CHAPTER TWENTY #2
The subject line was casual—“Re: interesting discovery!”—and the tone was the cheerful, exclamatory style of a man sharing personal news with colleagues.
Welles had written to three members of the renovation team, including the project manager DiMaggio, about a DNA ancestry test he’d recently taken.
The results had come back the week before his death.
He’d discovered that he had significant Native American heritage—specifically Ojibwe—that his family had never known about.
He’d written about it with the unguarded enthusiasm of a man whose sense of his own history had suddenly expanded, mentioning that he was planning to look into tribal enrollment and learn more about the culture he’d unknowingly been connected to his entire life.
Isla read the email twice. Then she sat back and stared at the screen.
A man who worked with historical artifacts discovers he has hidden Indigenous heritage.
A man who was cataloging pieces from an armory built on land that had its own history before the military claimed it.
A man who was killed in the basement—the foundation, the buried layer—with a weapon from the nation’s founding era.
The connections were gossamer. She could feel them but couldn’t yet hold them.
Genealogy. History. Identity that was discovered rather than inherited.
She didn’t know what it meant, but the instinct that had pulled her back to this file was the same instinct that had told her the weapons matched the exhibits, and that instinct had been right.
She stood and walked back to the interview room.
Vaughn was still at the table, leaning back in her chair with the posture of a woman who’d been pushing against a wall for two hours and the wall hadn’t moved.
Lang sat across from her, arms now crossed, her expression a closed door.
Whatever ground Vaughn had been trying to gain, she hadn’t gained it.
Isla knocked once on the doorframe and stepped in. Both women looked at her—Vaughn with the tired expectancy of a partner waiting for a new angle, Lang with the wariness of someone who’d learned to expect the worst from people wearing badges.
“Ms. Lang,” Isla said. “Did you know that Zach Welles had recently taken a DNA ancestry test?”
The question landed differently than anything they’d asked in the previous two hours. Lang’s defensiveness didn’t drop—it shifted. The crossed arms loosened slightly, not in surrender but in confusion, which was harder to fake and more telling when genuine.
“Yes,” Lang said slowly. “He mentioned it. He was excited about it—told several people on the crew, I think. He said he’d found out he had Native American ancestry. Ojibwe, if I remember right.” She frowned. “He didn’t know before. It was a surprise to him.”
“Who else did he tell?”
“I don’t know exactly. He brought it up during a break, when some of us were in the hall together. DiMaggio was there, and a couple of the construction guys. He was the kind of person who shared things—he was open about his life, about his work.” Lang’s frown deepened. “Why does this matter?”
“It might not,” Isla said. “Or it might matter a great deal.”
She looked at Vaughn. The detective’s expression had shifted too—the fatigue was still there, carved into the lines around her eyes, but underneath it a new alertness had surfaced, the look of a bloodhound catching a scent it hadn’t been tracking.
Isla stepped back into the corridor and stood there, thinking.
Three victims connected to a building being renovated.
Three weapons spanning centuries of American warfare.
And now this: a victim who’d discovered hidden ancestry, who’d found a connection to a history that predated the Armory, the military, the nation that had built both.
A history that was buried and forgotten and then unearthed through the modern alchemy of a DNA test, the same way the renovation was unearthing layers of the building that had been sealed and forgotten for decades.
Genealogy and history. The personal past and the collective past. Someone was drawing a line between them, and the murders were the ink.
She didn’t have the shape of it yet. She could feel its edges the way she’d felt the exhibit-weapon pattern on her first day at the Armory—a structure lurking beneath the surface of the facts, waiting for enough light to become visible.
The renovation wasn’t just changing the building.
It was excavating something, and someone was responding to that excavation with a violence that had its own archaeology, its own stratigraphy of meaning.
Isla pulled out her phone and dialed Kate.
“We have Lang in custody,” she said. “But I’m not sure she’s our killer. I need access to the full personnel files for everyone connected to the renovation—not just criminal backgrounds. Family histories. Affiliations. Anything related to ancestry or genealogy.”
Kate was quiet for a moment. “You’re expanding the motive.”
“I’m following a thread.” Isla looked back toward the interview room, where Vaughn was gathering her notes and Lang was sitting in a borrowed sweatshirt with her hands on the table and her past spread open under fluorescent light for strangers to examine.
“Someone is connecting these killings to something bigger than the renovation. I don’t know what it is yet, but I think it has to do with who these people are, not just where they worked. ”
“I’ll get you the files,” Kate said. “Isla—trust the thread.”
The line went dead. Isla pocketed her phone and stood in the corridor of the Duluth Police Department while the last light of Saturday evening faded beyond the narrow windows and the building settled into the particular hush of a place where people worked through the night because the work wouldn’t wait for morning.
Somewhere in the city, the Armory stood dark and sealed and patient, its collection diminished by three weapons and three lives, its walls holding whatever secrets remained in the spaces no one had thought to look.
She went back inside to keep working.