James was quiet for a moment, his blue eyes studying her with that perceptive intensity she'd come to recognize over their partnership. "When's the last time you slept more than a few hours?"
"I don't know. Tuesday?" Isla pulled up the Brune case file on her computer, though she'd already memorized every detail. "It doesn't matter. Sleep won't solve these cases."
"No, but it might help you think more clearly." James stood, moving around her desk to look at the screen she'd pulled up—the map showing Brune's possible locations, the red pins that stretched from Thunder Bay to Minneapolis, from Grand Rapids to the Canadian border. "The Marshals are handling the manhunt. Kate was clear about that. Our job is Langford and Graves."
"I know that." Isla's voice came out sharper than she'd intended. "I know my job, James. I know where my focus is supposed to be. But it's hard to concentrate on two murders when there's a serial killer out there who I could have caught, should have caught, if I'd just—"
She stopped herself, pressing her palms against her desk. This was the spiral she'd been trying to avoid, the one that led back to Miami and Alicia Mendez and the crushing weight of failure that had followed her to Duluth like a shadow.
"If you'd just what?" James's voice was gentle but firm. "Shot an unarmed man in the back when he ran? Violated every protocol we have about use of force? Become the kind of agent who makes headlines for the wrong reasons?"
"I could have tackled him. Could have called for backup sooner. Could have—"
"Could have done a hundred things differently, and maybe some of them would have worked and maybe they wouldn't." James crouched beside her chair so they were at eye level, his expression serious. "You did everything right at North Pier. You identified a serial killer that nobody else even knew existed. You stopped him from killing again. And yes, he got away, but that's not on you. That's on him, and on forty years of him learning how to disappear."
Isla wanted to believe him. Wanted to accept that she'd done her best and that sometimes your best wasn't enough to catch every killer or save every victim. But the doubt lingered,persistent and corrosive, whispering that if she'd been faster, smarter, more aggressive, Robert Brune would be in custody instead of haunting her dreams.
She thought about McCrae’s offer to return to Miami. Maybe things would be easier if she did just go back.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The darkness was absolute.
The Shipwrecker sat with his back against cold concrete, knees pulled to his chest in a space so narrow his shoulders brushed both walls. He'd been sitting like this for hours—or maybe days, time had lost meaning in the suffocating blackness—not daring to move, not daring to make a sound, not daring to turn on the flashlight he'd grabbed during his panicked flight from the docks two weeks ago.
The batteries were probably dead by now anyway.
His hand found the plastic water bottle beside him in the dark, fingers reading its shape like braille. Half full. Maybe less. He'd been rationing it carefully, allowing himself only small sips when his throat became too dry to swallow, when the metallic taste of fear became too thick in his mouth. The granola bars he'd scavenged from a gas station dumpster three days ago—or was it four?—were down to two. Maybe one and a half if he was being honest about the crumbled mess at the bottom of the wrapper.
He couldn't stay here forever.
But he couldn't leave.
The Shipwrecker had found this abandoned maintenance tunnel purely by accident during his second night on the run, stumbling through the industrial district half-blind with panic while sirens wailed in the distance. The entrance had been hidden behind a rusted dumpster, the steel door corroded enough that his desperate shoulder had broken the ancient lock. He'd crawled inside like a wounded animal seeking shelter, pulling the door shut behind him and descending into a darkness that had felt like salvation.
Now it felt like a tomb.
Somewhere above him—he thought it was above, though in this absolute blackness spatial awareness had become unreliable—the city continued its routines. People walked streets he knew by heart, drove past docks where he'd worked for forty years, went about their lives while his face stared out from every screen and newspaper. Robert Brune, they called him. The Lake Superior Killer. As if that name meant anything, as if it captured even a fraction of what he truly was.
He was the Shipwrecker. He was Superior's instrument.
Or he had been.
The Shipwrecker pressed his palms against the concrete floor, feeling the accumulated grime of decades beneath his fingers, and listened to the silence that surrounded him like water filling a drowning man's lungs.
Nothing.
No whispers from the lake, no guidance, no sense of purpose that had sustained him through fifty-six years of service. Just the sound of his own breathing, harsh and ragged in the enclosed space, and the occasional distant rumble that might have been traffic or might have been his imagination conjuring sounds to fill the void.
When had the whispers stopped?
He tried to remember, counting backward through the blur of running and hiding and scavenging that had consumed his days since Agent Rivers had identified him. That night at North Pier, certainly the lake had still been speaking—he'd felt its approval as he'd stalked his chosen sacrifice, had heard its ancient voice guiding his steps through familiar shadows. Even when the FBI agent had appeared with her weapon drawn and her amber eyes seeing too much, the lake had whispered instructions:Run. Disappear. Wait.
So he'd run. He'd disappeared into the warren of alleys and loading docks he knew better than his own reflection, hadslipped through gaps in the search perimeter with the ease of someone who'd spent four decades learning every secret of Duluth's waterfront. The first night he'd hidden in a warehouse basement. The second ni was under a pier. The third night had been in this tunnel, and he'd been here ever since, frozen with the paralyzing understanding that he had nowhere left to go.
And somewhere during those first desperate nights of flight, the whispers had stopped.
The Shipwrecker hadn't noticed at first. He'd been too consumed with survival, too focused on staying ahead of the search teams and the helicopters and the news vans that turned Duluth into a hunting ground where he was the prey. But now, in this crushing silence, the absence was unmistakable.
