—and he'd run into the margins of a city he knew better than anyone alive.
A fisherman's son who'd grown up on these shores and learned their every hiding place the way other children learned their own backyards.
He wouldn't run forever. The lake wouldn't let him.
Neither would she.
"The surgeon is Dr. Ahuja," Kate said, appearing beside her with two cups of vending machine coffee. "Twelve years at St. Luke's, neurosurgery. She's good."
Isla took the cup. It burned her palm through the thin paper, and she held on to that—the small, sharp reality of it—because the night had taken on the dislocating quality of a nightmare.
"How long?"
"Three to five hours, depending on what they find." Kate sipped her coffee. "I've called Stacey. She's keeping Emma home from school and will bring her when there's news."
Emma. The name pierced something in Isla's chest she hadn't known was still unarmored.
Thirteen years old, her father's world, a girl Isla had met exactly four times—each time with an expression that was equal parts curiosity and wariness, as if trying to determine what this woman meant to the father she adored.
"Does Emma know?"
"She knows he's hurt. Stacey said she'd tell her what she needed to when the time came."
"I need to get to the scrapyard," Isla said.
"No." Quiet but absolute. "Not tonight. The scene is being processed and they don't need you contaminating their work while you're running on three hours of sleep and more guilt than any one person should carry."
"Kate—"
"I'll have a preliminary report on your desk by eight. You will read it after you've had rest and a meal that doesn't come from a vending machine." The SAC turned to face her. "Sullivan wouldn't want you to run yourself into the ground over this."
"Sullivan doesn't get a vote right now."
The words came out harder than she'd intended. Kate absorbed them without flinching.
"No. He doesn't. Which is why you need to be the one thinking clearly. For both of you."
Isla wanted to argue. Wanted to push past the logic and do what every instinct was screaming at her to do—get to the scene, pick up the trail, hunt Brune through the dark until she found him.
She could feel the compulsion like a physical force, the same driven urgency that had gotten her through every case in Duluth.
But Kate was right. The admission sat in her chest like a stone.
She wasn't any good to James if she couldn't think straight. Wasn't any good to anyone—least of all to the thirteen-year-old girl who might be about to lose her father because Isla hadn't been awake to answer a note left on a coffee table.
"I'm not leaving the hospital," she said.
Kate nodded once. "I'll have someone bring you a change of clothes and your laptop. The report will come to your email as soon as it's ready." She paused at the door. "And Isla? Eat something. That's an order."
Then she was gone.
Isla sat.
The waiting room was nearly empty—a young couple in the far corner, the woman asleep on the man's shoulder, and an older gentleman reading a paperback. Ordinary people in the grip of ordinary fear, waiting for news from behind doors that separated the living from the dying.
She pulled the note from her pocket again.
Gone to check on the Brune search. Call me when you wake up. —J
Call me when you wake up. Such a simple sentence.
Such an ordinary assumption—that she would wake up, that she would call, that he would answer, that the world would continue along its familiar lines.
He'd written it with the casual confidence of a man who expected to be reachable when her name appeared on his screen.
She thought about his hand holding hers on the tailgate of the ambulance. The dried blood between their palms. The way he'd looked at her as if she were something he was afraid of losing, and the way she'd looked back knowing she was afraid of exactly the same thing but unable to name it.
Through the window, the sky was beginning to show the faintest light along the eastern edge. Not dawn—too early—but the promise of it. And beneath that lightening sky, somewhere in the sprawl of city and shore and lake, Robert Brune was running.
Isla closed her eyes. James Sullivan was alive. The surgeons were working. The net was closing.
And when she opened her eyes again, when the coffee was cold and the report was in her inbox and dawn had broken over Lake Superior, she would go to the scrapyard.
She would stand where James had stood and see what he had seen.
She would find the thread that Brune had left behind—the thread that every killer left, no matter how careful, no matter how desperate—and she would follow it.
All the way to the water, if she had to.
All the way to the end.