"We need to look deeper," she said."Verify what we can of his timeline—check with the grocery delivery service, see if the corner store has cameras, canvas the neighbors.And we need to dig into his background.Friends, family, anyone who might know if he's as isolated as he claims."
"And Monica Hayes," James added."We still don't know enough about her.We haven’t been able to salvage any footage of her from any street cams.Why her?Why that restaurant?There might be a connection we haven't found yet."
Isla nodded, watching the shabby neighborhood slide past as they drove.Houses that had given up, lawns buried under gray snow, lives lived in quiet desperation behind drawn curtains.
Vincent Carlisle wasn't the only ghost haunting this part of Duluth.
"Back to the office," she said."We've got work to do."
James merged onto the main road, and Isla let herself sink back against the seat.Her mind was already racing ahead—alibis to check, backgrounds to research, connections to trace.The familiar rhythm of investigation, the puzzle pieces waiting to be assembled.
But underneath it all, a quiet certainty was forming.Vincent Carlisle might be a broken man, a grieving widower, a ghost in his own life.But somewhere in the darkness of this case, there was a killer who had looked at Monica Hayes and seen something worth staging, worth posing, worth treating with a terrible kind of care.
Whether that killer was Vincent Carlisle or someone else entirely, Isla intended to find out.
The lake had whispered to Robert Brune.Maybe something else was whispering to whoever had killed Monica Hayes.
And Isla was going to learn its language.
CHAPTER SIX
The sandwich sat untouched on Isla's desk, its plastic wrapper still sealed.
She'd grabbed it from the vending machine during what was supposed to be a lunch break, but the break had lasted approximately four minutes before she'd found herself back at her computer, fingers moving across the keyboard with a mind of their own.Turkey and Swiss on wheat.It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
Now it was just another casualty of the investigation.
The FBI field office hummed around her—phones ringing, keyboards clacking, the distant murmur of conversation from the break room—but Isla had tuned it all out.Her focus had narrowed to the screen in front of her, to the records she'd been pulling for the past hour, to the picture of Vincent Carlisle that was slowly emerging from the digital breadcrumbs of his shattered life.
Medical records.The words glowed on her monitor, clinical and cold.She'd had to pull some strings to get access this quickly—patient privacy laws being what they were—but Kate had made a call, and doors had opened.Now, Isla almost wished they hadn't.
St.Mary's Psychiatric Center.Admitted June 15th of last year.Discharged August 3rd.Reason for admission: severe depression with suicidal ideation following the deaths of his wife and daughter.
Lakeview Behavioral Health.Admitted October 22nd.Discharged November 30th.Patient experiencing prolonged grief disorder complicated by possible psychotic features.Prescribed antipsychotic medication.
Northland Recovery Center.Admitted January 8th of this year.Discharged February 6th.
February 6th.Isla did the math in her head, feeling something cold settle in her stomach.Dr.Henley had estimated Monica Hayes's time of death at forty-eight to seventy-two hours before the body was discovered on Monday morning.That put the killing somewhere between Thursday evening and Saturday evening.
Vincent Carlisle had been released from his third psychiatric facility just three days before the earliest possible time of death.
She sat back in her chair, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands.The timeline was damning.A man spiraling through institutions for the better part of a year, a man grappling with grief so profound it had required multiple hospitalizations, suddenly released back into the world—and within days, a woman who looked like his dead wife turned up murdered in his former restaurant.
But something still didn't fit.
She thought about the man she'd met that morning.The unwashed clothes, the tower of newspapers, the way he'd barely been able to summon the energy to stand.Vincent Carlisle was a man who had given up on living, not a man planning anything.The psychiatric records confirmed what her instincts had already told her: this was someone fighting to survive each day, not someone capable of the careful staging, the deliberate positioning, the almost tender arrangement of Monica Hayes's body in that freezer.
Unless.The word inserted itself into her thoughts, unwelcome but insistent unless the hospitalizations weren't about depression at all.Unless the psychotic features mentioned in his file had twisted his grief into something darker.Unless losing Maria and Lily had broken something fundamental in Vincent Carlisle, something that made him see his dead wife's face in a stranger and decide—
Decide what?To kill her?To preserve her?To make her look peaceful in death the way Maria probably hadn't looked after a semi-truck crossed the median at seventy miles per hour?
Isla shook her head, frustrated with herself.She was building narratives without evidence, crafting stories to fit the facts rather than letting the facts speak for themselves.It was the same mistake she'd made in Miami, the same rush to judgment that had cost Alicia Mendez her life.
The memory surfaced before she could stop it: standing in that apartment, gun drawn, absolutely certain she had the right man.And behind her, blocks away, the real killer was already—
She pushed the thought away, hard.That was then.This was now.And now, she needed facts, not assumptions.
"Rivers."
