CHAPTER SEVENTEEN #2
"You have spent years," Isla went on, "studying a subject that almost nobody else takes seriously.
I don't need to tell you how that is received at dinner parties, or how it sounds to federal agents knocking on your door in March.
I understand that. What I'm asking you for is not a confession.
It's an expert consultation. You've described six frames for your work because this is a subject that genuinely resists one frame—because the different pieces of it live in different registers, and a person has to be a little promiscuous with vocabulary to talk about it at all.
I understand that too. So please—" she gestured at the chair he was still gripping, "—sit down.
And tell me, as someone who has studied these patterns longer than anyone else, I'm going to speak to this week: what does the mandala mean? "
She'd gambled by naming the pattern. The designs weren't public.
Kate had told her to withhold the specific shapes from the press.
But Zimmerman had been writing about snow circles on his website for years, and giving him a real piece of information—something he could feel as a trade, not a test—was the only way Isla could see to repair what Marshall had broken.
Zimmerman looked at her for a long moment. The excitement had drained from his face, but what replaced it wasn't quite hostility—it was the wounded suspicion of a man who had offered hospitality and been repaid with what he experienced as an ambush.
"A mandala," he said, slowly, lowering himself back into the chair with visible effort. "Not just a spiral?"
"A spiral at the first site. A mandala at the second."
"Show me."
"I can't show you photographs. I can describe them."
She did. Carefully. Withholding the specifics that only the killer would know, giving him enough to work with—the diameter of the spiral, the layered geometry of the mandala, the stones placed at the compass points.
Zimmerman listened with the attentiveness of a man who had forgotten, briefly, that he was angry.
"The mandala isn't Western," he said when she finished.
"It's Tibetan in its formal structure. Hindu predecessors, too—they predate the Buddhist version.
But the specific elements you're describing—compass-point stones, radial arms in multiples of four—are closer to the Navajo sand paintings.
Which aren't mandalas, technically. They're healing diagrams. Or curses, depending on who's making them. "
"Healing or curses."
"Diagrams of power. Directed either way."
Marshall was writing again, but he had leaned back slightly—a small concession of space, a physical recognition that the room belonged to Isla now and that his job, for the remainder of the interview, was to record rather than drive.
Isla kept Zimmerman talking for another twenty minutes.
He gave her names—authors he'd read, forums he frequented, a half-dozen people he'd exchanged messages with over the years who shared his interests and any of whom might conceivably know the pattern vocabulary well enough to use it.
None of the names felt hot, but they were names, and names were the currency of second days on a case.
"Where were you Tuesday night and last night—Wednesday night into early Thursday morning?" she asked, because the question still had to be asked, and because asking it now, after the conversation had been rebuilt, would read differently than it would have read fifteen minutes ago.
"Here." The word came out steady. "I live alone.
I work on my site, I read, I sleep. I haven't left this house after dark in months.
The cold aggravates my—" he stopped, as if the admission of physical limitation were itself an embarrassment.
"I have circulation issues. Raynaud's. My fingers go numb below forty degrees.
I can barely open a car door in this weather, let alone spend hours in the backcountry doing whatever was done out there. "
He held out his hands as evidence—thin, pale, the fingertips already faintly blue from the draft that seeped through the foil-sealed windows. The gesture was matter-of-fact rather than defensive, which somehow made it more persuasive.
No alibi. Living alone meant no one to confirm his presence at home on the nights in question.
But no alibi wasn't evidence, and the Raynaud's—the pale, bloodless fingers Isla could see trembling faintly in his lap—would make sustained outdoor work in sub-zero temperatures not just difficult but physically debilitating.
The killer had spent hours in deep snow, carving lines with bare precision.
Zimmerman couldn't reliably grip a pen in the cold.
"Thank you, Mr. Zimmerman." Isla stood. She kept her voice warm. "If you think of anything else—anyone you've interacted with who shares your interest, anyone who's contacted you through your site about the snow circles—please call. You may see something we wouldn't."
He looked at the card she placed on the nearest stack of papers, then at her. Whatever he saw in her face was evidently enough to unclench something, because he nodded, once.
"I'll look through my messages."
"Thank you."
They left. The door closed behind them before they'd reached the porch steps.
The car was cold. Isla started the engine and sat for a moment, the heater groaning, the silence between her and Marshall occupying the space where a debrief should have been.
She pulled away from the curb without speaking.
Marshall stared through the windshield at Zimmerman's foil-covered windows as they receded in the side mirror.
They made it two blocks before he spoke.
"I shouldn't have pushed him like that."
"No," Isla said. "You shouldn't."
"I thought I had him on the contradictions. I thought the pattern of his answers was the evidence."
"It was a real observation. Your timing was off.
You threw it at him in a room where he was already feeling cornered, in a house where he's been isolated and defensive for years, and you confused confronting a suspect with earning a confession.
" She kept her eyes on the road. "The observation was good, Marshall. The delivery cost us half an hour."
He absorbed that. She waited for the quiet to reseal itself, which was what he'd done the last three times she'd given him a critical note—the retreat into himself, the processing, the recalibration she'd learned to read as the sound of a young agent learning his craft.
But the quiet didn't reseal. Marshall cleared his throat.
"Can I say something."
"Say it."
"When I've heard you debrief other agents, you tell them what you saw.
Not just that the delivery was wrong—you tell them how you would have done it.
The specific phrasing. The point in the conversation to introduce a hard question.
The way to hold space for a witness you're about to press.
" He paused. "With me, it's always the end state.
The thing I got wrong. Never the thing I might have tried instead. "
Isla's hands tightened on the wheel.