CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The podium was a cheap thing—particle board with the Duluth Police Department seal affixed to its front, the kind of thing built for traffic updates and community policing announcements, not for telling a city that something was hunting its people in the snow.
Isla stood behind it and looked out at the room and felt the weight of every camera, every microphone, every face turned toward her with the hunger that press conferences generated—the appetite for information dressed as concern, for details dressed as public safety.
The briefing room at Duluth PD headquarters was standing room only.
Local news crews occupied the front rows, their cameras mounted on tripods like sentries, red recording lights burning.
Behind them, print reporters with notebooks and phones held at angles, and behind those, a scattering of faces Isla didn't recognize—bloggers, podcasters, the citizen journalists who materialized whenever a case crossed the threshold from local interest into something that could trend.
Kate Channing stood to Isla's right—slightly behind, the way a commanding officer stood when the operational lead was at the podium.
Kate's presence was a kind of reassurance: quiet, immovable, the gray-blue eyes scanning the room with the alertness of a woman who had stood behind more podiums than Isla could count, who understood that what happened in front of the cameras was performance, and what mattered was what came after.
To Isla's left, the space was empty.
She didn't look at it. Couldn't afford to look at it, because looking at the space where James Sullivan should have been standing—hands clasped, deep-set blue eyes steady, radiating the quiet authority that had anchored her through every public moment in this city—would crack something in her composure that she could not afford to crack. Not here.
Marshall stood near the back wall. She'd told him to observe, not participate—not because he wasn't capable but because two faces at the podium were enough, and it was best for him to observe.
"Good afternoon." Her voice came out steady.
Her eyes were level beneath the lights, and if the dark circles beneath them told a story the makeup hadn't fully concealed, the cameras would interpret exhaustion as dedication, and that was close enough to the truth.
"I'm Special Agent Isla Rivers with the FBI's Duluth field office.
I'm joined by Special Agent in Charge Katherine Channing.
We're here to address a public safety concern involving two deaths in the backcountry northwest and northeast of Duluth. "
She paused. Let the room settle. This was the architecture of a press conference—the pacing, the silences, the calibration between what the public needed and what the investigation required.
She'd learned it in Miami, standing behind podiums with Reggie Stamos at her shoulder and the confidence of a woman who believed her instincts were infallible.
That confidence had died with Alicia Mendez.
What replaced it was something harder—not confidence but discipline, the understanding that precision mattered more than presence, that the words she chose in the next five minutes would shape public behavior and possibly determine whether someone lived or died tonight.
"Over the past several days, two individuals have been found deceased in isolated backcountry locations.
Both were experienced outdoor enthusiasts.
Both were alone at the time of their deaths.
The circumstances of these deaths indicate that a single individual is responsible, and that this individual is specifically targeting people who are alone in remote wilderness areas. "
The room shifted. She could feel it—the intake of breath, the slight forward lean of bodies in chairs, the almost imperceptible increase in the frequency of shutter clicks.
The word targeting did that. It transformed a story about deaths in the backcountry from a wilderness hazard into something predatory, and predatory was the word that made people lock their doors.
"We are working closely with local law enforcement, the St. Louis County Sheriff's Office, and state patrol to identify and apprehend this individual. In the meantime, we are issuing the following advisory."
She looked directly into the nearest camera.
This was the moment that mattered—not the summary of facts, not the jurisdictional cooperation, but the directive.
The thing that would air on every local station and scroll across every phone screen and be discussed in every kitchen and every bar in Duluth tonight.
"We strongly advise all hikers and campers to remain indoors this evening and through the night.
If you must go out, do not go alone. Do not hike, camp, or travel into backcountry areas under any circumstances.
Avoid isolated locations. Travel in groups.
Tell someone where you are going and when you expect to return.
" She paused again, letting each sentence land separately, giving them the individual weight they deserved.
"This advisory applies to all areas surrounding Duluth, including state and county parks, wilderness trails, and any unpatrolled terrain. "
The questions came like gunfire.
How long has the FBI known? Are there any suspects?
Isla fielded them the way Kate had instructed—factually, carefully, revealing nothing about the spiral or the mandala or the stones or the terrible artistry of a mind that transformed murder into geometry.
She gave the victims' names, which were already public.
She confirmed the locations in general terms. She declined to describe the crime scenes.
She used the phrase active investigation seven times and public safety is our priority three times and we cannot comment on specifics at this time until the words felt like stones in her mouth, smooth and heavy and inadequate.
Eleven minutes. Kate ended it with a brief statement about interagency coordination and a phone number for tips, and then the cameras were off and the reporters were filing out and the room was emptying with the deflation that followed the discharge of public attention.
Isla stood behind the podium for a moment after the last camera crew packed up. Her hands, which had been steady throughout, were trembling now—a fine, almost invisible vibration that she pressed flat against the particle board until it stopped.
Kate appeared beside her. "Clean," she said. "Controlled. Exactly what we needed."
"It's not enough."
"It's never enough. But it's what we can do." Kate studied her with those gray-blue eyes that missed nothing. "Now we work."
***
The field office was quiet when they returned.
Marshall was already at his desk, the aerial photographs of both crime scenes arrayed on his monitor in a grid that he'd been refining since morning.
He looked up when Isla passed but said nothing—reading her expression with the developing instinct of a young agent learning when to speak and when to let silence do its work.
Isla sat at her desk. Through the window behind her, the sky had gone the color of pewter, and snow was beginning to fall—not the heavy, blanketing snowfall of a storm system but the fine, steady sifting of flakes that arrived almost vertically in still air, the kind that accumulated slowly and quietly and by morning would have transformed every surface in the city.
Fresh snow. Clean snow. The kind that recorded every footprint, every track, every passage of a body through the landscape with the fidelity of a witness who could not lie.
The kind that was irresistible to a killer who carved patterns in white fields.
She picked up the phone and dialed.
"Shaw."
"Captain, it's Rivers. I need aerial sweeps tonight. Every backcountry clearing within a thirty-mile radius of the city—every meadow, every open snowfield, anything with enough space for someone to work in."
A pause. Shaw processing. She could hear the quality of his silence—not reluctance but calculation, a pilot assessing conditions and logistics with the same methodical attention he brought to search patterns.
"The snow's going to limit visibility after dark," he said. "I can run the first sweep before sunset—maybe a ninety-minute window. After that, we're on thermal imaging, and the range drops significantly."
"Do what you can before dark. After that, coordinate with state patrol on ground sweeps—road patrols on every access point to the backcountry. Trailheads, forest roads, anything that connects to open terrain. I want eyes on every way in."
"I'll need authorization for the fuel hours."
"You'll have it. SAC Channing will call your department within the hour."
Shaw was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice carried something that wasn't quite a question. "You think he'll go out tonight."
Isla looked at the snow falling past her window. At the way it erased the world slowly, patiently, the way the killer erased his tracks—not through speed or violence but through the simple, implacable accumulation of white over everything that had come before.
Fresh canvas.
"The snow is new.” She paused, watching a single flake trace its path down the glass. "He's not going to wait. The conditions tonight are everything he wants."
She hung up and sat with the silence of the office around her and the snow falling outside and the photographs of spirals and mandalas pinned to the corkboard behind her desk.
Two victims arranged at the centers of designs that grew more elaborate with each killing.
A mind that was refining itself, sharpening its vision, moving toward something she couldn't yet see but could feel approaching the way you felt a storm system building over the lake—not in the sky but in the pressure, the stillness.
Somewhere out there, in a city being advised to lock its doors, a killer was watching the same snow fall.
And Isla knew—with the certainty that lived below analysis, below evidence, in the place where instinct and experience fused into something she'd learned to trust even when it frightened her—that tonight the snow would not fall undisturbed.
Tonight, someone would walk into the white and begin to carve.