The scrapyard employee.Drake—that was his name, Drake Johnson, the morning shift guy who'd been cooperating with the search teams.He would have arrived for his shift, would have seen James's sedan parked at the gate, would have found—
James tried to move again.Tried to push himself up, to signal, to do anything that would tell the approaching responders that he was here, alive, still breathing.His arms trembled and gave out.The gravel pressed against his cheek like a pillow made of broken glass.
But the sirens were getting closer.He could hear them splitting the morning silence, could almost feel the vibration of heavy vehicles on the access road, and somewhere in the rational part of his brain that hadn't been scrambled by a blow to the skull, he understood that he just needed to hold on.Just needed to keep breathing, keep his heart pushing blood through a body that wanted very badly to shut down.
The shipping container.That was what mattered.Not whether he lived or died, but what the empty container meant.Brune had been here—had been living here, hiding in plain sight while search teams combed the city.And now he was gone, fled into the night, and the container would hold evidence.Had to hold evidence.Forensics would find something—traces of where he'd been, clues to where he was going, the accumulated detritus of a killer who heard whispers in the water and fed the lake its dead.
Isla would understand.She'd see the container, see the footprints, read the scene the way she read every scene—with that fierce, almost frightening precision that made her the best investigator he'd ever worked with.She'd know what it meant.She'd pick up the trail where he'd been forced to drop it.
Just find him, Isla, before he finds someone else.
The sirens were very close now.Red light began to pulse against the metal walls, painting the towers of crushed cars in alternating shades of crimson and shadow.James heard voices—shouting, urgent, the cadence of first responders who didn't yet know what they were responding to.
He tried one more time to call out.What emerged was barely a whisper, lost in the crunch of boots on gravel and the slam of vehicle doors.But that didn't matter.They were here.They would find him.
The darkness reached for him again, and this time it felt less like an enemy and more like a mercy.The pain was very far away now, the cold almost comfortable, and the last thing James Sullivan was aware of before consciousness finally released its grip was the sound of someone shouting his name—or maybe just shouting—and the distant, rhythmic crash of Lake Superior's waves against the shore, steady as a heartbeat, patient as the dead.
CHAPTER ONE
Isla Rivers came awake all at once—not the slow ascent of ordinary waking but the violent jolt of a woman trained to go from sleep to combat readiness in a heartbeat.Her hand found the phone on the coffee table before her eyes were fully open, her thumb swiping the screen while muscles tensed beneath the two blankets someone had draped over her on the couch.
Someone.James.
The memory arrived in fragments.The ambulance at Enger Tower.Ethan Benson's blood on her hands.James's voice, steady and close, telling her to rest.The warmth of his palm against hers, rough with dried blood that wasn't his.
"Rivers."Her voice came out wrecked—raw and scraped hollow by exhaustion.
"Isla."Kate Channing's voice.And something in it—a tightness Isla had heard only a handful of times under the SAC—made the last remnants of sleep evaporate."I need you to listen carefully."
Isla sat up.The blankets fell away and the cold hit her like a wall.The space heater James had set up was still humming near the couch, but its warmth extended only a few feet, and beyond that the apartment was frigid, frost thick enough on the windows to obscure the lake.
"What happened?"
"Sullivan is at St.Luke's.He's being taken into emergency surgery."A pause—barely a beat, but enough for Isla to hear the effort behind Kate's composure."He was found at Hendrickson's Salvage and Scrap about an hour ago.Severe head trauma, possible internal injuries.A worker called it in when he arrived for his shift and found James's car at the gate."
For three seconds the words refused to assemble into meaning.Just sounds—clinical, precise—that could have been about anyone.
Then the meaning landed, and the floor dropped out from under the world.
"The scrapyard," Isla said."He went to the scrapyard."
"Isla—"
"He told me.Yesterday, before the photographer case—he said the search teams hadn't finished clearing it, that there were sections they'd missed."She was on her feet, though she didn't remember standing, scanning the dark apartment for her keys, her shoes, her weapon.Her gaze landed on the coffee table and everything inside her went very still.
The note.
A torn piece of paper with handwriting she knew as well as her own.Neat, slightly cramped letters—the penmanship of a man who'd spent years writing detailed field reports in margins too small for the information they contained.
Gone to check on the Brune search.Call me when you wake up.—J
The paper trembled in her fingers.Her hands were shaking—a fine tremor that had nothing to do with the cold.
He'd been here.Right here, sitting in the armchair while she slept.He'd stayed because she'd asked him to, and then he'd left because that was who James Sullivan was—the man who couldn't leave one corner unchecked, one door unopened.He'd written her a note and walked out into the dark and driven to a scrapyard where a killer was hiding, and she'd been asleep.Wrapped in blankets he'd tucked around her, dreaming of nothing while James bled into the ice.
"Isla."Kate's voice cut through the spiral."Are you still there?"
"I'm coming in."She shoved the note into the pocket of the jeans she'd fallen asleep in and found her boots by the door—leather with good treads, because she'd never learned to accept the clumsy insulated things the locals wore—and jammed her feet into them without unlacing."St.Luke's.Fifteen minutes."
