CHAPTER TWENTY
The docks had become her confessional.
Every night for the past week—longer, if she was honest—Isla had driven to the waterfront after dark and walked.
Past the loading bays where forklifts sat dormant.
Past the coils of rope and bollards and container stacks rising like monoliths against the sky.
Past the security lights that carved hard white cones into the darkness, each one a stage she stepped onto and stood in, deliberate, visible, daring the shadows to produce the man she’d been hunting for months.
Robert Brune. The Lake Superior Killer.
She reached the end of the eastern pier with her hand on her Glock and her breath fogging in the March air.
The ice shelf along the harbor was fracturing, great plates separating with the slow inevitability of a season turning, and the sounds the lake made at night had shifted—less glacial silence, more restless movement. Water finding its way back to itself.
She stood in the last security light and let it illuminate her. The ponytail, the badge at her belt. A woman standing alone on a dock at night with a weapon on her hip.
Come on, Brune. I’m right here.
She knew it was irrational. Brune’s photograph was taped to the break room wall of every dock operation within five miles; patrols had tripled since James’s attack.
Forty years of killing had taught Brune the difference between compulsion and recklessness.
But Isla came anyway, because the anger had to go somewhere, and the hospital was too quiet and her apartment was too empty and the field office after dark was a place where James’s absence pressed against her like a physical weight.
She turned from the water and started back along the pier. Halfway down, she saw the movement.
Left side. Near the container stack where the pier met the main dock. A shadow that shifted in the particular, unmistakable way of a human body moving between fixed objects.
Isla drew the Glock in a single motion and moved toward the container stack with her weapon up and every nerve singing with the electric certainty that this was it—he’d come back to the water the way she’d always known he would.
She rounded the corner and lunged.
“Freeze! FBI!”
The figure raised both hands. Not panicked—slow, deliberate, palms out. The gesture of someone who had been expecting exactly this.
“It’s me.” Marshall’s voice. “It’s Marshall. Don’t shoot.”
She didn’t lower the weapon immediately—the adrenaline needed somewhere to go, and the fury already replacing it needed a moment to find its shape.
She holstered the Glock. “What the hell are you doing here?”
In the ambient light she could see him: the charcoal suit replaced by a dark jacket and jeans, his expression carrying the composure of a man who had just had a gun pointed at his chest and was choosing to treat it as a professional matter.
“Following you,” he said. Without apology.
“You left the office at seven-forty,” he continued.
“You drove to the waterfront. Same lot you’ve been using every night this week.
” He paused. “The dock workers talk, Rivers. The night security guys. Word gets around when an FBI agent starts walking the piers after dark like she’s looking for a fight. ”
Isla holstered the Glock with more force than was necessary. “You had no business following me.”
“You had no business being here alone.” The words came out firmer than she’d heard from Marshall before.
“I know what you’re doing. Everybody knows.
You’re walking Brune’s territory alone at night, making yourself visible, hoping he’ll step out and give you a shot.
You’re using yourself as bait for a killer who’s already put one agent in the hospital. Without backup, without authorization.”
The accuracy of it landed harder than she wanted. She looked away—at the containers, the dark water beyond—and felt the defense she’d been building dissolve against the simple truth.
“Brune isn’t coming here,” Marshall said. “You know that. These docks aren’t safe for him. Coming here every night isn’t a strategy. It’s—” He stopped.
“Finish the sentence.”
“It’s reckless. And if you want to be bait—if that’s really what you want—then you should be doing it where our actual active killer is hunting. Not down here chasing a ghost.”
He was right.
The realization arrived as a click—something shifting into its correct position.
She’d been spending her nights hunting Brune out of guilt and grief.
But Brune wasn’t here. This new killer was different.
Active, hunting right now, his pattern accelerating and his designs growing more ambitious and the advisory she’d issued that afternoon nothing but a shield made of words.
If she wanted to stop him—really stop him—she needed to be where he was. In the wilderness. In the snow. In the places where solo travelers vanished and patterns appeared.
“We should set a trap,” she said. “The advisory cleared the trails. He’s out there. If we put someone in the backcountry—someone who looks like a target, alone, in the kind of isolated location he’s been selecting—”
“With a team positioned to close in,” Marshall said. He’d straightened, the confrontation giving way to operational alertness. “We’d need Shaw in the air. Thermal imaging. Ground teams at every access point.”
“We’d need Channing’s authorization. And the right location—somewhere with open meadows and dense cover, somewhere that fits his selection pattern.”
Her phone rang before Marshall could respond.
Shaw.
“Agent Rivers.” His voice was different—the unhurried precision she associated with the captain replaced by something tighter. “I’m in the air over the Munger trail corridor. I’ve found another one.”
The dock ceased to exist.
“Another body. Another pattern. But this time—” A pause, the rotors audible through the phone. “This time I interrupted him. The pattern isn’t finished. And about forty seconds ago, I watched someone run from the clearing into the trees.”
Isla was already moving, Marshall beside her.
“You saw him?”
“Dark clothing, moving fast toward the tree line. I lost visual when he entered the canopy.” Shaw’s voice steadied. “The body is still there. The pattern is partially complete—looks like he was still working when he heard me coming.”
“The Munger trail—how far from the city?”
“Seven, eight miles. There’s a snowmobile in the meadow. This victim might have been on a sled.”
Isla reached her car. Marshall was already at the passenger side.
She met his eyes over the roof—amber meeting dark brown, the argument on the pier replaced entirely by the particular communion of two agents being handed the very thing they’d been waiting for.
But it also spoke of trust. An understanding between them as actual partners.
“Shaw, maintain orbit. Do not land. Mark the direction he went. I’m en route.”
She killed the call and started the engine. Marshall had his phone out.
“State patrol?”
“Everybody. State patrol, sheriff’s office, Duluth PD. Every unit that can get to the Munger trail in twenty minutes. And call Channing—tell her we have a third body and a possible sighting of our killer.”
The city blurred past the windows as she drove north. Somewhere ahead, in the dark corridor of the Munger trail, a helicopter was circling a clearing where a body lay at the center of an unfinished design and a killer had run into the trees.
She thought about what Marshall had said on the pier. About setting a trap.
They hadn’t needed to. The killer had come to them.