He'd used that invisibility to watch them.To follow them.To learn their patterns and their schedules and the moments when they'd be most vulnerable.
Now he would use it one more time.
Jamie opened his car door and stepped out into the cold.The gun was a solid weight against his thigh, a promise and a threat.Across the street, Grace Hyland was turning, walking, her breath fogging in the February air.
Walking toward him without knowing she'd been chosen.
Walking toward the cold that would keep her safe forever.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The address on Jamie Thornton's driver's license led them to a neighborhood that seemed to have given up on itself.
Isla studied the building through the sedan's windshield as James pulled to the curb—a squat, three-story apartment complex on the east side of Duluth, the kind of place that advertised "affordable efficiency units" and meant "barely livable boxes where dreams went to die."The siding had gone gray with age and neglect, and the parking lot was more pothole than pavement.A single car sat in front of the building—not a gray sedan, but a rusted pickup truck with a cracked windshield and a bumper sticker that read "I'd Rather Be Fishing."
"This is it?"James asked, checking the address against his notes.
"Unit 2B."Isla was already reaching for her door handle, the familiar weight of her service weapon pressing against her hip."According to his records, Thornton moved here about eight months ago.Before that, he was at a temporary residence—hotel, probably—while the insurance claim on his house worked through the system."
"Quite a downgrade from a Victorian on Fifth Street."
"Grief does that to people."Isla thought about Vincent Carlisle's squalid house, the newspapers stacked like monuments to despair, the way loss could hollow a person out until all that remained was a shell going through the motions of living."Some people rebuild.Others just...stop."
They approached the building's entrance, a glass door with a crack running diagonally across its surface like a wound that had never healed.The lock was broken—had been for some time, judging by the rust around the latch—and the door swung open at Isla's touch.Inside, the hallway smelled of mildew and something that might have been boiled cabbage, the particular scent of a building where no one cared enough to complain.
Unit 2B was at the end of the first-floor hallway, its door painted a shade of brown that seemed designed to absorb light rather than reflect it.Isla positioned herself to one side, her hand resting on her weapon, while James took the other.They'd done this dance a hundred times before—the choreography of uncertainty, the careful approach to a door that might hide anything.
James knocked.The sound echoed in the quiet hallway, sharp and authoritative.
Nothing.
He knocked again, harder this time."FBI.Jamie Thornton, open the door."
Silence.The kind of silence that pressed against the ears, that seemed to have weight and texture.Isla strained to hear movement from inside—footsteps, the creak of floorboards, anything that would suggest someone was home and choosing not to answer.
The building's superintendent was a wiry man in his sixties who introduced himself as Gus and seemed entirely unsurprised that the FBI wanted to see inside one of his units.He'd probably seen worse, Isla thought as he fumbled with his ring of keys.Places like this tended to collect people running from something.
"Thornton, you said?"Gus squinted at the door as if trying to remember."Quiet guy.Keeps to himself.Don't think I've seen him in weeks, come to think of it.Rent's paid through the end of February, so I figured he was still around somewhere."
"When did you last see him?"Isla asked.
"Couldn't say exactly.Before Christmas, maybe?He'd go out at night sometimes—I'd see his car leaving when I was taking out the trash.Never talked to nobody, never had visitors."Gus shrugged, the gesture carrying the particular indifference of someone who'd long ago stopped being curious about his tenants' lives."I don't pry.Long as the rent's paid and they're not cooking meth, people can do what they want."
The key turned in the lock with a click that seemed too loud in the silence.Isla drew her weapon and nodded at James, who pushed the door open from the side, letting it swing inward to reveal the darkness beyond.
"FBI," Isla called into the apartment."Jamie Thornton, make yourself known."
Nothing.
She went in first, James covering her, their movements practiced and precise.The apartment was small—a studio, barely four hundred square feet—and it took less than thirty seconds to clear.The bathroom door stood open on an empty room.The closet held a handful of clothes on wire hangers.The narrow bed was made with military precision, its thin blanket pulled taut across the mattress.
No Jamie Thornton.No sign that anyone had been here in days.
Isla holstered her weapon and let her eyes move across the space, cataloguing details.The apartment was spartan to the point of bleakness—no pictures on the walls, no personal items on the dresser, nothing that suggested a life being lived rather than merely endured.A hot plate sat on the counter beside a single pot and a single bowl.A small television faced the bed, its screen dark and dusty.
But it was the wall above the desk that made her breath catch.
Photographs.Dozens of them, arranged in careful rows, their edges slightly curled from being handled too many times.Women's faces stared out from the display—some cut from magazines, others printed on computer paper, a few that looked like they'd been taken from a distance with a long lens.All of them blonde.All of them in their thirties.All of them bearing that same general resemblance to each other, to Rebecca Thornton, to the women who had been found posed in freezers across Duluth.
