CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Isla had pinned the aerial photographs to the corkboard behind her desk—Shaw's shots of both scenes, printed at the highest resolution the office equipment allowed, arranged in sequence from the Gallagher spiral to the Lloyd mandala.
Beside them, she'd taped the victim profiles: Martin Gallagher, fifty-two, data analyst, avid winter hiker.
Rebecca Lloyd, forty-three, oil painter, solo camper for fifteen years.
Two people who had nothing in common except the backcountry and the terrible misfortune of being alone in it when a killer came looking for a body to complete a design.
She sat at her desk and read Rebecca Lloyd's life.
Duluth resident for twelve years. Divorced, no children.
Employed part-time at a frame shop on Superior Street and supplemented her income with sales of landscape paintings—oils, primarily, the kind of luminous winter scenes that tourists bought and shipped to living rooms in warmer states.
She was known in the local arts community.
Had shown work at the Tweed Museum and several downtown galleries.
Her social media—sparse, mostly images of paintings and backcountry landscapes—painted the portrait of a woman who lived quietly, deliberately, in a world organized around two things: art and wilderness.
Isla looked at the photographs on the wall.
At the mandala, with its geometric precision and its concentric rings and its motifs repeating at ten-degree intervals.
Art and wilderness. The killer was making art in the wilderness too—a different kind, violent and uninvited, but art nonetheless.
The word kept returning no matter how many times she tried to replace it with something more clinical, and she was beginning to accept that the discomfort it caused was itself a kind of evidence.
The killer intended beauty. That was part of the message.
Whatever else the spirals and mandalas meant, they were meant to be beautiful, and denying that meant denying a piece of the profile she was building.
"Rivers."
Kate Channing's voice from the doorway. Isla looked up and found the SAC standing with her arms crossed.
"Press conference," Kate said. "One o'clock.
Duluth PD is hosting, but we're leading.
Two victims in the backcountry with a ritual display component—the media already has the helicopter crew's story, and it's only a matter of time before someone leaks the photographs. I want us out in front of this."
Isla's stomach tightened. She'd led press conferences in Miami—had stood behind podiums with cameras flashing and microphones thrust forward and answered the calibrated questions from the public and the press.
She'd been good at it. Confident, composed, steady beneath the lights while she delivered the information the public needed and withheld the information the investigation required.
But that had been Miami, and she'd had her team around her—Reggie at her shoulder, Steve Delgado in the background with his wire-rimmed glasses and his steady, anchoring presence.
Here she had Marshall, who was capable but new, and an empty chair where James Sullivan should have been standing with his quiet solidity and the calm he radiated at moments when Isla's composure was costing her more than she wanted to show.
"I'll be ready," she said.
Kate studied her for a moment—the gray-blue eyes reading whatever Isla's face was giving away—and nodded.
"Keep it factual. Two victims, a backcountry area, and unusual crime scene characteristics.
Don't mention the specific patterns—the spiral, the mandala.
Don't describe the stones. Give enough to justify the public safety warning without feeding whoever's doing this the attention they might be looking for. "
"Understood."
Kate left. Isla turned back to her desk and the weight of the afternoon arranged itself ahead of her—the press conference at one, the case still open, the killer still free, and the particular loneliness of facing cameras without the partner who had stood beside her through every hard moment in this city.
She was reaching for Lloyd's phone records when Marshall appeared.
He'd been at his desk since they'd returned from the backcountry, working with the quiet focus she'd come to recognize as his default mode—head down, screen bright, the occasional click of keys the only sound.
Now he stood at the edge of her desk with his notebook in one hand and an expression she hadn't seen on him before: not confidence exactly, but something adjacent to it.
Eagerness, tempered by the self-awareness that eagerness in a junior agent could easily tip into presumption.
"I found something," he said. "Maybe."
Isla leaned back. "Tell me."
"Curtis Zimmerman. Age fifty-one. He was charged in 2019 with trespassing and vandalism in three counties across Iowa and Wisconsin for creating elaborate crop circles in cornfields.
Admitted to it—said it was art, not malice.
Pled to misdemeanors, paid fines, did community service.
" Marshall set a printed photograph on Isla's desk—an aerial shot of a cornfield with a geometric pattern pressed into the stalks.
"He moved to Duluth last year. And he has a website. "
He turned his laptop around. The website was crude—the kind of basic template that suggested its creator was more interested in content than design.
The header read PATTERNS IN THE VOID in a font that tried too hard.
Below it, a blog filled with entries that ranged from crop circle analysis to conspiracy theories about sacred geometry and government cover-ups.
The most recent post, dated two days ago, was titled SNOW CIRCLES: THE NEXT FRONTIER.
Isla read it. The post was rambling—a mix of speculation and self-promotion, referencing the Gallagher case and suggesting that the snow pattern was evidence of "something larger, a communication we're not equipped to understand.
" It stopped short of claiming credit but carried the unmistakable tone of someone who wanted to be associated with the event, who saw in the news coverage a validation of the worldview they'd built their identity around.
She looked at the crop circle photograph.
The pattern was geometric—concentric rings, radiating lines, the visual vocabulary that had become central to this case.
It was cruder than the snow patterns, the lines less precise, the overall design more folk art than mathematics.
But the impulse was the same: large-scale geometric designs created in natural landscapes, meant to be seen from above.
"He lives alone," Marshall continued. "A rental house on the west side. No criminal record beyond the crop circle charges. No history of violence."
Isla studied Marshall's face. She could see what was happening behind the careful professionalism—the hope that he'd contributed something valuable, that the hours of database searching and cross-referencing had produced a lead worthy of the case.
He was trying in the particular, earnest way of a young agent who understood that trying was the only currency he had.
"It's a reach," she said honestly, because he deserved honesty. "Crop circles and murder are different categories."
"I know. But the geometric patterns, the aerial visibility, the backcountry locations—the overlap is there. And he's local, he's got the relevant skill set, and he's literally posting about the case on his website."
Isla looked at the aerial photograph again.
Then, at the mandala pinned to her corkboard.
The difference in quality was significant—the crop circle was ambitious but imprecise, the work of an enthusiast; the mandala was the work of something closer to mastery.
But Marshall was right that the connection existed, even if it was thin.
And they had nothing else. No DNA from the first scene beyond what the trampled evidence had failed to preserve.
No witnesses. No tracks. The case was forty-eight hours old, and the evidence pointed everywhere and nowhere, and a press conference was in three hours, and the public would want to know that the FBI was doing more than studying photographs and waiting for a third body.
"Where does he live?"
Marshall gave her the address. West Duluth is a neighborhood of older rentals and quiet streets that sits between the hillside and the industrial corridor.
"Let's go talk to him," Isla said. She grabbed her badge and keys, and Marshall fell into step beside her with the barely contained energy of a man whose lead had been accepted, however provisionally.
In the elevator, Isla caught her reflection in the polished steel doors.
Dark circles under the eyes. Hair in its perpetual ponytail.
The blazer wrinkled from hours in the backcountry.
She looked like what she was—a woman running on too little sleep and too much coffee and the fuel that came from a case that hadn't yet given her enough to work with.
She thought about the press conference. About standing behind a podium in three hours with cameras and microphones and the vulnerability of speaking to a city that was watching.
James always stood to her left at briefings—slightly behind, the way partners stood, close enough that she could feel his presence without seeing him.
A steadying weight. A fixed point in the room's chaotic geometry.
She'd manage without him. She always managed. But managing and being whole were different things, and the distance between them was the distance between the woman she presented to the world and the woman who carried a note in her pocket like a prayer.
The elevator doors opened. They walked to the car, and Isla drove west, and the city moved past the windows in its familiar pattern of streets and buildings and the distant gray presence of the lake, and she carried the case forward the only way she knew how.
One lead at a time. One door at a time.
Even the wrong ones.