The smell of old coffee and desperation woke her.
Isla's eyes opened to fluorescent lights and the blurred edge of her laptop screen, her cheek pressed against the conference room table in a position that would make her neck scream for the rest of the day.For a disorienting moment, she didn't know where she was—the conference room looked wrong from this angle, all ceiling tiles and the underside of the whiteboard—and then memory came flooding back.The crime scene.Sarah Ramsey's still-warm body.The hours that followed, chasing leads that dissolved like morning fog.
She sat up slowly, vertebrae cracking in protest, and checked her watch.7:02 AM.Wednesday, February 14th.Valentine's Day.
Across the table, James Sullivan was stirring to life with the same confused, bleary expression she probably wore.His flannel shirt was creased beyond repair, his dark blonde hair standing up on one side where he'd used his arm as a pillow.Files surrounded him in a scattered halo, and his laptop screen had gone dark, the battery drained sometime in the night.
"We fell asleep," he said, his voice rough with disuse.
"Apparently."Isla stretched her arms over her head, wincing as her shoulders protested."What time did we finally crash?"
"I don't—" James squinted at his watch."Last thing I remember, it was around four.I was running background checks on the commercial refrigeration angle."
Four AM.Which meant they'd gotten maybe three hours of sleep, if you could call passing out from exhaustion at a conference table sleep.Isla's body felt like it had been wrung out and hung up to dry, but beneath the exhaustion, her mind was already spinning up again, reaching for the threads she'd been pulling before unconsciousness had claimed her.
James pushed himself to his feet, swaying slightly."Coffee.We need coffee.And food.When did either of us last eat?"
Isla tried to remember and came up blank.There had been vending machine crackers at some point, she thought.Maybe around midnight.Or maybe that had been the night before, at the diner crime scene.The hours had blurred together into one long tunnel of evidence and dead ends.
"I'll grab us something from the break room," James said, already moving toward the door."The bagels should be out by now.Try not to solve the case while I'm gone."
The door clicked shut behind him, and Isla was alone with the wreckage of their all-night session.Files covered the table—victim backgrounds, restaurant records, lists of names they'd compiled and crossed off one by one.The whiteboard on the wall had grown dense with connections, a spider's web of red and black lines that still refused to point toward a center.
She turned back to her laptop and pressed the power button, waiting for it to boot up while she rubbed the grit from her eyes.Outside the conference room windows, the FBI field office was beginning to stir.She could hear voices in the hallway, the distant ping of the elevator, the particular energy of a building coming to life.Soon this space would fill with other agents, other cases, the ordinary business of law enforcement that didn't stop just because three women had been murdered in three days.
Three women.Three freezers.Three closed restaurants.
The laptop screen flickered to life, and Isla navigated back to where she'd left off.She'd been pursuing a theory—still half-formed, more instinct than evidence—about the freezers themselves.The killer knew which restaurants were closed.Knew which ones had working freezers.That kind of knowledge suggested either obsessive research or professional access.
She'd already run down the obvious angles.Health inspectors who might have insider knowledge of closures.Restaurant supply companies that tracked inventory.Commercial refrigeration services that maintained equipment.The lists had been long, the overlap with her victims nonexistent.
But there was another angle she hadn't fully explored.The freezers at the crime scenes weren't just working—they were maintained, kept running even though the restaurants themselves were shuttered.Someone was paying the electric bills.Someone was making sure the equipment stayed operational.
Isla pulled up the property records for Bella Ristorante, scrolling through the utility information she'd requested the day before.The power was still on, paid through an escrow account while the health department closure worked its way through the system.Standard practice for a temporary shutdown.
She did the same for the Shoreline Diner.Same story—utilities maintained through the renovation period, the freezer kept running because the construction crew was using it to store their lunches.
But Harrington's Steakhouse was different.
The restaurant had been closed since December, following a kitchen fire.Insurance dispute ongoing.The owner, Paul Harrington, had told Fritz he'd been fighting with the adjusters for two months, everything in limbo while they argued about liability.And yet—
Isla leaned closer to the screen, her fatigue momentarily forgotten.
The power was still on.The walk-in freezer was still running.But according to the utility records, Paul Harrington wasn't the one paying for it.
The account showed payments from a company called Murphy's Restaurant Equipment Salvage.
Isla's fingers moved across the keyboard, pulling up everything she could find on the business.Murphy's Restaurant Equipment Salvage, established 2018.Owner and sole proprietor: Daniel Murphy, age forty-two.The company specialized in buying used kitchen equipment from closed restaurants—ovens, prep tables, refrigeration units—and reselling them to new establishments or shipping them to buyers across the Midwest.
Including freezers.Industrial walk-in freezers, exactly like the ones at all three crime scenes.
She cross-referenced the business records, her heart beginning to pound as the connections emerged.Murphy's had purchased equipment from Bella Ristorante six months ago, during a kitchen renovation that predated the salmonella shutdown.They'd bought the old freezer unit from the Shoreline Diner when the new owners gutted the place.And according to a purchase order dated January 15th, Murphy's had been in negotiations with Paul Harrington's insurance company to buy the fire-damaged equipment from Harrington's Steakhouse—including the walk-in freezer.
Three crime scenes.One company connected to all of them.
Isla pulled up Daniel Murphy's driver's license photo and felt her breath catch.
He was average height.Average build.Brown hair.The kind of face you'd pass a thousand times without noticing—unremarkable features, forgettable in almost every way.Exactly the type of man Nathan Cross had described seeing at the yoga studio.Exactly the type Paul Harrington had described fleeing the scene of Sarah Ramsey's murder.
