CHAPTER FIVE
Kate Channing's office was at the end of the hall at the field office, glass-walled, the blinds drawn halfway—the SAC's version of an open-door policy.
Isla knocked and entered without waiting for a response, a habit Kate tolerated from approximately two people in the building, both of whom had earned it.
Kate was behind her desk, impeccable as always—gray suit, silver hair in its precise bob, wedding band catching the overhead light. But her posture carried something Isla had learned to recognize: the stillness Kate adopted when she was about to say something she'd been rehearsing.
"Sit down, Isla."
Isla sat. Not because she wanted to, but because the tone of the instruction suggested it wasn’t optional.
Kate studied her for a moment. The gray-blue eyes missed nothing—they never did—and what they saw now was apparently worth addressing before anything else, because instead of opening the file on her desk, Kate folded her hands and spoke with the careful directness she reserved for the conversations that mattered most.
"Before I brief you on this case, I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer honestly."
"Kate—"
"Are you fit for duty?"
The question landed in the space between them like something dropped from height. Isla felt her jaw tighten.
"Yes."
"That was fast."
"Because the answer is simple."
"The answer is never simple when an agent's partner is in a coma and that agent has been sleeping three hours a night, spending her mornings at a hospital bedside and her afternoons walking the docks with her hand on her weapon.
" Kate's voice didn't rise, but it sharpened.
"I know about the docks, Isla. I've known since Tuesday. "
Isla said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn't sound like either a justification or a confession, and Kate deserved better than both.
"I understand what you're carrying," Kate said.
"I've carried it myself—not the same shape, but the same weight.
And I need you to hear me when I tell you that I am not questioning your competence.
I am questioning your judgment, which is a different thing entirely, and it's the thing that gets agents killed. "
"My judgment is fine."
"Your judgment took you to a scrapyard at two in the morning against my direct orders.
Your judgment has you walking Brune's territory alone, armed, hoping he'll step out of the shadows and give you a reason.
" Kate held up a hand before Isla could respond.
"I'm not asking you to deny it. I'm asking you to recognize it.
Because I have a case that needs an investigator, not a woman looking for a fight. "
The silence stretched. Isla looked at the file on Kate's desk, then at Kate, then at the window behind her where the Duluth skyline pressed against a sky the color of old pewter.
"I need to work, Kate." The words came out quieter than she'd intended—stripped of the confidence she'd been armoring herself with. "If I'm not working, I'm at that hospital watching monitors and waiting for something the doctors can't promise me. I need a case. I need something I can actually do."
Kate held her gaze for a long moment. Whatever she saw there—honesty, desperation, capability, some combination of all three—it was enough. She opened the file.
"Then you'll work this case. But not alone, and not on your terms." She glanced toward the door. "Send in Agent Marshall."
Isla turned in her chair as the office door opened and a man walked in who was, by her immediate and uncharitable assessment, young enough to still have his academy haircut.
He was thirty, maybe thirty-one—tall and lean, with the build of someone who ran miles instead of lifting weights.
Dark hair cropped close, brown skin, sharp features arranged in an expression that was trying very hard to project confidence and not quite making it.
He wore a charcoal suit that fit well enough to suggest he cared about the impression he made, and he carried a leather portfolio that looked new.
His eyes were dark and alert, moving between Isla and Kate with the quick, assessing the dynamic in the room like it was second nature.
"Agent Rivers, this is Special Agent Ben Marshall. He transferred from the Minneapolis field office last week." Kate gestured to the chair beside Isla. "Agent Marshall, sit down."
Marshall sat. He nodded at Isla with a politeness that was just slightly too careful—the deference of a younger agent who had heard stories and wasn't sure which version of the person those stories described was sitting next to him.
"Agent Rivers." His voice was steady, midwestern-flat. "I've read your work on the Northern Star case. The profile you built on Brune was—"
"You're my new partner," Isla said. It wasn't a question.
"Temporary assignment," Kate corrected. "Agent Marshall will be working with you for the duration of this investigation. He has four years with the Bureau, two in the Minneapolis violent crimes unit, and he comes with a strong recommendation from SAC Bergman."
Four years. Isla didn't say anything, but the number sat in the room like something slightly too small for the space it occupied.
She'd had four years under her belt before she'd been trusted with anything more complex than surveillance rotations.
She looked at Marshall and tried to see past the portfolio and the careful politeness and the suit that still had its showroom crease.
What she saw was a capable young agent who had absolutely no idea what he was walking into.
Marshall, to his credit, seemed to know what she was thinking.
"I know I'm not Sullivan," he said. The words were straightforward—no attempt to charm or deflect. "And I know this office is dealing with things I wasn't part of. I'm not trying to fill anyone's shoes. I'm just here to work the case."
"Good," Isla said. "Because there are no shoes to fill. Sullivan is in a hospital bed, not retired."
A flicker in Marshall's expression—surprise, maybe, or recognition that the stories he'd heard hadn't prepared him for the reality. He recovered quickly.
"Understood."
Kate intervened before the silence could curdle.
"This morning at approximately oh-eight-thirty, a search and rescue crew conducting a grid search for missing hikers in the backcountry northwest of Duluth spotted a body in an open snowfield approximately six miles west of Brool Lake.
" She slid a printed photograph across the desk—aerial, shot from altitude, showing a wide white expanse with something at its center that made Isla lean forward.
"The body was positioned at the center of a large geometric pattern carved into the snow.
The pattern is approximately thirty feet in diameter.
No tracks were found leading to or from the site. "
Isla studied the photograph. The image was grainy—shot from a helicopter, the morning light casting long shadows across the snow—but the shape was clear enough.
A spiral, precisely carved, with internal lines radiating inward.
And at the center, small and dark against all that white, the unmistakable shape of a human body.
"No tracks?" she said.
"According to the helicopter crew, the snowfield was undisturbed except for the pattern itself. The most recent storm deposited fourteen inches of fresh snow Monday night, which means the pattern was created after the storm ended."
"Someone walked into the middle of a snowfield, carved a thirty-foot circle, placed a body at the center, and left no footprints." Isla looked up from the photograph. "That's a lot of thought put into such a strange crime.”
"And yet." Kate tapped the image. "Sheriff's office responded by snowmobile. State patrol followed. The request for FBI involvement came from the state level. I'm told the scene has significant complexity and the local resources are—"
"Overwhelmed."
"Outmatched was the word I was going to use."
Isla looked at the photograph again. The pattern, the body, the white emptiness surrounding both.
This wasn't a crime of opportunity or passion.
This was something constructed—designed, executed with care and precision, displayed in a place where it would be found from the air and nowhere else.
The word that came to mind was the one she least wanted to use, because of what it implied about the person who had done this.
Ritual.
She stood. "How do we get there?"
"Helicopter from the St. Louis County airfield.
It's a forty-minute flight. Sheriff's office has a staging area established.
" Kate looked at Marshall. "Agent Marshall, you'll coordinate with local law enforcement on the ground.
Agent Rivers leads the scene analysis." Then, to Isla: "Work the case.
Do it right. And, Isla—" She waited until Isla met her eyes. "Be the investigator I know you are.”
Isla held the look for a beat, then nodded. It was the closest thing to a promise she could offer.
She walked out of the office with Marshall a half-step behind her, the way new partners always walked—close enough to signal alliance, far enough back to acknowledge hierarchy. In the hallway, she stopped and turned to face him.
"Can you handle cold?"
He blinked. "I was born here in Minnesota."
"That's not what I asked."
"I can handle cold."
"Good. Dress for it. We're going to be in a snowfield for hours and I won't have time to worry about whether you're hypothermic." She started walking again. "And Marshall? Don't bring the portfolio."
She didn't see his expression, but she heard him set it on a desk as he passed.
They drove separately to the airfield. The helicopter was already warming up when they arrived—a St. Louis County Sheriff's Bell, its rotors turning in lazy circles that kicked up veils of powder from the tarmac.
Isla climbed in without hesitation. Marshall followed, his winter gear more appropriate than hers, which she noted without comment.
The helicopter lifted, banked north, and the city of Duluth fell away beneath them—first the buildings, then the industrial waterfront, then the residential sprawl giving way to forest and snow and the indifferent wilderness that began where the city's authority ended.
Isla watched the landscape transform through the window and felt the familiar, dislocating shift that came with leaving the controlled environment of an investigation and entering the place where the evidence actually lived.
Somewhere below all this white, in a meadow she hadn't seen yet, a dead man lay at the center of a circle someone had carved into the snow with patience and purpose and whatever else drove a person to turn murder into geometry.