CHAPTER EIGHT
The shoreline at night was a different country.
Isla walked the frozen edge of Lake Superior with her hands stuffed deep in her coat pockets, her breath coming in pale clouds that the wind tore apart as quickly as they formed.
The temperature had plummeted since sunset—single digits now, maybe colder with the wind chill—but she'd needed to get out, to move, to think.
The office walls had started closing in around eight o'clock, after she and James had spent six hours chasing leads that went nowhere and connections that dissolved under scrutiny.
Monica Hayes remained a cipher. A woman with no enemies, no secrets, no reason for anyone to want her dead.
They'd visited The Looking Glass that afternoon—her salon, a cheerful space with exposed brick and vintage mirrors that still smelled faintly of hair products and jasmine perfume.
Her employees had wept when they talked about her.
Her clients had called in, one after another, unable to believe the news. Everyone loved Monica Hayes.
And someone had strangled her anyway.
The ice along the shore glowed faintly under the cloud-shrouded moon, pale and luminous, shifting in patterns that seemed almost deliberate.
Isla stopped walking and stared out at the black expanse of water.
Somewhere out there, beneath that impenetrable surface, lay the remains of ships that had gone down a century ago.
The lake never gave up her dead, the locals said. She kept them.
He's here.
The thought arrived unbidden, as certain as the cold seeping through her layers.
Robert Brune. The Lake Superior Killer. Eight weeks since he'd vanished, eight weeks since every law enforcement agency in the region had mobilized to find him, eight weeks of nothing—no sightings, no tips, no bodies washing up on shore.
James thought he was gone. Kate thought he was gone.
The task force had shifted its focus to Canada and beyond, chasing rumors of a grizzled old fisherman who might have crossed the border, might have found passage on a freighter, might have disappeared into the vast northern wilderness where a man could live off the land and never be seen again.
But Isla knew better. She could feel it in her bones, in the prickling sensation along the back of her neck, in the way her eyes kept scanning the darkness as if expecting to find him standing there, watching her the way she'd watched him on those docks six weeks ago.
The lake whispers to him, she thought. And he whispers back.
Men like Robert Brune didn't leave. They couldn't. Whatever darkness lived inside them was rooted to a place, fed by familiar waters and familiar shores.
He'd spent sixty-four years on these shores.
His mother had drowned in this lake when he was eight years old.
Every victim he'd claimed had been a sacrifice to these waters, an offering to whatever voice he heard calling from the deep.
He wouldn't leave. He couldn't leave.
A couple walked past her on the path, arm in arm, their laughter carrying on the wind.
Late-night stragglers heading home from one of the bars along the waterfront, probably.
The woman was wearing a red coat that seemed almost garish against the monochrome landscape of snow and ice and darkness.
The man said something Isla couldn't hear, and the woman threw her head back and laughed again, the sound bright and sharp in the cold air.
Normal people, Isla thought. Living normal lives. Going home to warm beds and morning routines and the comfortable assumption that the world was basically safe, basically predictable, basically kind.
She envied them. She hated that she envied them.
Further along the path, a man walked a German Shepherd, the dog's breath steaming as it strained at the leash, eager to explore every drift and shadow.
The man nodded at Isla as they passed—a local, probably, someone who walked this route every night regardless of weather, who knew the shoreline in all its moods and seasons.
His face was weathered, bearded, unremarkable.
For just a moment, her heart stuttered.
But no. The man was too young, too tall, his gait too casual.
Robert Brune walked with the particular roll of someone who'd spent decades on fishing boats, his center of gravity always shifting, always compensating for swells that existed only in memory.
This man walked like someone who'd never been to sea.
Isla turned back to the lake and let out a long, slow breath.
She was jumping at shadows now. Seeing Brune's face in every stranger, hearing his voice in every whisper of wind.
This was what he'd done to her—not just escaped, but burrowed into her mind like a splinter, a constant irritation that she couldn't dig out no matter how hard she tried.
She thought about the case she was supposed to be working.
Monica Hayes, posed in a freezer, hands folded, eyes closed.
A woman who looked like Vincent Carlisle's dead wife.
A grieving widower who had spent the past eighteen months being eaten alive by loss.
A restaurant that had once been filled with love and now sat empty, contaminated by something far worse than salmonella.
It didn't fit. None of it fit. Carlisle had the motive—if you could call a shattered psyche and a woman who resembled his wife a motive—and the opportunity, and a timeline that placed him out of the psychiatric facility just days before the murder.
But the man she'd met that morning couldn't have done this.
She was certain of it, as certain as she was that Robert Brune was still somewhere nearby, watching and waiting.
Which meant there was something she was missing. Some connection, some pattern, some thread she hadn't yet found.
The wind picked up, driving ice crystals against her face.
Isla ducked her chin into her collar and started back toward her apartment, her boots crunching on the frozen path.
The couple had disappeared around a bend.
The man with the German Shepherd was a distant figure now, nearly lost in the darkness.
She was alone with the lake and the cold and the persistent feeling that she was being watched.
It took her fifteen minutes to reach her building, fifteen minutes of scanning every shadow and every parked car and every darkened doorway. By the time she climbed the stairs to the third floor, her fingers were numb despite her gloves and her cheeks burned from the wind.
Her apartment was warm, at least. The heating had been working consistently for months now—a small miracle after those first brutal winters when she'd learned to sleep in layers.
She stripped off her coat and gloves, made herself a cup of tea she didn't really want, and stood at the window watching the distant lights of the harbor wink through the darkness.
The corkboard caught her eye. Robert Brune's face stared back at her from its center—that fishing license photo, so ordinary, so harmless. The face of someone's grandfather. The face of a man who had killed at least twenty-three people over three decades and probably more.
Where are you?
The lake offered no answers. It never did.
Isla finished her tea, washed the cup, and went to bed. Sleep came slowly, reluctantly, fighting against the thoughts that circled through her mind like vultures around carrion. Monica Hayes. Vincent Carlisle. Maria Carlisle. A woman posed like a sleeping princess. A man hollowed out by grief.
And beneath it all, always, the persistent whisper of the lake.
* * *
The fog rolled in from the water like something alive.
Isla stood on the docks, her service weapon drawn, her heart hammering against her ribs. The night was thick with moisture, visibility dropping by the second, the sodium lights overhead reduced to smears of orange in the gray murk. Somewhere ahead—close, too close—she could hear footsteps.
She knew this place. Knew it the way you know a recurring nightmare, every detail etched into memory through repetition.
The stack of shipping containers to her left.
The coiled rope she'd nearly tripped over the first time.
The gap between buildings where the fog was thickest, where the shadows seemed to breathe.
Six weeks ago. This was six weeks ago.
She was dreaming. She knew she was dreaming. But the knowledge didn't help, didn't change anything, didn't stop her feet from moving forward into the fog or her finger from tightening on the trigger.
The footsteps stopped.
Isla stopped too, straining to hear anything over the pounding of her own pulse. The fog swirled around her, cold and damp, tasting of the lake and something else—something older, something that had been rotting in the depths for a very long time.
And then he stepped out of the darkness.
Robert Brune looked exactly as he had that night—grizzled beard, weathered face, pale eyes that caught the light and reflected nothing. He was wearing the same heavy coat, the same work boots, the same expression of patient indifference. His hands hung loose at his sides, empty, unthreatening.
But his eyes. His eyes weren't indifferent at all. They were focused on her with an intensity that made her skin crawl, that made the gun suddenly feel inadequate in her hands.
"I know you," he said. His voice was low and rough, like waves scraping over rocks. "I've always known you."
"FBI," Isla heard herself say. "Don't move."
Brune smiled. It was the worst thing she'd ever seen—not cruel, not predatory, but genuinely warm. The smile of someone greeting an old friend.
"She talks about you," he said. "The lake. She whispers your name when the ice cracks in spring. She's been waiting for you a long time, Agent Rivers."
"Shut up." Her voice cracked. The gun trembled in her hands. "Get on your knees. Hands behind your head."
"You hear her too, don't you?" Brune took a step closer, and Isla couldn't make herself pull the trigger, couldn't make her body respond to the screaming in her head. "Late at night. When you can't sleep. When you're standing at your window watching the water. You hear her calling."
"I said shut up—"
"She wants what we all want." Another step. He was close enough now that she could smell him—lake water and diesel and something colder, something that had no place in the world of the living. "To be remembered. To be fed. To know that someone is listening."
The fog closed around them both, and Isla felt the ground shifting beneath her feet—not solid concrete anymore but something softer, something that gave way like wet sand, like the shore at the edge of black water—
"You'll understand soon," Brune said, and his smile widened. "She'll make you understand."
The lake rose up behind him, impossibly high, a wall of black water that blotted out the sky—
Isla woke gasping, her sheets soaked with sweat.
The room was dark. Her apartment. Her bed. The familiar shapes of her dresser, her closet door, the window where gray light was beginning to seep through the curtains. Real. Solid. Safe.
She pressed her palm against her chest, feeling her heart race beneath her fingers.
The same dream. The same nightmare she'd had every night since Brune had disappeared, sometimes with variations but always ending the same way—with the lake rising, with his voice in her ears, with the terrible certainty that he was right about something she couldn't quite name.
Her phone was ringing.
The sound cut through the fog of sleep and fear, sharp and insistent. Isla fumbled for it on her nightstand, nearly knocking it to the floor before her fingers found purchase. The screen glowed in the darkness: SULLIVAN.
She checked the time. 5:47 AM.
Nothing good ever came from a call at 5:47 in the morning.
"Rivers," she said, her voice rough with sleep and the remnants of the dream.
"It's Sullivan." His voice was clipped, professional, carrying the particular flatness that meant he was already in work mode, already compartmentalizing whatever he was about to tell her. "We've got another one."