PROLOGUE
The wind screamed across the frozen harbor, rattling the walls of the shipping container like the bones of a dead man.Robert Brune pressed his back against the corrugated steel and pulled the thin blanket tighter around his shoulders.Forty years on these waters had never made him soft to the cold, but this was different.This wasn't the honest chill of honest work.This was the cold of hiding.Of waiting.Of listening.
The radio crackled beside him, its yellow glow the only light he allowed himself after dark.He kept the volume low, barely audible above the wind, but he heard every word.
"—Authorities now believe the suspect may have fled the state.FBI sources confirm the manhunt has expanded to Wisconsin and Michigan, with lake communities along the southern shore on high alert—"
The Shipwrecker smiled in the darkness.Let them search Wisconsin.Let them freeze their soft hands on Michigan doorknobs.He was here, where he'd always been, nestled in the ribs of his city like a tumor they couldn't cut out.
He reached for the can of beans on the floor beside him—his third to last—and realized he wasn't hungry.Hadn't been hungry in days.The cold and the dark and the waiting had hollowed him out, left room for other things to take root.
The whispers had been faint at first.Just the wind, he'd told himself.Just the ice settling on the harbor.Just memory playing tricks on an old man's mind.But they were growing louder now, persistent, threading through the howl of the February gale like voices just beneath the surface of sleep.
Robert.
He set down the can and closed his eyes.
Robert, I'm cold.
His mother's voice.Or not her voice exactly—she'd been dead fifty-six years—but the memory of it, the echo of it, rising up from the black water of his mind.She'd drowned in this lake when he was eight years old.Walked out onto the ice on a morning just like this and never walked back.They'd found her three days later, tangled in the rocks near the breakwater, her eyes open and staring at nothing.
The lake had taken her.And the lake had given him a gift in return.
I need company, Robert.It's so dark down here.
He pressed his palms against his ears, but the whispers didn't come from outside.They never had.They rose up from somewhere beneath his sternum, somewhere wet and cold and ancient.
He'd been so careful.Forty years of careful.The right kind of accidents.He'd fed the lake, and the lake had kept his secrets, and no one had ever looked twice at the quiet fisherman with the grizzled beard and the kind eyes.
Until her.Until Agent Rivers.
It’s been eight weeks since he'd fled into the maze of warehouses and shipping yards, abandoning his apartment, his boat, his life.The Merrell boots he'd worn to Alex Novak's final swim were at the bottom of the harbor now, replaced with a pair of Timberlands he'd pulled from a donation bin.He'd shaved his beard, grown it back.Changed nothing that mattered.
The FBI thought he'd run.That's what hunted men did—they ran.They put distance between themselves and their crimes, fled to places where no one knew their faces or their sins.
But the Shipwrecker wasn't a hunted man.The Shipwrecker was the lake's instrument, and the lake didn't let its instruments wander far.
Robert.Please.I'm so lonely.
The wind died for a moment, and in the sudden silence, he could hear the water lapping against the pilings somewhere in the darkness below.A gentle sound.Patient.Hungry.
He knew what the whispers wanted.What they always wanted.Another soul to slip beneath the waves, another sacrifice to feed the endless appetite of that vast black deep.He'd resisted for six weeks now—the longest he'd ever gone—and every day the voices grew louder, more insistent, more difficult to distinguish from his own thoughts.
But leaving meant exposure.Meant risking everything he'd managed to preserve.His freedom.His anonymity.His sacred work.
The radio crackled again.
"—Snow expected to continue through the weekend, with temperatures dropping to fifteen below.Authorities are urging residents to stay indoors—"
Robert Brune stared at the ceiling of his metal tomb and felt the lake stirring in his blood.Sooner or later, he would have to answer.He always did.The only question was whether he could survive long enough to hear the call.
The wind resumed its assault on the walls, and somewhere in its howling, he could have sworn he heard the lake singing.
He reached for the radio and turned it off.
In the darkness of the shipping container, surrounded by the last of his dwindling supplies, the Shipwrecker closed his eyes and waited for the lake to tell him what to do next.
CHAPTER ONE
