CHAPTER ONE
The hospital smelled like every hospital Isla had ever been in—antiseptic layered over something organic that the antiseptic was trying very hard to mask.
She'd been coming here every day for nearly two weeks now, and the smell still hit her fresh each time she walked through the automatic doors, as if her body refused to let her acclimate.
As if it wanted to remind her, every single visit, that this was not a place where things were fine.
She carried a paper cup of coffee from the place on Superior Street that her partner, James Sullivan, liked.
Had liked. Did like—he wasn't dead. She had to keep correcting that reflex, the way her mind kept sliding into past tense when she thought about him, as though the man lying in the ICU bed on the fourth floor had already become someone to be spoken about rather than spoken to.
Yes, he had been attacked by the Lake Superior Killer, but he was still alive.
The coffee was a small, stupid gesture, buying it for a man who couldn't drink it.
She drank it herself each time, standing beside his bed, and told herself it was the thought that counted.
The elevator doors opened on the fourth floor, and she stepped out into the corridor with the particular walk she'd perfected over the past couple of weeks—confident enough to avoid being questioned by nurses, unhurried enough to suggest she belonged here.
She didn't, technically. Visiting hours were specific, and noon fell within them, but she'd been gently reminded twice that ICU patients needed rest, that hovering wasn't helpful, that perhaps she might consider limiting her visits.
She'd smiled politely and continued to come every day.
What else was she going to do? She was on mandatory leave.
The thought landed the way it always did, with a dull flare of anger that started in her chest and radiated outward until her jaw tightened and her fingers pressed too hard against the coffee cup.
Mandatory leave. As if she were the problem.
As if the problem weren't a sixty-five-year-old fisherman with a body count that stretched back decades, still out there somewhere in the margins of Duluth while Isla sat in her apartment and stared at the lake and was told, in so many words, to get her head examined.
Kate's exact phrasing had been more diplomatic than that, of course.
Kate was always diplomatic. She'd sat Isla down in her office with the door closed and her reading glasses folded on the desk, which was Kate's tell for conversations she didn't want to have, and she'd used words like concerning pattern and psychological evaluation and your own wellbeing, Isla.
She'd mentioned the insubordination—working the case with Ben after being ordered to stand down—but that was just the justification on paper.
The real reason was in the way Kate had looked at her, with that careful, measuring expression she reserved for agents she suspected were cracking.
Isla wasn't cracking. She was angry. There was a difference.
She turned the corner toward James's room and nearly collided with Dr. Patel, his attending physician, a small, composed woman in her forties who always looked like she'd slept exactly the right number of hours, which Isla found both admirable and faintly irritating.
"Agent Rivers. I was hoping to catch you." Patel fell into step beside her, which was never a good sign. When doctors walked with you, they were delivering news they wanted to soften with forward momentum. "I have an update on Agent Sullivan's condition."
Isla's stomach clenched, but she kept her face neutral. She was good at that. It was one of the things she'd always been good at—composing her features into something professional while everything behind them rioted. "I'm listening."
"We're seeing some encouraging signs. He's been showing increased responsiveness over the past forty-eight hours—small movements, some reaction to stimuli.
His neurological assessments are trending in the right direction.
" Patel paused outside James's door, her hand on the frame.
"We're cautiously optimistic that we can begin weaning him off the ventilator soon.”
"But he still hasn't woken up?"
"Not yet. These things take time, and his body has been through significant trauma. The fact that he's showing purposeful movement is genuinely positive. But I want to be straightforward with you—the timeline for full consciousness is difficult to predict. It could be days, or it could be longer."
Isla nodded. She appreciated Patel's directness, even when the directness included phrases like it could be longer. "Can I see him?"
"Of course. He's stable. Talk to him—there's real evidence that familiar voices can aid the process."
Patel moved on down the corridor, and Isla stood for a moment outside the door, marshaling herself the way she always did before walking in.
It was the hardest threshold she crossed each day, worse than the hospital entrance, worse than the elevator.
Because on the other side of it was James Sullivan reduced to a collection of medical data—heart rate, oxygen levels, the mechanical rhythm of a machine breathing for him—and no matter how many times she saw it, some part of her brain still expected him to be sitting up, giving her that look he had, the one where his blue eyes crinkled at the corners and he said something dry and understated that was funnier than it had any right to be.
She pushed the door open and went in.
The room was dim, the blinds half-closed against the gray noon light.
James lay in the hospital bed with the stillness of deep sleep, though it wasn't sleep, not really.
The ventilator tube ran from his mouth to the machine beside the bed, which hissed and clicked in its steady mechanical cadence.
His face was pale beneath the weathered tan, and without expression it looked younger somehow, the strong jaw and the nose that had been broken at least once softened by the absence of the tension he usually carried.
His father's old watch sat on the bedside table.
A nurse had taken it off him when he was admitted, and Isla had made sure it stayed within reach, as though he might open his eyes at any moment and want to know what time it was.
She set the coffee on the windowsill and pulled the chair closer to the bed, the legs scraping softly against the linoleum. She sat. She looked at him. The monitors beeped their steady, indifferent report.
"Patel says you've been moving," she said.
Her voice sounded strange in the quiet room—too loud, too normal, like speaking at full volume in a church.
"Small stuff, she says. Fingers, I think.
Maybe your hand." She paused. "You probably twitched in your sleep and they're writing a press release about it, but I'll take what I can get. "
She watched his face for a response, the way she always did, studying him with the same intensity she brought to crime scenes—looking for the tell, the detail, the thing that didn't belong or the thing that did. Nothing. The ventilator breathed. The monitor beeped.
Isla leaned forward and rested her forearms on her knees, the coffee warming her hands through the cup even though she wasn't holding it anymore, her fingers laced together in the space between them.
She stared at the floor tiles and tried not to think about the scrapyard.
About getting the call. About the drive to the hospital at a speed that should have gotten her pulled over, the cold white corridors, the doctor's careful face explaining the extent of the injuries.
She tried not to think about Robert Brune, and failed, the way she'd been failing every day since Kate put her on leave.
His face surfaced in her mind unbidden—that weathered, innocuous face, the grizzled beard, the eyes that held nothing you'd look twice at.
A fisherman. A shipyard worker. A man who'd spent forty years walking among the people of Duluth while feeding them to the lake, and who was still out there, right now, probably within miles of this hospital, breathing free air while James Sullivan breathed through a tube.
Her hands tightened until the knuckles went white.
The psych eval sat on her kitchen counter at home, the paperwork Kate had sent over with a note that said Take your time, but not too much time.
Isla hadn't filled it out. Hadn't called the department psychologist to schedule the appointment.
Kate had followed up once, a carefully worded email that Isla had read and not replied to.
She knew what she was supposed to do. She knew that the path back to her desk and her badge and the case that mattered most ran directly through a fifty-minute conversation with a therapist who would ask her how she was feeling and whether she was sleeping and whether her fixation on the Lake Superior Killer was perhaps a way of avoiding deeper emotional processing, and Isla would have to sit there and not say what she wanted to say, which was that she didn't need processing, she needed to be out there doing her job.
But she wasn't out there. She was here, in a chair, watching a machine breathe for her partner while the man who'd put him here remained free.
"I'm going to find him, James." She said it quietly, to the room, to the monitors, to the man who probably couldn't hear her. "Kate can bench me. She can send me to every shrink in the state. But I'm going to find him."
As if in answer—and she knew it wasn't, she knew it was a coincidence or reflex or the kind of neural static that happened in injured brains—James's left hand moved.
Not much. A contraction of the fingers, a slight curl inward, barely perceptible beneath the hospital blanket.
The heart monitor didn't change. The ventilator kept its rhythm.
But his fingers moved, and Isla watched it happen, and something in her chest seized so hard she couldn't breathe for a moment.
She reached out and covered his hand with hers, carefully, avoiding the IV line taped to the back of his wrist. His skin was warm. That always surprised her. He looked so still, so absent, that she half expected him to be cold, but he wasn't. He was warm and alive, and his fingers had moved.
"There you are," she said softly.
She sat like that for a long time, her hand over his, watching the monitors trace their green lines across the screen.
The coffee on the windowsill went cold. The gray light shifted as clouds moved over the lake.
At some point a nurse came in, checked readings, adjusted something on the IV drip, and left without commenting on the FBI agent holding the patient's hand.
The nurse had seen her before. Everyone on this floor had seen her before.
When she finally stood to leave, her legs stiff from the chair and the coffee long forgotten, she paused at the door and looked back at him.
James Sullivan, lying in that bed, taking up more space even unconscious than most people did standing.
His daughter's latest drawing was taped to the wall—Emma had been here too, Isla knew, brought by Stacey on the weekends, drawing pictures and talking to her father the way Patel recommended.
The drawing was a house with a lopsided chimney and a yellow sun, the kind of thing a younger child might make, but Isla understood the impulse.
When the world got too complicated, you went back to the simple shapes.
"I'll be back tomorrow," she told him. The same thing she said every day. A promise she hadn't broken yet, even when the drive home afterward was the worst part, her apartment too quiet and the lake too visible from her window and the paperwork sitting on her counter like an accusation.
She picked up the cold coffee, tossed it in the hallway trash on her way out, and walked back through the hospital that smelled like hospitals always did—like the boundary between one thing and another, the waiting room between who you were before and who you'd be after, if after ever decided to arrive.
Outside, the March air hit her face with its particular Duluth cruelty—not quite winter, not remotely spring, just cold and damp and edged with the smell of the lake.
She stood on the hospital steps and breathed it in and let the anger settle back into its familiar place, the low burn behind her ribs that had become so constant she almost didn't notice it anymore.
Almost.