The SUV's heater hummed as they drove, but Isla couldn't shake the chill that had settled in her bones.Somewhere in this city, a grieving man had been hollowed out by loss.And if she was right about what she was seeing, that hollow space had been filled with something terrible.
She thought about what DiMatteo had said.Some men, when they lose everything...
The sentence didn't need finishing.Isla knew exactly how it ended.
Some men, when they lose everything, become capable of anything at all.
CHAPTER FIVE
Vincent Carlisle lived in a part of Duluth that tourists never saw.
The neighborhood had probably been respectable once—working-class homes built for miners and longshoremen in the 1940s, neat little boxes with peaked roofs and tiny yards.Now the houses wore their age like old men wore their disappointments: sagging porches, peeling paint, windows patched with plastic sheeting against the February cold.Every third lot seemed to be abandoned, boarded up, waiting for demolition that would never come because nobody cared enough to tear them down.
James pulled the SUV to the curb in front of a two-story house that looked marginally better than its neighbors—at least the steps had been shoveled sometime in the past week.The siding was a faded blue that might have been cheerful decades ago, and a single light burned behind a ground-floor window.
"This is it?"Isla checked the address on her phone against the number barely visible above the front door.
"This is it."James killed the engine."He moved here about three months after selling the restaurant.Downgrade doesn't begin to cover it."
Isla thought about the Tuscan hillside painted on Bella Ristorante's sign, the white tablecloths, the promise of warmth and good food.Then she looked at this house, with its broken gutters and the rusted mailbox tilting toward the street like a drunk trying to stay upright.
Some men, when they lose everything, DiMatteo had said.
They climbed out into the cold.The wind off the lake found them even here, blocks away from the water, cutting through Isla's blazer with familiar malice.She tucked her chin against it and followed James up to the front door.
He knocked.The sound seemed to echo in the quiet street—no traffic, no voices, no dogs barking.Just the wind and the distant groan of something metal swinging on a hinge.
For a long moment, nothing.Then footsteps, slow and heavy, approaching the door.A shadow passed behind the frosted glass panel, paused, moved again.
The door opened.
Vincent Carlisle looked like a man who had stopped caring about the business of being alive.He was maybe fifty, though he wore it like sixty—gaunt face, hollow eyes, gray stubble covering a jaw that had probably been strong once.His clothes hung on him as if they'd been bought for a larger man: a flannel shirt worn through at the elbows, sweatpants that pooled around bare feet despite the cold seeping in from outside.His hair was uncombed, thinning, the color of dirty snow.
But it was his eyes that caught Isla's attention.They were the eyes of a man who had seen something terrible and never stopped seeing it—red-rimmed, distant, focused on something beyond the two FBI agents standing on his porch.
"Mr.Carlisle?"Isla held up her badge."I'm Special Agent Rivers.This is Special Agent Sullivan.We'd like to ask you a few questions."
Carlisle blinked, slowly, as if processing the words from a great distance.His gaze drifted from Isla to James to the badge and back again.
"FBI," he said.Not a question.His voice was rough, underused, like machinery that hadn't been oiled in too long."What do you want?"
"It's about your former restaurant," James said."Bella Ristorante.There's been an incident."
Something flickered in Carlisle's expression—not quite surprise, not quite fear.More like the dull recognition of someone who had been expecting bad news for so long that its arrival was almost a relief.
"Incident," he repeated.He stepped back from the door, a wordless invitation, and shuffled into the dim interior of the house.
Isla exchanged a glance with James.His expression was carefully neutral, but she could read the tension in the set of his shoulders.They followed Carlisle inside.
The house smelled of stale air and unwashed dishes and something else—the particular scent of neglect, of a space that had given up on itself.The living room they entered was cluttered with the detritus of a life on pause: newspapers stacked in uneven towers, empty food containers on every surface, clothes draped over furniture like ghosts of the person who'd worn them.The curtains were drawn against the daylight, and the only illumination came from a floor lamp with a crooked shade and the blue flicker of a television playing on mute.
Carlisle lowered himself into an armchair that had molded to his shape through countless hours of sitting.He didn't offer them a seat, but Isla spotted a couch beneath a layer of old magazines and decided to remain standing anyway.
"What kind of incident?"Carlisle asked.He was watching the muted television—some daytime talk show, bright colors and moving mouths—as if he couldn't quite bring himself to look at them directly.
"A body was found in the restaurant's walk-in freezer," Isla said.She kept her voice even, clinical."A woman.She was murdered."
Carlisle's head turned toward her, finally meeting her eyes.For a moment, something almost like life stirred in his expression—confusion, perhaps, or disbelief.
