CHAPTER TWO #2
A sleeping bag, dark green, military surplus, unrolled on a sheet of flattened cardboard in the far corner.
It was filthy—stained and compressed from use—and beside it a rolled fleece blanket served as a pillow, molded into the shape of a head that had rested on it night after night.
The faint smell of kerosene lingered in the cold air, mixing with something else—something animal, the staleness of a space occupied too long by a body that hadn't had proper access to running water.
Food wrappers littered the floor in a pattern that suggested not carelessness but routine.
Canned goods—beans, soup, tuna—the pull-tab lids peeled back and left beside the empties.
A gallon jug of water, half full, and beside it a smaller bottle that might have held something stronger.
Brune had been surviving, not living. Subsisting in this metal box like something hibernating, waiting out the search the way a fox waits out dogs from deep inside its den.
But it was the far wall that stopped her.
Someone had scratched words into the metal.
Not carved—scratched, with what looked like a nail or a piece of wire, the letters rough and uneven, catching the work lights at angles that made them appear and disappear depending on where Isla stood.
She moved closer, careful of the evidence markers on the floor, and read.
THE LAKE SPEAKS
Below it, smaller, scratched deeper as if the hand that made the marks had been pressing harder:
SHE CALLS THEM HOME
And below that, smaller still, barely legible:
I AM THE CURRENT
Isla stared at the words until they blurred.
She thought about what she knew of Robert Brune—the biographical details that had emerged when she'd identified him months ago.
Mother drowned when he was eight. Foster system.
Forty years on the water. A life shaped entirely by the lake, bent around it the way a tree warps around a prevailing wind.
He believed the lake whispered to him. Believed it demanded sacrifices. And he'd been sitting in this container, in the dark, scratching his delusions into the walls while search teams combed the city yards away.
How long? The forensics report would give a more precise answer, but Isla could estimate from what she saw.
The food wrappers suggested at least two weeks, possibly longer.
The sleeping bag was compressed enough to indicate extended use.
He'd been here through the worst of the late-winter cold, huddled in this metal box with his canned soup and the voice of a lake that only he could hear.
And James had found him.
She turned from the wall and walked back to the container doors, stepping carefully around the evidence markers, and stood at the threshold where inside became outside.
The blood was there, directly below, frozen into the ground.
She looked at it, and then past it, letting her gaze travel beyond the work lights and into the deeper darkness of the scrapyard.
He'd run. After hitting James, Brune had run. But which way?
Isla stepped out of the container and began to circle the perimeter of the illuminated scene, moving slowly, her eyes scanning the ground.
The forensics team would have already done this—would have documented every footprint, every disturbance in the gravel—but she needed to see it herself.
Needed to trace the path with her own eyes, because reading a report was one thing and standing in the cold where a killer had stood was something else entirely.
She found his trail twenty feet from the container.
Bootprints. Deeper at the toe than the heel—a running stride, someone moving fast, not looking back.
They cut between two stacks of crushed cars and continued along a narrow channel that ran parallel to the scrapyard's eastern fence.
Isla followed them, her phone's flashlight supplementing the distant glow of the work lights, the cold forgotten now.
He'd been panicked. She could read it in the stride pattern—uneven, the spacing irregular, the prints occasionally slipping where he'd hit ice and nearly gone down.
This wasn't the measured movement of a man executing a plan.
This was flight. Pure, animal flight. He'd swung whatever he'd swung at James's head and then he'd bolted, driven by the same desperate survival instinct that had kept him free for decades.
The trail wound through the scrapyard's eastern section, following paths between the scrap piles that suggested familiarity—he knew this place, knew which gaps were wide enough to squeeze through, which routes led toward the perimeter.
He'd chosen his hiding spot well. A man who'd spent forty years navigating docks and shipyards and the treacherous edges of Lake Superior would know how to read an industrial landscape the way a sailor reads the water.
Isla followed the prints for a hundred yards, then two hundred.
They led her to the eastern fence, where a section of chain-link had been peeled back from its post—not cut, but worked loose over time, the wire bent and re-bent until it created an opening just large enough for a man to push through.
Fresh scraping on the post. Threads of fabric caught on a wire barb—dark material, heavy. A coat or a jacket, torn in haste.
She squeezed through the gap and emerged on the other side of the fence, into an access road that ran between the scrapyard and a neighboring lot.
The road was paved—cracked, neglected asphalt that the city probably hadn't maintained in years—and the moment Isla's boots hit the hard surface, the trail died.
No more bootprints. No more frozen ground soft enough to hold impressions. Just asphalt stretching in both directions under the amber wash of a distant streetlight, the surface scoured clean by wind and cold and the indifference of a city that didn't know a monster had passed through its streets.
Isla stood in the middle of the road and turned a slow circle, her flashlight beam sweeping across the asphalt, the neighboring fence, the dark shapes of buildings in the middle distance.
Nothing. No prints, no fabric, no blood trail.
The cold had done its work and the road had done the rest, and Robert Brune had walked out of this scrapyard and into the city and disappeared.
She lowered the flashlight.
The silence was immense. Not the comfortable silence of a winter night but the hollow, mocking silence of a dead end—the particular quiet that filled the space where a trail should have continued and didn't. Isla had followed threads to their ends before.
Had stood in places where evidence stopped and darkness began and felt the frustration of a puzzle missing its most important piece.
But this was different. This thread was woven through James Sullivan's blood, and its disappearance on this cracked asphalt felt less like an investigative setback and more like a personal failure.
She'd lost him.
Again.
She'd identified Robert Brune months ago—dragged him into the light after decades of anonymity, gave a name and a face to the pattern of drownings that had haunted the shores of Lake Superior for longer than she'd been alive.
And he'd run. Run and hidden and survived, and the entire apparatus of federal law enforcement hadn't been able to close the distance between knowing who he was and putting him in a cell.
And now James was in surgery and Brune was out there, somewhere in the sprawl of the city, and the trail ended here on a forgotten access road behind a scrapyard full of rust and blood.
She thought about going farther. Following the road in both directions, checking the neighboring lots, expanding the search radius by sheer force of will.
But the rational part of her mind—the part that was still functioning, still capable of assessment despite the exhaustion and the guilt and the cold that had worked its way deep enough into her body to feel permanent—knew it was pointless.
Hours had passed since the attack. Brune could be anywhere by now.
Could have had a vehicle stashed nearby, could have caught a ride, could have simply walked until the city absorbed him.
A sixty-five-year-old man who'd spent his life invisible wasn't going to leave a trail on pavement for an FBI agent to follow in the middle of the night.
Isla turned off the flashlight and stood in the dark.
The city hummed around her—distant, unconscious, the low-frequency murmur of a place that didn't know what moved through its streets in the small hours.
Somewhere to the east, Lake Superior lay beneath the darkness, its surface locked under ice that would begin to crack and shift in the coming weeks as the season turned.
The lake kept its own time. The lake held its own counsel.
And somewhere between the water and wherever Isla stood, Robert Brune was hearing its whispers and preparing to answer.
I am the current.
The words he'd scratched into the container wall returned to her, and she turned them over in her mind the way she turned evidence—looking for meaning, for the psychological contour of the man who'd written them.
He didn't see himself as a killer. Didn't see his victims as people who'd been murdered.
He was a force of nature in his own understanding, an instrument of the lake's will, and the people he drowned were simply being called home.