CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO #3
Another silence. Marshall's eyes moved to the case board—to the photographs of three people who had walked into the wilderness and never walked out, whose last hours had been spent in the company of someone who saw in their deaths not tragedy but raw material for a design.
"I'm not sitting in this office while he takes a fourth," Marshall said.
The words came out quiet but with a firmness she hadn't heard from him before—not the borrowed confidence of a new agent performing competence, but something earned.
Something that had been forged in three crime scenes and a backcountry search and the education of watching a killer's work grow more ambitious with each iteration.
"Walker and Harris can have the case tomorrow. Tonight, we go."
Isla nodded. The decision had been made—not in this moment but in the accumulation of moments that had led to it, the spiral of evidence and frustration and loss that tightened with each body until the only possible center was action.
"We'll need the right location," she said. "Somewhere that fits his selection criteria—open meadow, forest cover, accessible but remote. Close enough to the city that he could reach it in the timeframe, far enough that patrol units wouldn't stumble across the operation."
"I know the trails," Marshall said. "The Lester River corridor. There's a meadow three miles in—open, sheltered by a ridge, no structures within a mile. It matches the terrain profile of all three sites."
"One of us goes in as the target. The other positions at a distance with line of sight."
"I'll go in," Marshall said.
"No." Isla's voice was flat. "I go in. I know his behavioral profile. I know how he approaches, how he selects, what he looks for in a victim. And I've been reading his crime scenes for three days. If he tests me—if he watches before he moves—I need to be the one he's watching."
Marshall opened his mouth to argue, then closed it.
She could see the objection working through him—the instinct to protect, to put himself in the more dangerous position, to do the thing that junior partners did when senior partners took risks.
But he was learning. Learning that Isla didn't make operational decisions based on chivalry or hierarchy but on the cold logic of who was best positioned for what, and that arguing with that logic was like arguing with mathematics.
"I'll position on the ridge," he said. "Thermal scope. Clear line of sight to the meadow. If he comes, I'll see him before he reaches you."
"If he comes, you don't move until he's committed. Until he's close enough that retreat isn't an option. This man climbed a tree at full sprint and vanished into the canopy—if we spook him, we'll never get another chance."
Marshall nodded. His face in the fluorescent light was serious and focused.
Isla looked at the clock on the wall. Ten-forty. The killer operated in darkness, in the deep hours between midnight and dawn. If the pattern held, they had perhaps five or six hours before the window opened.
"We gear up," she said. "Full winter kit.
Radios, not phones—he may be monitoring cell signals.
We leave separately, stagger our arrival.
And Marshall—" She waited until he looked at her.
"If this goes wrong, the official story is that I went alone.
You were never there. You went home after the meeting with Kate, exactly like she told you to. "
"No."
"Marshall—"
"I said no." His voice was steady. "We go together. Whatever happens, it happened to both of us. I'm not going to let you carry this alone."
The words hung in the empty bullpen. Isla felt something shift—some internal calculus she'd been running since the day Marshall had walked into Kate's office with his new portfolio and his careful politeness and his four years that had seemed like nothing.
He wasn't James. Would never be James—that partnership had been built over years of shared cases and shared silences and the slow, accumulating trust that came from standing together in the worst places the world could produce.
But Marshall was something. Something that had been built in days instead of years, in crime scenes instead of conferences, in the crucible of a case that demanded more than either of them could provide alone.
"All right," she said. "Together."
Marshall picked up his keys. Isla picked up hers.
They walked to the door of the bullpen, and Isla paused at the threshold and looked back at the case board one more time—the photographs, the timelines, the aerial shots of patterns in the snow that Walker and Harris would inherit tomorrow along with everything Isla had learned and everything she hadn't yet figured out.
She turned off the lights. The case board disappeared into darkness, and the patterns with it, and the faces of the dead.
In the hallway, Marshall was waiting.
"Lester River corridor," Isla said. "One hour."
He nodded, and they parted—Isla to the elevator, Marshall to the stairs, two agents walking in opposite directions through a nearly empty building toward the same frozen meadow.