He was out the door before she could argue, leaving her alone with the hum of fluorescent lights and the faces of two dead women staring out from her monitor.
Isla turned back to the screen, to Maria Carlisle and Monica Hayes and Amanda Pierce arranged in a row.Three women who might have been sisters, or at least cousins.Three women who shared some quality the killer found irresistible.
Light hair.Mid-thirties.Slender builds.The kind of women you might pass a hundred times without noticing.
But the killer had noticed.Had chosen two of them, hunted them, posed them with a care that suggested something deeper than simple violence.
What do you see when you look at them?Isla asked the absent killer.What do they mean to you?
The office was filling up now—agents drifting in, phones beginning to ring, the ordinary rhythm of a Tuesday morning asserting itself against the darkness at the edges.Detective Fritz called with an update on the yoga studio canvass; no one had seen anything unusual, but they'd gotten a partial plate from a security camera at a business three blocks away.A gray sedan, possibly a Honda or Toyota, parked on the street with a view of the studio's lot.The image was grainy, the plate unreadable, but it was something.
Another thread to pull.
Isla added it to the growing web of connections on her whiteboard—victims in the center, locations radiating outward, potential links marked in red.The pattern was there, she could feel it, hiding just beneath the surface of the evidence.The killer wasn't random.He wasn't impulsive.Every choice he made—the victims, the locations, the posing—meant something.
She just had to learn to read his language.
The lake whispered to Robert Brune.Something else was whispering to this killer—something about women with light hair and gentle faces, about cold storage and careful arrangement, about Valentine's Day approaching like a deadline.
Somewhere in Duluth, Isla was certain, another woman was going about her morning with no idea that she'd been chosen.That she fit the profile.That she was being watched by someone who saw her not as a person but as a candidate.
A gift.An offering.A sacrifice.
The thought drove Isla back to her keyboard, back to the records and reports and digital breadcrumbs that might lead her to the killer before he found his next victim.Two bodies in less than a week.Valentine's Day tomorrow.
He wasn't done.She was certain of that now.
The only question was whether she could stop him in time.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The magazine had been read so many times that the spine had cracked, the pages soft and pliant as old cloth.
He sat at his kitchen table in the gray morning light, a cup of coffee cooling beside him, and turned to page forty-seven.He didn't need to look at the page number anymore—his fingers knew the exact weight and texture of the pages that came before, could find this spot blindfolded, in the dark, in his sleep.He'd done exactly that, more than once, waking at three in the morning with his hands already reaching for the nightstand where he kept the magazine when he wasn't carrying it with him.
I Love Duluth.The words curved across the cover in cheerful red script, promising stories about local businesses, notable residents, and the hidden gems that made this city worth celebrating.The Winter edition.Months old now, the cover image of a snow-dusted lighthouse already feels like ancient history.
He turned to page forty-seven and looked at her.
She was smiling in the photograph—a professional headshot, probably taken for the magazine feature, her light blonde hair swept back from her face in soft waves.The article was about up-and-coming entrepreneurs, local success stories, people building something meaningful in a city that the rest of the world forgot existed."Making Numbers Beautiful: How One Accountant Is Revolutionizing Small Business Finance."
He didn't care about the article.He'd read it, of course—read it dozens of times, memorized every bland quote about passion and community and giving back—but the words were meaningless.Background noise.What mattered was her face.
Her smile.
The way the light caught her eyes in that photograph, making them seem warm and kind andalivein a way that hurt to look at.
She looked so much like her.
Not exactly.Never exactly.The hair was a slightly different shade, the nose a touch wider, the chin more pointed than rounded.But when he squinted—when he let his vision blur just slightly, let the details soften into impression—she could almost beher.It could almost be the woman he'd lost, the woman whose face he was beginning to forget, no matter how desperately he tried to hold onto it.
That was the cruelest part.Not the loss itself, but the slow erosion of memory that followed.The way her features were fading in his mind was like a photograph left too long in the sun.He could remember theideaof her face, the general shape and coloring, but the specifics—the exact curve of her smile, the precise shade of her eyes—those were slipping away, dissolving into something vague and terrible.
The magazine helped.The photographs helped.
They weren't hers.He knew that.He wasn't crazy, wasn't delusional, wasn't some monster who couldn't tell the difference between a stranger and the woman he'd loved.He knew exactly what he was doing, exactly who these women were, exactly what he was taking from them.
But when he closed their eyes and folded their hands and arranged them just so—when he stepped back and looked at them in the cold blue light of the freezer—for just a moment, just one perfect moment, he could pretend.
