"We'll be there."She hung up and was on her feet before the phone was back in her pocket."Marshall.Missing solo camper, Caribou Trail area.Experienced hiker, never misses a check-in."
Marshall was already reaching for his jacket."Another victim of opportunity?"
"Different area than Gallagher.Forty or fifty miles from the first site."Isla grabbed her keys and badge, her mind racing through the implications.Different area.Same profile—solo backcountry traveler, experienced, alone.If the spiral killer was choosing locations rather than victims, then the geography of his kills would map his knowledge of the terrain, and two sites fifty miles apart meant a wider range than she'd assumed.
Unless the killer was moving.
"Marshall, head straight to the Caribou trailhead.Coordinate with county SAR, establish a staging area, and find Lloyd's campsite.Her mother may know her preferred spots—get that information from Duluth PD en route."
"What about you?"
"I'm taking a different approach."Isla was already pulling up a contact on her phone—a number she'd saved the day before, after standing in a ruined snowfield and wishing she'd had eyes in the sky before boots had destroyed the evidence."I'll meet you at the site."
Marshall didn't question it.He took his keys and left, his long stride carrying him to the elevator with the purposeful efficiency she'd come to rely on.Isla waited until the doors closed, then pressed the call button.
The phone rang twice.
"Shaw."
"Captain Shaw, this is Agent Rivers, FBI.I need your helicopter."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Bell lifted off the St.Louis County airfield at nine-twelve, and Isla felt the ground release her the way it always did in a helicopter—suddenly, completely, the earth simply letting go and the sky taking over.Captain Shaw flew with the unhurried precision of a man who had logged enough hours to trust the machine and the air and the process of being between them, his hands steady on the controls, his eyes already scanning the terrain as they climbed.
"Caribou Trail corridor," he said through the intercom, confirming the heading."Your missing person—what do we know about her last location?"
"Her mother says she favors a campsite in a hollow off the main trail, about three miles in from the trailhead.Sheltered, surrounded by spruce."Isla had gotten the details from Duluth PD during the drive to the airfield, relayed from Patricia Lloyd with the precise, desperate clarity of a mother who had been describing her daughter's habits to strangers since dawn."She's been using it for years."
"I know the Caribou corridor.Good terrain for winter camping—sheltered valleys, decent wind protection."Shaw adjusted their heading slightly north."But it's also good terrain for getting lost in.The trail system branches after the first two miles, and once you're off the main route, the forest gets thick fast."
Isla watched the landscape transform beneath them.Duluth fell away—the city receding from its full sprawl to a cluster, then a smudge, then nothing, replaced by the rolling white expanse of the backcountry.The morning was clear, the sky a cold blue that promised sunlight without warmth, and the snow below caught the light and threw it back in a glare that made her squint even through the helicopter's tinted glass.
She thought about the meadow near Brool Lake.About the spiral, destroyed by the time she'd reached it—the precision of the pattern reduced to fragments by well-meaning boots that hadn't understood what they were crossing.She'd studied Shaw's photographs for hours, reconstructing the design from aerial images, trying to see it the way its creator had seen it: complete, unbroken, the single continuous line curving inward to the body at its center.
If Rebecca Lloyd was a victim—and everything in Isla's experience was telling her that a missed satellite check-in from a woman who'd never missed one in fifteen years was not a navigation error or a dead battery—then there might be another pattern in the snow.Another design, carved with the same patience and care, placed in another sheltered clearing chosen for the same reasons the first meadow had been chosen: protection from wind, isolation from trails, visibility from the air.
The killer wanted his work seen from above.That was the insight that had crystallized for her during the night, somewhere between studying Shaw's photographs and staring at the ceiling of her apartment at three in the morning.The spiral was too large to be appreciated from ground level.Standing at the edge of the meadow, all you saw were fragments—curves and trenches that lost their meaning without the perspective of altitude.But from a helicopter, from three hundred feet, the design revealed itself in full.The killer had built something meant to be seen from the sky.
Which meant a helicopter might find it before ground teams could destroy it.
"Captain, when we reach the corridor, I want you to fly a search pattern over every open clearing within a five-mile radius of the campsite.Every meadow, every snowfield, anything with enough open space for a pattern."
Shaw glanced at her."You think there's another one."
"I think if there is, we need to see it before anyone walks through it."
Shaw nodded.He'd seen the first pattern from the air, had circled it for twenty minutes with Russ documenting every angle, and the memory of what they'd found—the precision, the body, the beauty he'd been unable to stop himself from commenting on—had clearly not released its hold.He understood what was at stake in a way that no briefing could have conveyed.
They reached the Caribou Trail corridor in twenty-two minutes.The forest below was denser here than near Brool Lake—heavier stands of spruce and pine, the canopy thick enough in places to obscure the ground entirely.But the clearings existed, scattered through the forest like gaps in a sentence, and Shaw began working them systematically, banking the helicopter in wide orbits that brought each opening into view.
The first three clearings were empty.Undisturbed snow, pristine surfaces, no marks of any kind.The fourth was too small—barely fifty feet across, hemmed by trees, not enough space for what Isla was looking for.
"Coming up on a larger meadow," Shaw said."South-southwest of the campsite coordinates, maybe half a mile."
The helicopter banked, and the trees fell away, and the clearing opened beneath them like a page being turned.
Isla's breath stopped.
