The cold bit into Isla's face like a living thing.
She welcomed it.The February wind off Lake Superior had a way of stripping away everything except the present moment—the crunch of ice-crusted sand beneath her boots, the pale orange glow bleeding across the horizon, the ache in her lungs from air that felt sharp enough to cut glass.She’d grown accustomed to coming out here to clear her head at seven in the morning, when the sun was only now bothering to rise, painting the frozen shoreline in shades of amber and steel.
Two months.Eight weeks since Thomas Garrett had met his end in those tunnels beneath Duluth.Eight weeks since Robert Brune—The Lake Superior Killer—had slipped through their fingers and vanished like morning fog off the water.
Isla stopped walking and stared out at the lake.It stretched before her, vast and gray and utterly indifferent, chunks of ice bobbing gently near the shore while the deeper waters remained black and impenetrable.Somewhere out there, she'd once believed, the answers waited.Now she wasn't so sure.
Every day he's free is a day someone else could die.
The thought arrived unbidden, as it did every morning.She'd caught him—actually caught him—hunting his next victim.She'd looked into those pale, empty eyes and seen exactly what Robert Brune was: a sixty-four-year-old fisherman who believed the lake whispered to him, who'd spent decades making murders look like accidents.The Lake Superior Killer.The LSK.Three letters that had consumed two years of her life.
And then he'd run.
The investigation into Northern Star Fisheries had turned up nothing—he'd been smart enough to change his boots after leaving that Merrell print at Alex Novak's murder scene.Ten months of dead ends before she'd finally gotten lucky, finally been in the right place at the right time to witness him stalking another victim through the fog-shrouded docks.
Lucky.The word tasted bitter, even now.
She'd identified him.Exposed him.Forced him out of the shadows and into the harsh light of a nationwide manhunt.
And he'd disappeared anyway.
A gust of wind whipped strands of dark hair across her face, escaped from her ponytail as they always did.Isla tucked them back impatiently; her fingers were already numb despite the thermal gloves she'd reluctantly started wearing this winter.Two and a half years in Duluth, and she still refused to dress like a local—still layered thermal undershirts beneath her blazers rather than submit to the puffy down coats that made everyone look like overstuffed marshmallows.Some battles were worth fighting, even losing ones.
She turned and began walking back toward her apartment, her boots leaving crisp impressions in the thin layer of snow that had accumulated overnight.The building rose ahead of her, an unremarkable brick with windows that caught the early light.Her apartment was on the third floor, small but warm now that her landlord had finally fixed the heating.The view of the lake had been what sold her on the place, back when she'd first arrived from Miami, convinced she'd be gone within a year.
Miami.
She'd turned down Samuel McCrae's offer without hesitation.Her former boss had called back in December, right in the middle of the Thomas Garrett case, his voice carefully neutral as he dangled the possibility of returning to the field office where she'd built her career, where she'd made her worst mistake, where Alicia Mendez had died because Isla had chased the wrong suspect.
Duluth had become something she hadn't expected.Not a punishment or a purgatory, but a place where she'd found cases that mattered, colleagues who challenged her, a partner who—
She cut that thought off before it could fully form.
James Sullivan believed the LSK was gone for good.He'd said as much last week at the Claddagh, nursing his usual Guinness while his daughter, Emma, texted him about her science project.
"He's in the wind, Rivers.Probably crossed into Canada months ago.Could be in Norway by now, finding some new lake to haunt."
"He won't leave."
"You don't know that."
"I know him."
James had given her that look—the one that managed to be both patient and skeptical, his deep-set blue eyes crinkling at the corners in a way that wasn't quite a smile."You identified him.That's not the same as knowing him."
Maybe he was right.Maybe she was clinging to intuition over evidence, the same mistake that had cost Alicia Mendez her life.But every time Isla closed her eyes, she saw Robert Brune's face—weathered and grizzled, utterly unremarkable, the kind of face you'd pass a thousand times without noticing.The face of a man who'd grown up in the foster system after watching his mother drown.Who'd spent forty years on these waters.Who believed the lake demanded sacrifices.
Men like that didn't just leave.
The media had moved on, of course.Eight weeks without a sighting, without a body, without so much as a rumor, and the twenty-four-hour news cycle had found fresher meat.The LSK had become yesterday's story, a cautionary tale about the monsters hiding in plain sight, a few paragraphs buried in the back of newspapers when some reporter needed to fill space.
Isla almost missed the chaos of active pursuit.The sleepless nights, the endless leads, the certainty that came with movement.This—this waiting, this watching, this gnawing sense of unfinished business—was worse.
She climbed the stairs to her apartment, fumbling briefly with keys that had gone cold in her pocket.Inside, the warmth hit her like a physical force, drawing a shiver she hadn't realized she'd been suppressing.The space was small but tidy—a couch that had seen better days, a kitchen she rarely used, a bedroom just big enough for a bed and a dresser.On the wall near the window, a corkboard held newspaper clippings, photos, and a map of the Great Lakes region with red pins marking the LSK's known and suspected kills.
She should take it down.Her boss, SAC Kate Channing, had suggested as much, in her careful way.
"The task force is handling it now,"her boss had said, gray-blue eyes missing nothing."You're not doing yourself any favors by making it personal."
