CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Isla’s car was parked on the shoulder of Rice Lake Road with the engine running and the darkness pressing against the windows on every side.
Isla had the map spread across the steering wheel—a physical USGS topographic, because cell service was a suggestion this far from the city and satellite data required equipment they didn't have in a sedan at eleven o'clock at night.
Marshall held the flashlight from the passenger seat, angling it across the contour lines. He'd been quiet since the field office, but his quiet now was different from his quiet three weeks ago. That silence had been the restraint of a young agent unsure when to speak. Tonight it was operational.
"Three sites," Isla said. She touched each one on the map with her pen.
"Gallagher. Brool Lake drainage, six miles west-northwest." The pen moved northeast. "Lloyd.
Caribou Trail corridor, roughly fifty miles from the first." It dropped south.
"Pierce. Munger trail, seven or eight miles from the city. "
The three points formed a rough triangle, Duluth sitting at its center like a hub from which the violence radiated outward in carefully spaced intervals.
Isla had been staring at this geometry for hours—at the field office, in the car, behind her eyes when she closed them—and the pattern that emerged was as deliberate as anything the killer carved in snow.
"He's spacing them," Marshall said. He didn't need to explain. The observation was obvious once you saw it, and Marshall had been seeing more and more of what was obvious in this case, the way eyes adjusted to darkness over time.
"Not just spacing them. Ensuring distance.
" She traced the gaps between the sites.
"Fifty miles between Gallagher and Lloyd.
Thirty-five between Pierce and Gallagher.
Forty from Pierce to Lloyd. He's making sure each snowfield is as far from the last as the geography allows while staying within his operational range. "
"Why?"
"Because he doesn't want them found together.
Each one is its own stage. If they're too close, the scenes compete.
The individual design loses its power." She paused, hearing herself slip into the killer's logic the way she always did when a profile was taking shape.
"He's an artist who insists on gallery spacing. "
Isla drew exclusion radii around each site—circles representing the minimum distance the killer seemed to require between his works. They sat on the map like territorial claims, each staking out a section of backcountry as spent, no longer available.
"If he maintains this spacing, the next site won't fall inside any of these zones. Which leaves us with the terrain outside them—areas far enough from all three but still within range of Duluth."
The map showed what it always showed: hundreds of square miles of forest and snowfield. But the killer didn't use all of it. He needed specific conditions. Remote. Untouched. Open enough for his designs. Sheltered from wind. And visible from the sky.
"We need Shaw," she said.
One bar of service, flickering. She dialed before it could die.
Shaw answered on the fourth ring with the flatness of a man who'd been awake and waiting. "Rivers."
"Captain. We're trying to narrow down where he might strike next." She described the exclusion zones, the criteria—sixty-foot minimum clearance, wind protection, remote, pristine snow, outside the existing radii.
Shaw was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice had shifted into the register she recognized—the pilot running calculations, matching terrain against requirements the way he matched weather against flight plans.
"That rules out most of the near backcountry.
You're looking at terrain to the north or southeast." He walked her through it methodically.
To the north, beyond thirty miles: the Boundary Waters fringe, Isabella Lake area, Stony River corridor.
Plenty of open terrain—meadows, bogs, clear-cut areas.
Remote as it got. To the southeast: the Highland corridor above the lake, old Normanna settlement clearings, a stretch along the Split Rock River headwaters.
"Wind protection?" Isla asked. The previous sites had all been sheltered—meadows in hollows, clearings ringed by dense forest. The killer needed the snow surface intact for days, needed his lines to hold their edges while he worked.
"The Isabella meadows are exposed—wind scours them clean most nights.
But the Stony River valley is sheltered by bluffs on both sides.
There's a meadow two miles up from the forest road I've overflown dozens of times.
Two hundred yards across, flat, surrounded by spruce.
Wind barely touches it." He paused. "Southeast, the Split Rock headwaters have a broad meadow in a depression about a mile north of the river.
I've seen it hold snow patterns for days after storms. Good shelter, good sight lines from altitude. "
Isla marked locations as Shaw talked. "How many viable sites total?"
"Strict about your criteria? Four to six in the Stony River corridor. Three, maybe four in the Split Rock area. Call it ten to twelve."
Ten to twelve. Scattered across two corridors separated by dozens of miles. Too many to stake out with the resources they had—which, at this hour, amounted to Isla and Marshall and whatever they carried on their backs.
But the killer was out there. She knew it.
Fresh snow from the afternoon system, a clear night, the backcountry emptied by the advisory.
Everything he needed. And he'd been interrupted—the unfinished pattern at the Munger trail an open wound in the mind of a man who treated his designs with the reverence of sacrament.
The compulsion that drove him to carve sixty-foot mandalas in subzero darkness did not tolerate incompletion.
"Shaw, if you had to pick the three or four sites most likely to match his profile, which ones?"
"Stony River meadow is first. Best shelter, best size, best conditions. After that, the Split Rock depression. Then two smaller clearings on the east side of the Stony River valley." A pause. "You're not thinking of flying these tonight."
"No. We're going on foot."
"Agent Rivers, those are backcountry sites. The Stony River meadow is a two-mile hike from the nearest road in three feet of snow. At night, in these temperatures—"
"I know what the conditions are."
"The killer navigates this terrain at night because he's been doing it for years. You'd be going in blind."
"Not blind. We have maps, GPS, and your descriptions." Isla kept her voice level. "There are two of us and two corridors. We can't cover them together—it's too much ground. And the killer only strikes people who are alone. Every victim has been a solo traveler."
The silence that followed told her Shaw understood exactly what she was proposing.
"You're using yourselves as bait."
"We're conducting backcountry reconnaissance of high-probability sites. If we happen to present as solo travelers in terrain the killer favors, that's an operational variable we've accounted for."
"That's a very careful way of saying yes."
"It's a very careful situation, Captain. Can you be in the air at first light?"
"I'll be at the airfield by five." No hesitation. "Rivers. Be careful out there."
She ended the call. The single bar of service had vanished after their conversation, the screen showing the blunt finality of No Service. They were on their own.
The map lay between them, annotated with Shaw's locations. Isla studied the geography one more time, letting the terrain settle into her mind the way crime scenes settled.
"I'll take the Stony River corridor," she said. "The terrain is more complex, and the primary meadow matches the killer's site selection most closely. You take Split Rock. Wherever he is, we’ll catch him before he makes a move.”
Marshall nodded. No argument. No counterproposal. But something in the way he held himself—the slight forward lean, the hands resting on his knees with deliberate stillness—told her he understood what he was agreeing to.
"The approach to Stony River is off County Road 2.
Forest road, passable by vehicle for the first half mile before the snow gets too deep.
Then snowshoes." She folded the map along the crease dividing the two corridors and handed him the southeastern half.
"GPS coordinates are marked. The primary is the depression a mile north of the river.
If it's undisturbed, move to the secondary.
If you find anything—any sign of activity, any disturbance—call me immediately. Don't approach. Don't engage."
"And if I find him?"
Direct. No hedging.
"You're armed and trained. Use your judgment. But your primary objective is communication. Get on the radio, get to a point where you can reach Shaw or dispatch or me. The worst thing you can do is go dark."
"Understood."
Isla reached into the back seat for the winter gear she'd packed—the heavy parka she'd finally stopped refusing, the insulated pants, the gloves rated to forty below.
She'd spent almost three years resisting the bulky armor that Duluth winters demanded, as if stubbornness were insulation enough.
Tonight she couldn't afford stubbornness.
Marshall was already dressed for it. He'd learned that lesson earlier than she had, the way he'd learned most things in this partnership—quietly, without needing to be told twice.
"Marshall."
He looked up from the map.
"Are you sure about this?"
The question wasn't a formality. She was asking him to walk alone into the wilderness at night, in terrain he'd never seen, looking for a killer who climbed trees and vanished and carved impossible geometry with the patience of something that didn't operate on human time. She was asking him to be a target.
Marshall held her gaze. The dashboard light caught his eyes—dark, steady, carrying the quiet weight of a man who had spent four years wondering if he belonged and had decided, somewhere in the last three weeks, that the question no longer mattered.
"I'm sure," he said.
Two words. No elaboration. Marshall at his most certain sounded like Marshall at his most quiet, and Isla had learned the difference between his silences well enough to know this one was bedrock.
"Stay on the radio. Channel seven. Check in every thirty minutes. You miss a check-in; I'm pulling you out."
"Same goes for you."
The corner of her mouth moved—not quite a smile, but the ghost of one. The kind of expression that passed between partners about to do something dangerous.
She started the car. The engine turned over and the headlights cut white tunnels through the darkness, illuminating the road and the trees pressing close on either side and the snow that lay over everything like a promise that could mean safety or erasure, depending on whether you were walking through it or lying beneath it.
She thought about James. Not deliberately—the way she sometimes did, sitting beside his hospital bed, studying the monitors and the stillness of hands that should have been holding a pen or building his daughter a bookshelf.
This was the involuntary kind, the kind that surfaced when the risk she was about to take brought into sharp focus everything she still had to lose.
James would have hated this plan. Would have insisted on coming, bad skull and all, or would have found some quieter way to keep her from walking into the backcountry alone at midnight.
But James was in a hospital bed, and the chair beside her was occupied by a man who was not James but who had said I'm sure with a steadiness that earned what it asked for.
They would drive north to where County Road 2 split from the highway.
Then Marshall would take the car southeast to Split Rock, and Isla would begin the walk north to the Stony River, and the distance between them would grow with every step until they were alone in the backcountry with nothing but the cold and the snow and whatever was waiting in the clearings Shaw had described from the memory of a thousand flights.
Alone.