CHAPTER TWO
The docks at night were a different country.
Isla had learned this over the past week, walking them every evening after dark like a woman with somewhere to be.
She was looking for Robert Brune. She was also walking the ragged edge of something that could end her career for good—no badge clipped to her belt, no service weapon at her hip.
Just dark jeans and a black thermal under her jacket, a flashlight in her pocket she hadn’t turned on once in seven nights, and the kind of purpose that other people might reasonably call recklessness.
She didn’t care. That was the part that should have worried her, but didn’t.
The port of Duluth stretched along the western tip of Lake Superior like a scar, all industrial geometry and rusted infrastructure.
During the day the ore docks hummed with activity—ships loading, trucks grinding along access roads, the clatter of machinery moving things from one place to another.
But after dark, the port emptied out, and what remained was something older: black water slapping against concrete pilings, mooring lines creaking under tension, wind moaning through the gaps between shipping containers stacked three high like enormous metal teeth.
Isla moved through it carefully but not hesitantly, footsteps deliberate on cracked asphalt, eyes adjusted to the dark until she could read the landscape in shades of gray.
She stayed close to the containers when she could, using their bulk as cover, and crossed open ground quickly when she couldn’t.
No weapon. No authorization. A suspended federal agent conducting solo surveillance in a dangerous area at night without telling a single soul where she was.
Kate would have her badge permanently if she knew.
Not the temporary confiscation of mandatory leave, not the gentle bureaucratic fiction of psychological evaluation—the real thing.
The kind of termination that came with a letter in your file and a conversation with HR that started with: we appreciate your service.
Isla had weighed all of it. She had weighed it against James Sullivan lying in a hospital bed, breathing through a machine, and against Robert Brune’s weathered, unremarkable face, and the scales hadn’t been close.
She rounded the corner of a warehouse that had been decommissioned long enough for weeds to colonize the cracked loading dock.
The building was dark, windows boarded or broken, the chain-link fence sagging and gapped in half a dozen places.
This was the dead zone between the active port and the old industrial district that the city kept talking about redeveloping and never did.
It was also based on forty years of drowning reports and coroner records, the area where the highest concentration of Brune's likely kills had occurred.
He knew this ground. Fished these waters for decades, worked the shipyard a quarter mile north, walked these docks in every season.
If he was still hiding in Duluth—and she believed he was, the way she believed certain things about criminals that she couldn’t always articulate but that lived in her gut like instinct—he would come back here.
The Lake Superior Killer didn’t just kill near the water.
He needed it. The lake was the altar, and this stretch of shore was his church.
The wind shifted. Mineral smell of the lake and something else underneath—diesel fuel, old metal, the faintly organic scent of things decaying in cold water.
Isla stopped walking. Stood in the shadow of the warehouse and listened with her whole body, not just her ears.
The lake murmured against the rocks. A chain clanked somewhere to her left, metal on metal—probably a loose fitting on a container.
A car passed on the road above, its headlights sweeping briefly across the container tops before disappearing.
Nothing. Seven nights, and nothing.
But that wasn’t quite right. Last Tuesday she’d heard footsteps—real ones, not rats, not the settling of old infrastructure—moving parallel to her on the other side of a container row.
She’d tracked them for two hundred yards before they stopped.
When she’d circled around, there was no one.
Just boot prints in a patch of mud that could have belonged to anyone, and the dark, and the sound of her own breathing.
She told herself it could have been a dockworker. Security patrol. A homeless person. She didn’t believe it.
She started walking again, east toward the container yard.
The cold was getting to her—not deep winter’s dramatic cold but the insidious damp of Duluth in late March, the kind that found every gap in your clothing and settled into your joints.
She flexed her hands in her pockets. Her gloves were on the kitchen counter next to the psych eval paperwork.
She wasn’t in the mood to examine the metaphor.
A sound stopped her—hollow, metallic, like someone bumping a container wall from inside.
She held her breath. Counted to ten. Counted to twenty.
The sound didn’t repeat. She released the breath slowly through her nose and kept walking, but her senses were dialed to a frequency that made every shadow into a shape and every gust of wind a voice.
This was the part she didn’t like to think about—the fact that walking these docks alone and unarmed, hunting a man who had killed at least a dozen people and nearly killed her partner, gave her something that felt dangerously close to peace.
The rest of her life had become a holding pattern: suspended from work, suspended from purpose, suspended between the woman she’d been before and whoever she’d be after.
Out here, at least, she was in motion. Out here, the math was simple. Find him before he found someone else.
Claire had called that afternoon, her voice carrying the worried brightness she used after every disaster in Isla’s life—parents’ accident, Miami, all of it.
How are you doing. How’s Sullivan. Have you filled out the paperwork.
Isla had lied about the first, told the truth about the second, dodged the third.
Claire had let her dodge. The kindness of siblings who knew when pushing would break something.
What she hadn’t told Claire—hadn’t told anyone—was that the nightly patrols had become the only part of her day that made sense.
Mornings were bad: waking early with nowhere to go, running the lakeshore until her legs ached, then sitting in her apartment while the silence pressed against the walls.
Afternoons were the hospital. But the nights were hers.
At night the anger had a direction, and she felt like she was doing something instead of waiting for something to happen.
Patel’s update had been different today.
More purposeful movement from James. Better neurological scores.
The ventilator weaning was progressing. She’d said something about the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours being a window, and Isla had turned that word over in her mind during the entire drive home, trying to decide which side it landed on.
A window could open. A window could close.
She passed the container yard’s outer perimeter and moved deeper into the grid, where the stacks grew taller and the gaps between them narrower.
The ambient light from the port facilities faded here, replaced by a darkness so complete she could feel it against her skin.
She moved by memory now, counting rows and turns the way she’d mapped them over the previous nights.
Third row, turn left. Past the red container with the shipping label in Cyrillic.
Past the gap where two stacks met at an angle and left a triangular space barely wide enough for a person to stand in.
She checked that space tonight, as she checked it every night. Empty.
The lake was louder here, closer to the water’s edge.
She could hear the swell working against the breakwater, a steady percussion that sounded almost like breathing.
Brune would hear it too, she thought. He would hear it and think the lake was speaking to him, the way he always had, ever since his mother drowned when he was eight and left him alone in a world that he’d spent the next fifty-seven years trying to appease.
She was still thinking about it when she heard the sound behind her.
A scrape. The sole of a boot on concrete. It came from behind and to her right, from the narrow gap between two shipping containers she’d walked past without checking because she’d walked past it six times before and it had always been empty.
Every nerve in her body fired at once. The training kicked in—assess, orient, respond—but the gap between knowing and doing was half a second, and half a second was too long.
She turned. Already too late. The shadow that lunged from the gap was fast—faster than a sixty-five-year-old man had any right to be—and it closed the distance before she’d completed the pivot.
She registered a shape, broad-shouldered and low, the smell of diesel and cold water, and then something hard whipped through the air and caught her across the left shoulder with a crack that sent white light exploding behind her eyes.
The dock tilted. Her knees buckled. And the shadow kept coming.