CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Bell lifted off the St. Louis County airfield at nine-twelve, and Isla felt the ground release her the way it always did in a helicopter—suddenly, completely, the earth simply letting go and the sky taking over.
Captain Shaw flew with the unhurried precision of a man who had logged enough hours to trust the machine and the air and the process of being between them, his hands steady on the controls, his eyes already scanning the terrain as they climbed.
"Caribou Trail corridor," he said through the intercom, confirming the heading. "Your missing person—what do we know about her last location?"
"Her mother says she favors a campsite in a hollow off the main trail, about three miles in from the trailhead.
Sheltered, surrounded by spruce." Isla had gotten the details from Duluth PD during the drive to the airfield, relayed from Patricia Lloyd with the precise, desperate clarity of a mother who had been describing her daughter's habits to strangers since dawn. "She's been using it for years."
"I know the Caribou corridor. Good terrain for winter camping—sheltered valleys, decent wind protection.
" Shaw adjusted their heading slightly north.
"But it's also good terrain for getting lost in.
The trail system branches after the first two miles, and once you're off the main route, the forest gets thick fast."
Isla watched the landscape transform beneath them.
Duluth fell away—the city receding from its full sprawl to a cluster, then a smudge, then nothing, replaced by the rolling white expanse of the backcountry.
The morning was clear, the sky a cold blue that promised sunlight without warmth, and the snow below caught the light and threw it back in a glare that made her squint even through the helicopter's tinted glass.
She thought about the meadow near Brool Lake.
About the spiral, destroyed by the time she'd reached it—the precision of the pattern reduced to fragments by well-meaning boots that hadn't understood what they were crossing.
She'd studied Shaw's photographs for hours, reconstructing the design from aerial images, trying to see it the way its creator had seen it: complete, unbroken, the single continuous line curving inward to the body at its center.
If Rebecca Lloyd was a victim—and everything in Isla's experience was telling her that a missed satellite check-in from a woman who'd never missed one in fifteen years was not a navigation error or a dead battery—then there might be another pattern in the snow.
Another design, carved with the same patience and care, placed in another sheltered clearing chosen for the same reasons the first meadow had been chosen: protection from wind, isolation from trails, visibility from the air.
The killer wanted his work seen from above.
That was the insight that had crystallized for her during the night, somewhere between studying Shaw's photographs and staring at the ceiling of her apartment at three in the morning.
The spiral was too large to be appreciated from ground level.
Standing at the edge of the meadow, all you saw were fragments—curves and trenches that lost their meaning without the perspective of altitude.
But from a helicopter, from three hundred feet, the design revealed itself in full.
The killer had built something meant to be seen from the sky.
Which meant a helicopter might find it before ground teams could destroy it.
"Captain, when we reach the corridor, I want you to fly a search pattern over every open clearing within a five-mile radius of the campsite. Every meadow, every snowfield, anything with enough open space for a pattern."
Shaw glanced at her. "You think there's another one."
"I think if there is, we need to see it before anyone walks through it."
Shaw nodded. He'd seen the first pattern from the air, had circled it for twenty minutes with Russ documenting every angle, and the memory of what they'd found—the precision, the body, the beauty he'd been unable to stop himself from commenting on—had clearly not released its hold.
He understood what was at stake in a way that no briefing could have conveyed.
They reached the Caribou Trail corridor in twenty-two minutes.
The forest below was denser here than near Brool Lake—heavier stands of spruce and pine, the canopy thick enough in places to obscure the ground entirely.
But the clearings existed, scattered through the forest like gaps in a sentence, and Shaw began working them systematically, banking the helicopter in wide orbits that brought each opening into view.
The first three clearings were empty. Undisturbed snow, pristine surfaces, no marks of any kind. The fourth was too small—barely fifty feet across, hemmed by trees, not enough space for what Isla was looking for.
"Coming up on a larger meadow," Shaw said. "South-southwest of the campsite coordinates, maybe half a mile."
The helicopter banked, and the trees fell away, and the clearing opened beneath them like a page being turned.
Isla's breath stopped.
It was there.
Not a spiral this time. Something else—something more elaborate, more complex, carved into the fresh snow with a precision that made the first pattern look like a rough draft.
From three hundred feet, looking straight down through the helicopter's window, the design resolved with the clarity of a photograph, every line sharp-edged against the white surface, every curve placed with geometric exactitude.
A mandala.
Concentric rings—three of them, each carved as a continuous trench in the snow, each perfectly circular, nested inside the other like the rings of a target.
Between the rings, patterns. Not random marks but deliberate, repeating motifs—short radiating lines in the outermost ring, evenly spaced, like the teeth of a gear.
In the middle ring, a series of curved shapes that might have been crescents or waves, their repetition creating a rhythm that was almost hypnotic.
And in the innermost ring, closest to the center, the snow had been worked into something more intricate still—a pattern within a pattern, shapes that overlapped and interlocked in a design that Isla's mind struggled to parse from altitude because there was simply too much detail, too much intention compressed into too small a space.
And at the center—the exact center, the point from which the entire design radiated outward like ripples from a stone dropped in still water—a body.
So small against all that white geometry.
Dark-clothed, motionless, positioned on its back with arms extended, the posture a mirror of Martin Gallagher's arrangement in the first meadow.
Even from three hundred feet, Isla could see the precision of the placement—the body's axis aligned with the internal geometry of the mandala, centered with the kind of care that spoke not of haste, but of devotion.
Rebecca Lloyd. Dead.
"Jesus," Shaw said. His voice was steady—the cockpit demanded that—but the word carried a weight that wasn't professional.
"Circle," Isla said. "Tight orbit, three hundred feet. I need photographs."
She already had her phone out, the camera app open, her hands operating with a steadiness.
Marshall was on the ground. Search and rescue teams were mobilizing.
Within the hour—maybe sooner—boots and snowmobiles might converge on this clearing, and the mandala would suffer the same fate as the spiral, its precision trampled into the general chaos of a crime scene being processed by people who didn't know what they were crossing.
Not this time.
Shaw settled the helicopter into a banking orbit.
The mandala rotated beneath them as they circled, and with each degree of arc, Isla saw new details, new layers of the design's complexity emerging as the angle of light shifted across the carved surfaces.
She photographed continuously—wide shots capturing the full pattern, tighter shots of individual sections, the body at the center growing larger as Shaw dropped to two-fifty at her request.
The outermost ring was approximately sixty feet in diameter.
Larger than the Gallagher spiral. The lines were cleaner, more precisely carved, the gaps between the concentric circles uniform in a way that suggested measurement—not estimation, but actual measurement, the killer pacing out distances or using some tool to maintain consistency.
Isla had to wonder: did he really do this alone?
What kind of job did he have—had he spent a lot of time in the sky, as a pilot or something similar?
Someone who knew how to recognize shapes from far above?
Or was he inspired by crop-circle phenomenon?
Between the rings, the motifs were more detailed than she'd first thought.
The radiating lines in the outer ring weren't simple marks—each one had a slight curve, a consistency of length, creating a sunburst effect that gave the outermost circle the appearance of a compass rose.
The crescents in the middle ring were arranged in alternating orientations, creating an optical rhythm that, from altitude, seemed almost to pulse—a trick of geometry and shadow that made the ring appear to move even though nothing was moving.
And the innermost ring—closest to the body—held a pattern that made Isla lean closer to the window, her phone pressed against the glass, her eyes straining against the altitude.
Interlocking shapes. Not letters, not symbols she recognized, but forms that carried the weight of intentional meaning, arranged with the kind of density and care that suggested this ring, this closest perimeter around the body, was the most important part of the design.
"The snow between the rings," Shaw said, circling. "It's clean. Same as last time."