CHAPTER THREE
It hit her a second time before she’d finished falling—the chain.
It caught her across the upper back as she twisted away from the first blow, drove the air from her lungs, sent her stumbling forward with palms slamming against cold asphalt.
Gravel bit into the heels of her hands. Pain radiated through her shoulder and back in overlapping waves—but pain was information.
Heavy chain. Three feet of slack. Swung with intention.
Not a weapon of opportunity. He’d brought it.
Robert Brune stepped out of the gap between the containers and into the thin ambient light.
For one frozen moment Isla saw him clearly.
He looked the same. That was the maddening thing—the grizzled beard, the weathered face, the stocky build of a man who’d spent his life hauling nets and moving freight.
Dark clothes, heavy canvas jacket, work boots.
He held the chain in both hands, with the easy familiarity of someone who’d handled chain his whole working life.
Three feet of heavy galvanized links, the kind used to secure cargo on deck.
A fisherman’s weapon. His eyes found hers in the dark.
They were calm. Not angry, not panicked. The eyes of a man doing something he’d done before.
He swung again.
Isla rolled. Her body moved on training and instinct—Quantico muscle memory, Miami field exercises, the sessions she’d kept up in Duluth because fitness was the one thing she could control.
She rolled left and the chain cracked against the asphalt where her head had been half a second earlier, throwing sparks.
She used the momentum to get her feet under her and came up in a crouch.
No weapon. No badge. No backup. Just her and a serial killer eight feet away in the dark, swinging a chain like he was born to it.
He closed the distance with a low shuffling advance, center of gravity stable—a fisherman’s stance, someone used to keeping balance on uncertain ground.
The chain whipped laterally at her midsection.
Isla stepped inside the arc. It was the only option that didn’t end with the chain wrapping around her.
Inside the arc put her in grappling range with a man who outweighed her by sixty pounds, but it was the less dangerous of two bad options, and her career had been a series of those.
She drove her fist into his solar plexus with everything she had.
Brune grunted—small, surprised, almost polite—and it didn’t slow him enough.
His body was hard from forty years of manual labor, and the punch that should have doubled him over only staggered him half a step.
But half a step was enough. Isla followed with a knee to his thigh and an elbow to the side of his jaw that connected with a solid crack and snapped his head sideways.
That one he felt. He reeled. The chain went slack in his grip, and Isla saw her opening.
She grabbed for it with both hands, fingers closing around cold, oil-slick links.
She pulled. He pulled back. For a suspended second they stood locked together over the chain, and she could see his face up close for the first time—the deep lines around his mouth, the weathering of decades on the water, the absolute calm in his eyes.
No rage. No fear. Just the steady focus of a man performing a sacrament.
She could smell him—sweat and diesel and the cold scent of the lake, as if the water had soaked into him until he smelled like the thing he worshipped.
He headbutted her.
Not elegant. Brutal and effective. His forehead slammed into the bridge of her nose with enough force to fill her vision with white static and send blood flooding down her upper lip.
She lost her grip on the chain. Stumbled backward, hands going to her face—and in the half second it took her to recover, he’d looped the chain around her throat.
Cold. That was the first thing she registered—the shocking, immediate cold of metal against skin, like plunging into the lake.
Then the pressure. He pulled the chain tight from behind, crossing the ends and hauling backward, and suddenly there was no air.
Not reduced breathing, not restricted airflow.
Nothing. The chain compressed her windpipe with mechanical efficiency, and the world began to narrow at the edges, darkness eating inward like a closing iris.
She clawed at the chain. Fingers scrabbling against the links, trying to wedge anything—a finger, a thumb—between the metal and her throat.
She couldn't. He was too strong, and the chain was too tight, and she was losing oxygen at a rate that gave her thirty seconds before she lost consciousness.
Maybe sixty if she was lucky. After that, three minutes before it became permanent.
Brune said nothing. He breathed heavily behind her, a steady rasp of exertion, but he didn’t speak.
The silent ones were the most dangerous—the ones who didn’t need to talk because the act itself was the communication.
She could feel his conviction in the pressure of the chain. He wasn’t angry. He was devout.
A thought slid through her dimming mind with terrible clarity: this is how he does it.
Not the drownings—those came after. This was the part no one saw.
The chain or the hands or whatever tool he used to take them down, and then the water, the sacrifice, the lake receiving what Brune offered it. She was being prepared for the altar.
Her vision was going gray. Heartbeat hammering in her temples, too fast. Lungs burning with the particular fire of air that couldn’t get in.
She thought of James in that hospital bed, the way his fingers had curled in sleep.
She thought of Alicia Mendez in Miami, the woman she’d failed to save.
She was not going to be another name on a list. She was not going to die on a dock in Duluth and give Robert Brune the offering he wanted.
She stopped clawing at the chain—it wasn’t working, it was wasting what energy she had left—and reached backward over her shoulder, grasping blindly for his face. Her fingers found beard, cheekbone. She dug her thumb into his eye socket with every ounce of force she had.
He roared. The first real sound—animal and pained.
His grip on the chain loosened fractionally.
Not enough to breathe, but enough to shift.
Isla torqued her hips and drove her elbow backward into his ribs, once, twice.
The chain loosened another fraction and she sucked in a thin stream of air that tasted like rust and salvation.
Then the light came.
Headlights. White and sudden and blinding, sweeping across the dock from the access road above.
A patrol car on its rounds, high beams cutting through the dark and illuminating everything—the containers, the cracked asphalt, two figures locked together in something that looked, from any distance, like exactly what it was.
Brune reacted before the light finished its sweep.
The chain went slack all at once, falling away from her throat like a shed skin, and she heard his boots on the asphalt behind her, already moving.
Isla dropped to her knees, one hand at her throat, the other bracing against the ground, and dragged in breath after ragged breath while the headlights strobed across the container yard and a siren yelped once, short and sharp.
She looked up in time to see him. Robert Brune, running between two rows of containers with the chain dangling from one hand, moving with a speed and sureness that spoke of intimate knowledge of the terrain.
He cut left at the end of the row and vanished into the maze of stacked metal as cleanly as if the containers had swallowed him.
Every cell in her body screamed at her to follow.
She tried. Got one foot under her, then the other.
Pushed herself upright and the docks tilted sideways.
Her throat felt like she’d swallowed broken glass, each breath coming with a wheeze that sounded wrong even to her own ears.
Blood from her nose had soaked into her collar, and the cut above her eye—she didn’t remember getting it, but head wounds were like that—was dripping steadily into her eyebrow.
Three steps toward where he’d gone. The container rows stretched ahead of her in the headlight glow, forming corridors of dark metal that could have hidden anything.
She listened for his footsteps and heard only her own ragged breathing, the siren’s echo, the lake slapping its ancient rhythm against the pilings.
He knew this terrain the way she knew her own apartment.
He could be fifty feet away, standing still in a shadow, and she’d walk right past him.
Four steps. Five. Then she stopped. Her legs were shaking—not from fear. From oxygen deprivation, from the adrenaline crash setting in, from the simple fact that her body had been thirty seconds from unconsciousness and was objecting to the idea of a foot pursuit.
He was gone. Again.
The patrol car pulled up twenty feet away, doors opening simultaneously. Two officers emerged, hands on weapons, flashlight beams crisscrossing the dark.
"Ma’am? Are you alright?"
Isla wiped blood from her eye and straightened her spine.
"FBI," she rasped. "Special Agent Isla Rivers. I need you to call this in."