"TheStorm Runner'screw," she said to Lieutenant Chen, who had been standing nearby, looking increasingly uncomfortable."What do we know about them?"
Chen consulted his tablet again."Captain Wayne Trudeau, age fifty-one.Been fishing these waters for thirty years, according to locals.Crew consisted of his son, Derek Trudeau, age twenty-eight, and two other men—Michael Okonkwo and James Larsen.All local, all with clean records as far as we know."
"Clean records but running enough meth to supply half of northern Minnesota," James observed dryly.
"The fishing industry's been hard hit for years," Chen said, a note of something like sympathy in his voice."Lot of guys supplement their income with...side businesses.Doesn't make them bad people necessarily.Just desperate."
Isla thought of the scattered personal effects she'd seen in the wheelhouse, the half-eaten meal in the galley.A father and son, working together on a boat that had probably been in the family for generations, making a living any way they could in an economy that had left them behind.They'd made bad choices, certainly.Criminal choices.But they hadn't deserved to end up as blood stains on a drifting vessel.
"I want everything you can find on the Storm Runner's operations," she said to James."Where they fished, where they docked, who they associated with.If there's a pattern to how our killer is identifying targets, we need to find it."
"And Callahan?"
"Keep working him.He knows more than he's told us—he has to.If he's been operating on these waters for years, he's heard things, seen things, knows people who know people."Isla looked back at the Storm Runner, at the blood that was already being photographed and catalogued by the crime scene team."Someone is turning Lake Superior into their personal hunting ground, James.And until we figure out who they are, every criminal operation on these waters is a potential target."
"And if they run out of criminals?"James asked quietly.
The question hung in the air between them, unanswered because Isla didn't have an answer she was willing to voice.Predators who developed a taste for hunting didn't simply stop when their preferred prey became scarce.They adapted.They evolved.They found new victims.
She thought again of the Lake Superior Killer—the invisible predator she'd been tracking for almost two years.That killer had made his work look like accidents, had operated so subtly that decades might have passed without anyone noticing the pattern.This new threat was different—more violent, more public, more brazen—but there was something about the methodology that nagged at her.The patience.The knowledge of the waterfront.The ability to move through an environment full of potential witnesses without being seen.
Two predators on the same waters.Or was there something else she was missing?
"Let's get back to the office," she said finally, pulling off her latex gloves with sharp, frustrated movements."We need to cross-reference everything—the Northern Dawn, the Storm Runner, every suspicious incident Callahan mentioned, every drowning that might have been staged.If there's a connection, we're going to find it."
James fell into step beside her as they walked back toward their SUV, the wind at their backs carrying the smell of the lake and the faint, lingering copper scent of violence.The Storm Runner grew smaller behind them, a battered fishing boat that had become a crime scene, a tomb for men whose bodies might never be found.
Isla didn't look back.There would be time for that later, when the evidence was processed, and the families notified, and the investigation expanded to include yet another incident in what was becoming a terrifying pattern.For now, she needed to focus on the hunt—on the predator who had turned the largest freshwater lake in the world into his personal killing ground.
Ghost ships, she thought again as they pulled away from the marina.Someone was creating an armada of them, one violent attack at a time.And until she found them, the bodies would keep disappearing into Superior's cold, dark depths.
The hunt was far from over.It was only beginning to reveal its true scope.
CHAPTER TEN
The local news anchor's voice droned through the modest apartment like background static, but he sat motionless in the worn recliner, his attention fixed on the screen.The television cast pale light across sparse furnishings—a kitchenette that had never seen a dinner party, bookshelves lined with military history and maritime law, a single framed photograph on the wall that he never looked at anymore.
"Coast Guard officials have confirmed the discovery of another vessel found drifting on Lake Superior," the anchor said, her expression appropriately somber."The fishing boat Storm Runner was located approximately twelve miles east of Two Harbors early this morning.Sources tell us the four-person crew is currently missing and that investigators have found evidence of foul play aboard the vessel."
He watched the aerial footage of the Storm Runner being towed into harbor, her white hull stark against the gray water.A fishing boat.Family operation, probably.Father and son, maybe cousins or lifelong friends who thought they could make easy money running methamphetamine beneath legitimate catches of lake trout.They'd thought wrong.
His hands moved with practiced precision over the knife laid across his lap, the whetstone gliding along the blade in slow, measured strokes.The rhythm was meditative—something he'd learned decades ago, in a life that felt like it belonged to someone else.The steel gleamed under the lamp light, clean now, though it hadn't been clean when he'd returned three nights ago.
"This marks the second incident in less than a week involving an unmanned vessel on Lake Superior," the anchor continued."The FBI has declined to comment on whether the two cases are connected, but sources close to the investigation tell us—"
He muted the television.He didn't need speculation from reporters who understood nothing about the real threats moving through these waters.The FBI could investigate all they wanted.They'd find the same thing they always found: blood, questions, and dead ends.They were good at their jobs—he'd give them that—but they were fighting with one hand tied behind their backs, constrained by rules and jurisdictions and the endless paperwork of bureaucracy.
He wasn't constrained.
The knife went back into its leather sheath, and he rose from the recliner with the economical movement of someone who had learned to conserve energy for when it mattered.His apartment was small but organized with military precision—everything in its place, nothing extraneous, no personal touches that might invite questions from the occasional visitor.Not that visitors came often.He'd made sure of that.
The closet in the spare bedroom—the room that might have been a home office or a nursery in another man's life—held his work.He opened it now, revealing neat rows of manila folders arranged by date and priority, surveillance photographs tacked to a corkboard, nautical charts marked with routes and waypoints that traced the hidden arteries of Lake Superior's criminal underworld.
He pulled out the folder labeled TRUDEAU and added it to the completed stack.Wayne Trudeau, fifty-one.Commercial fisherman for three decades, meth distributor for the past five.His son Derek had been pulling in fifty thousand a year running product for a network that stretched from Thunder Bay to Milwaukee.That network was smaller now.Weaker.
Better.
The next folder was thicker.He spread its contents across the small desk beneath the window, arranging surveillance photographs and shipping manifests with the care of a surgeon preparing an operating theater.The faces staring up at him were strangers—men he'd watched from a distance, tracked through their routines, catalogued in exhaustive detail—but he felt he knew them intimately.Their schedules, their weaknesses, their crimes.
