CHAPTER TWELVE
At night, St. Luke's Hospital was all corridor and shadow—fluorescent light pooling on linoleum, the hum of machines doing the work that sleeping bodies could not.
But in the early morning, the building woke with a restless institutional energy: shift changes, carts rattling, the squeak of rubber soles on freshly mopped floors.
The smell was the same—antiseptic and warm plastic and the faint, unplaceable sweetness that Isla now associated with places where the boundary between life and death was measured in millimeters of swelling inside a human skull—but the morning light coming through the windows gave it a different cast, something almost hopeful, as if the building itself believed that daylight improved the odds.
Isla did not share the optimism.
She sat in the chair she'd come to think of as hers—though it wasn't, and the nurses probably moved it when she left—and looked at his face.
The bruising had continued its slow migration from purple to yellow, the body's own forensic timeline marking the days since the scrapyard, like tree rings marking years.
His jaw was slack. His eyes were closed.
The broad shoulders that had always seemed built for bearing weight were motionless beneath the hospital blanket.
"Marshall's search came up empty last night," she said.
She'd been talking to him again—couldn't stop, the same way she couldn't stop checking the note in her pocket, these small rituals of connection that were all she had left.
"The backcountry teams covered every trail sector.
No suspects. But we've got a new case, James.
A body in a snowfield—someone carved a spiral in the snow and placed the victim at the center.
Stones on his chest. No tracks." She paused.
"It's unlike anything I've seen. I wish you were here to see it with me. "
The monitor beeped. The ventilator hissed. James said nothing.
Isla leaned forward and took his hand—carefully, always carefully, the IV a fragile bridge between his body and the machinery sustaining it.
His fingers were warm. That was the thing that undid her every time, more than the stillness, more than the silence: the warmth.
His hand was warm, and his skin was alive, and his pulse beat steadily beneath her thumb, and all of it—all the evidence of life she could catalog—meant nothing without the consciousness that made James Sullivan the man whose handwritten note was in her pocket.
She heard the footsteps before the door opened. Two sets—one adult, measured and deliberate, and one lighter, quicker, carrying the rhythm of someone young trying to match a longer stride. Isla released James's hand and stood, and the door opened, and Stacey Sullivan walked in with Emma behind her.
The moment assembled itself with the awkward precision of a scene neither woman had rehearsed.
Stacey—blonde, composed, attractive in the practical way of Midwestern women who didn't waste time on vanity—stopped two steps inside the room.
Her eyes went to James first, then to Isla, and what passed across her face was not hostility but something more complex: the recognition of a shared vigil, complicated by everything that made it shared.
"Agent Rivers." Stacey's voice was polite. Civil.
"Stacey." Isla heard her own voice match the register—courteous, contained, professionally appropriate. "How is Emma doing?"
"She's hanging in there." Stacey glanced back at her daughter, who had stopped just inside the doorway, her eyes fixed on her father's bed with an expression that made Isla's chest constrict.
Thirteen. Just thirteen, and the world had handed her this—her father in a hospital bed, machines breathing for him, the adults around her using careful voices that meant things were worse than anyone was saying. "She wanted to come before school."
"Of course."
A silence settled between them. Not hostile—Isla had been braced for hostility and hadn't found it—but was weighted with the discomfort of two women standing in a room with a man who connected them in ways neither had chosen.
Stacey looked at the chair Isla had been sitting in, at the coffee cup on the side table, at the evidence of a vigil that preceded her arrival, and whatever she thought about that, she kept it behind the composed, civil mask she wore.
"Any change?" Stacey asked.
"No. Dr. Ahuja is doing rounds at nine. She said the swelling is stable but hasn't decreased."
"Stable," Stacey repeated the word the way Isla had been repeating it for days—tasting it, testing its actual weight against the weight it was meant to carry. "They keep using that word."
"I know."
Another silence. Isla moved toward the door, making space, ceding the room to the woman and child who had a right to it that superseded whatever claim her own presence might imply. But as she reached the doorway, a hand caught hers.
Small. Warm. Gripping with a fierceness that was startling in its intensity.
Emma.
The girl had stepped away from her mother and crossed the room in the time it took Isla to turn, and now she stood at Isla's side with her father's blue eyes—deep-set, crinkled at the corners the same way his did, though hers were red-rimmed and swollen—looking up at her with an expression that bypassed every adult complication and went straight to the raw, uncomplicated truth beneath.
Then Emma hugged her.
The girl's arms went around Isla's waist, and her face pressed against Isla's blazer, and she held on with the desperate strength of a thirteen-year-old who needed someone to hold on to, someone who existed in the same orbit of worry as she did, someone who understood what it meant to sit beside that bed and talk to a man who couldn't answer.
Isla's arms came up slowly. She held Emma the way you hold something breakable—gently, with the awareness that the wrong amount of pressure could shatter whatever fragile equilibrium was keeping this child upright.
Over Emma's head, she met Stacey's eyes.
The ex-wife's expression had shifted—the composure cracking just enough to show something beneath it that looked like gratitude, or understanding, or simply exhaustion.
"He's going to wake up," Emma said, muffled against Isla's jacket. Not a question. A declaration, spoken with the stubborn certainty of a child who had decided what the outcome would be and was daring the universe to contradict her.
Isla closed her eyes. She thought about James's note, worn soft in her pocket.
She thought about the hand she'd held every morning for six days.
She thought about the word she'd let stand in the scrapyard, alone in the dark—loved—and the terrifying possibility that she would never get to say it out loud.
"Yeah," she said. Her voice came out rough. "He is."
Emma held on for another few seconds, then released her and walked to her father's bed with the composure of a girl who had just given herself permission to believe something, and who was now ready to sit beside the evidence and wait for it to prove her right.
Isla stepped into the hallway. The door closed behind her, and she stood with her back against the wall and pressed her palm flat over the pocket where the note lived.
She had never been a woman who prayed. Not since her parents' accident, not since Miami, not in any of the dark hours between then and now when prayer might have offered a comfort she couldn't find elsewhere.
But standing in that hospital corridor with the sound of Emma's voice still in her ears, she did something she couldn't quite name—something that wasn't prayer and wasn't hope but occupied the same territory, a wordless reach toward whatever governed outcomes in a world she'd spent her career trying to make sense of.
Come back, James. Just come back.
Then she straightened, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and walked toward the elevator.
She had work to do.
***
The field office was half-lit when she arrived at eight—the overhead fluorescents on their weekend setting, illuminating alternate rows and leaving the bullpen in a pattern of light and shadow that made the empty desks look like they were holding their breath.
Marshall was already there, sitting at the desk that had become his, a cup of coffee untouched beside him and his laptop open to what appeared to be a topographic map of the backcountry northwest of Duluth.
He looked up when she walked in, and she saw the admission before he spoke it—written in the set of his jaw and the slight drop of his shoulders.
"Nothing," he said.
Isla sat at her desk across from him. "Walk me through it."
Marshall did. Six hours of grid searching.
Every trail sector covered. License plates checked at three trailhead parking areas—all registered to local residents or verified out-of-state visitors with confirmed identities.
No solo males matching the profile. The cabin they'd tracked to had been occupied by a family of four on a weekend trip, a cooperative alibi.
Two other hikers had been encountered near dawn, both traveling in pairs, both known to the trail guide Koskinen.
"The backcountry's clean," Marshall said. "Or he's already gone."
"Or he was never staying in the backcountry in the first place.
" Isla pulled up Shaw's aerial photographs on her laptop.
She'd been studying them since the night before, and the spiral—even in the grainy resolution of photos taken from a helicopter—had begun to yield its secrets the way evidence always did when she stared at it long enough.
"He came in, did what he came to do, and left.
The backcountry was his canvas, not his home. "
"So, he's local. Lives in Duluth, or close to it."
"Someone with access to a vehicle and the ability to get to a remote trailhead without attracting attention. The Brool Lake corridor has three access points by road—
Her phone rang. The caller ID showed the Duluth PD dispatch number, and Isla answered with the clipped readiness of someone who understood that phone calls at eight in the morning from police dispatch were never good news.
"Agent Rivers, this is Sergeant Harmon, Duluth PD. We've received a missing persons report that's been flagged for your attention, given the active investigation in the backcountry."
"Go ahead."
"Rebecca Lloyd, age forty-three. Her mother, Patricia Lloyd, contacted us thirty minutes ago.
Ms. Lloyd has been solo camping in the backcountry along the Caribou Trail since Monday.
She and her mother have a standing arrangement—daily check-in by satellite phone, no exceptions.
Ms. Lloyd missed her check-in this morning.
Her mother says she's never missed one in fifteen years. "
The information landed with the weight of a stone dropped into still water—the ripples spreading outward, reaching the edges of everything Isla had been building in her mind since the meadow.
"Caribou Trail," Isla said. "That's northeast of the city. The Gallagher scene was northwest, near Brool Lake."
"Different area entirely, yes ma'am. Ms. Lloyd's vehicle was located at the Caribou trailhead by county deputies ten minutes ago. Vehicle's locked, appears undisturbed."
"What do we know about her?"
"Experienced winter camper. Goes out regularly, knows the area well. Her mother described her as—" a rustle of paper— "extremely cautious and reliable. She's also apparently an artist. Oil painter."
Isla looked at Marshall. He'd stopped typing and was watching her, reading the change in her expression.
"Sergeant, I need everything you have on Rebecca Lloyd. Known campsites along the Caribou Trail, her usual routes, any GPS data from previous trips. And I need search and rescue mobilized immediately."
"Already in motion, Agent Rivers. County SAR is staging at the Caribou trailhead."
"We'll be there." She hung up and was on her feet before the phone was back in her pocket. "Marshall. Missing solo camper, Caribou Trail area. Experienced hiker, never misses a check-in."
Marshall was already reaching for his jacket. "Another victim of opportunity?"
"Different area than Gallagher. Forty or fifty miles from the first site.
" Isla grabbed her keys and badge, her mind racing through the implications.
Different area. Same profile—solo backcountry traveler, experienced, alone.
If the spiral killer was choosing locations rather than victims, then the geography of his kills would map his knowledge of the terrain, and two sites fifty miles apart meant a wider range than she'd assumed.
Unless the killer was moving.
"Marshall, head straight to the Caribou trailhead. Coordinate with county SAR, establish a staging area, and find Lloyd's campsite. Her mother may know her preferred spots—get that information from Duluth PD en route."
"What about you?"
"I'm taking a different approach." Isla was already pulling up a contact on her phone—a number she'd saved the day before, after standing in a ruined snowfield and wishing she'd had eyes in the sky before boots had destroyed the evidence. "I'll meet you at the site."
Marshall didn't question it. He took his keys and left, his long stride carrying him to the elevator with the purposeful efficiency she'd come to rely on. Isla waited until the doors closed, then pressed the call button.
The phone rang twice.
"Shaw."
"Captain Shaw, this is Agent Rivers, FBI. I need your helicopter."