CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Isla stopped on the trail and pulled the radio from her chest. The digital display glowed green in the darkness—frequency correct, battery full, the device doing everything it was supposed to do except deliver the voice she needed to hear.
“Marshall. Radio check.”
Static. The thin, empty hiss of a channel with no one transmitting.
“Marshall. Respond.”
Nothing.
Five minutes late. Marshall was five minutes late on a check-in he’d agreed to with the quiet seriousness of a man who understood what a missed check-in would mean.
He was methodical. Careful. The kind of agent who treated protocols the way some people treated promises—as things that mattered because you said they would.
He wouldn’t be late unless he couldn’t respond.
The fear arrived all at once—not gradual but sudden and total. It filled her body with the chemical urgency of a system that understood, before the conscious mind had finished calculating, that something had gone very wrong.
She pulled the map from her jacket. Marshall would have reached the primary meadow by now—the depression a mile north of the river.
Isla was thirty miles north.
Thirty miles. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and forced the panic back beneath the training. Think. Think like you’ve been trained to think.
She keyed the radio once more. “Marshall, if you can hear me, hold on. I’m coming.”
Then she turned and ran.
Back up the trail she'd spent forty minutes descending, back through the spruce and birch and the darkness that pressed against her like a living thing. Her snowshoes bit the surface and she pushed the pace past sustainable into something fueled by adrenaline.
The car was at the junction. She reached it in twenty-two minutes, a pace that left her lungs burning and her legs shaking.
She threw the snowshoes in back, started the engine.
The tires spun once on ice before catching, and then she was moving, the headlights cutting tunnels through the darkness, County Road 2 unwinding ahead of her.
She drove fast—faster than the road deserved, faster than training permitted, the car sliding on curves the cold had polished to glass.
She called Shaw as she drove, one hand on the wheel.
“Shaw. It’s Rivers. I’ve lost contact with Marshall in the Split Rock corridor. I need you in the air now.”
Shaw’s voice came back without the fog of sleep—he’d been awake, waiting. “I can be airborne in twenty minutes. Where am I going?”
“Split Rock River headwaters. The primary meadow—the depression a mile north of the river.”
“Understood. County EMS staging?”
“Trailhead. No sirens, no lights until you’re over the site. If the killer is there, I don’t want him running again.”
A pause. “Rivers. Be careful.”
She pressed the accelerator harder.
***
The Split Rock trailhead was dark and empty. Marshall’s vehicle sat at the pull-off, engine cold, windows already filming with frost.
Isla was out of the car with her weapon drawn before the engine finished ticking.
She snapped on the snowshoes and found Marshall’s trail—a single line of prints heading southeast into the forest. He'd gone to Split Rock.
She'd been wrong about the site. She'd been wrong and Marshall had been where she wasn't, and she was still thirty miles too far north
She followed.
His prints were steady, evenly spaced, the stride of a man moving with purpose.
No signs of haste, no deviations. He’d been walking his route exactly as planned.
Isla pushed the pace to its maximum, each step a controlled lunge through the snow.
She didn’t call out—didn’t dare, because her voice would carry for a mile in the cold air and she would lose the only advantage she might still have.
The first meadow was undisturbed. Marshall’s tracks skirted its western edge and continued southeast. She followed deeper into the corridor, the terrain descending into the depression.
His tracks stopped at the tree line overlooking the primary meadow.
No—they didn’t stop. They changed. The steady prints collapsed into a churned mess of displaced snow—the violent disruption of someone whose weight had shifted suddenly and catastrophically from vertical to horizontal. Isla crouched and observed the scene with her headlamp.
Blood.
A spray of droplets across the surface, dark against white, already crystallizing in the cold.
And beside the blood, pressed into the churned snow where it had fallen from a hand that could no longer hold it, Marshall’s service weapon.
The Glock lay on its side, the barrel half-buried.
She press-checked it—full magazine, round in the chamber. He hadn’t fired. Hadn’t had time.
She tucked his weapon into her waistband and followed what came next.
A drag trail. Two parallel furrows in the snow where heels had scraped the surface, flanked by the deep, regular prints of someone walking with a heavy load.
Size eleven or twelve, heavy-treaded boots—the same profile from Lloyd’s campsite, the same stride she’d studied in photographs for three days.
The prints spoke of effort, but not urgency.
The killer was in no hurry. He had the night ahead of him and the work to do and no reason to believe anyone was coming.
The killer was dragging Marshall toward the meadow.
Isla followed the trail out of the trees and onto the open snowfield. At the far edge—perhaps a hundred yards away—she could see movement. A shape, dark against the snow, moving with the steady, unhurried rhythm she’d come to associate with everything this killer did.
He was working.
Even from this distance she could see the beginnings of a pattern.
Lines curving outward from a dark mass at the center that was the shape and size of a human body.
The first trenches of what would become another design carved with the patience of a man who believed his art was worth more than the lives it consumed.
Isla keyed the radio. Her voice was barely above a whisper.
“Shaw. Split Rock primary meadow. I have visual on the suspect. He has Marshall. I’m engaging. Get me everything.”
She didn’t wait for a response. She drew her Glock and stepped onto the snowfield.
She ran. Her snowshoes drove through the surface and she was running through his pattern—across the trenches he’d carved with his machined edger, her boots obliterating the clean lines, filling the perfect curves with the chaotic disruption of a woman who did not care about his art, who saw in his geometry nothing but murder and the body of her partner lying at its center.
He saw her.
The figure straightened from its crouch beside Marshall’s body and turned, and in the combined glow of his headlamp and the starlight she saw him for the first time.
Mid-forties. Brown hair going gray at the temples.
A face so unremarkable it could have belonged to anyone—a neighbor, a colleague, the man behind you in line at the hardware store.
In his right hand, the carving tool. In his left, the hammer.
Short-handled. Metal head. The instrument that had killed Martin Gallagher and Rebecca Lloyd and Mike Pierce and had just struck the side of Ben Marshall’s head with enough force to drop a trained federal agent in the dark.
The killer looked at her. Looked at the pattern she was destroying with every step—the boot prints through his arcs, the trenches filled, the geometry ruined. And what crossed his face was not fear.
Rage.
Pure, incandescent, the fury of an artist watching his work destroyed by someone who could not see what he was building. The anonymity burned away, the ordinariness peeling back to reveal the thing that lived beneath it. He dropped the edger. He raised the hammer. And he ran at her.
Not away. At her. Through his own half-finished pattern, the hammer high, propelled by a speed that surprised her—the speed of a man who had been navigating this terrain at night for years.
Thirty yards. Twenty.
Isla stopped. Planted her feet. Raised the Glock with both hands and found the front sight and placed it on center mass.
“FBI! Stop!”
He didn’t stop. The hammer cocked back behind his shoulder, and his face was a mask of something beyond anger—grief, maybe, or the anguish of a man whose only honest work was being taken from him.
Ten yards.
Isla fired.
The first shot hit him center-left, the muzzle flash painting the snow orange for a fraction of a second. He staggered but didn’t fall—momentum and rage carrying him two more steps, the hammer still raised, his body refusing the information the bullet had delivered.
She fired again.
The second shot hit his right shoulder and the hammer fell.
It dropped from fingers that could no longer hold it, landing in the snow with a soft thud that was the quietest sound in a night full of quiet sounds.
He went down. Not dramatically—he folded.
Knees first, then sideways, the body collapsing in the particular, graceless way bodies collapsed when the structures holding them upright were no longer intact.
Isla held the Glock on him. Counted to five. He didn’t move.
She crossed the remaining distance at a run.
The killer lay on his side, breathing in shallow, rapid gasps, his eyes open and staring at the sky with an expression that was no longer rage but something she’d seen before on the faces of the dying—surprise, maybe.
The bewilderment of a person whose body had just informed them the story was almost over.
She kicked the hammer out of reach. Found a knife in a belt sheath, pulled it and threw it into the snow.
Then she left him.
Marshall was ten yards away.
He lay on his back at the center of the half-formed pattern, his arms arranged at angles from his body, his legs together—the position she’d seen three times now, the killer’s composition.
His eyes were closed. Blood darkened the snow beneath the left side of his head, a spreading stain that the cold was already crystallizing at its edges.
Isla dropped to her knees beside him and pressed two fingers to his throat.
A pulse. Faint, rapid, but present—the thin thread of a heartbeat persisting beneath skin that was already cold, the body’s mechanisms doing what they were designed to do in the absence of the consciousness that usually directed them.
“Marshall.” Her voice cracked on the word. She pressed her gloved hand against the wound on his head—applying pressure, the most basic and most desperate of interventions. “Ben. Open your eyes.”
He didn’t open his eyes.
Isla pulled the radio from her chest with her free hand, the other pressed to Marshall’s head, blood warm against her glove.
“Shaw. Suspect is down. Agent Marshall is injured. I need medevac to this meadow right now. Do you copy?”
Shaw’s voice, the rotors audible behind it: “Copy, Rivers. Airborne now. ETA twenty-two minutes. County EMS staging at the trailhead. Hang on.”
Twenty-two minutes.
Isla looked down at Marshall. His face was white in the starlight, the blood dark against his skin, his chest rising and falling in shallow breaths visible only because she was close enough to see the faint movement of his jacket.
He looked young. Younger than thirty-one, younger than his four years and his careful composure and the quiet determination that had carried him through every terrible thing this case had asked of him.
He looked like someone who had walked into the dark because a woman he trusted had asked him to, and the dark had answered.
She thought of James. Of the call she’d received from Kate three weeks ago—the tightness in Kate’s voice, the words arriving in the order that meant the worst possible thing.
Sullivan is at St. Luke’s. She had knelt beside James that night too, in a different kind of darkness, and the helplessness had been the same—the vast, terrible inadequacy of hands that could solve murders but could not heal the people she cared about.
She kept the pressure on Marshall’s wound and she stayed with him, kneeling in the blood and the snow and the ruins of a pattern that would never be finished, and she waited for the sound of rotors.
Around them, the meadow kept its silence.
The stars burned overhead, hard and white and indifferent.
And at the center of a design that had been meant to be beautiful, Ben Marshall lay still, and the night held its breath, and the distance between the living and the dead was measured in heartbeats that Isla counted with her fingers pressed to his throat—one after another, fragile and persistent, refusing to stop.