“Dark clothing, moving fast toward the tree line.I lost visual when he entered the canopy.”Shaw’s voice steadied.“The body is still there.The pattern is partially complete—looks like he was still working when he heard me coming.”
“The Munger trail—how far from the city?”
“Seven, eight miles.There’s a snowmobile in the meadow.This victim might have been on a sled.”
Isla reached her car.Marshall was already at the passenger side.She met his eyes over the roof—amber meeting dark brown, the argument on the pier replaced entirely by the particular communion of two agents being handed the very thing they’d been waiting for.But it also spoke of trust.An understanding between them as actual partners.
“Shaw, maintain orbit.Do not land.Mark the direction he went.I’m en route.”
She killed the call and started the engine.Marshall had his phone out.
“State patrol?”
“Everybody.State patrol, sheriff’s office, Duluth PD.Every unit that can get to the Munger trail in twenty minutes.And call Channing—tell her we have a third body and a possible sighting of our killer.”
The city blurred past the windows as she drove north.Somewhere ahead, in the dark corridor of the Munger trail, a helicopter was circling a clearing where a body lay at the center of an unfinished design and a killer had run into the trees.
She thought about what Marshall had said on the pier.About setting a trap.
They hadn’t needed to.The killer had come to them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Munger trail access road was a chaos of light and motion.State patrol cruisers angled across the parking area with light bars painting the tree line in alternating blue and red, the colors reflected off the snow in a pulsing rhythm.Deputies pulled equipment from a sheriff’s truck with the grim efficiency of people who had done this before.
Isla was out of the car before the engine finished dying.A state patrol sergeant met them at the trailhead.
"Agent Rivers.The helicopter crew has been maintaining orbit.Clearing is approximately two miles along the main trail.Snowmobiles are staged."
“No one enters that clearing until I’m on scene,” Isla said.“The pattern is evidence.Every line, every trench—it stays intact.”
The sergeant nodded.He’d heard about the first scene.
The snowmobiles carried them into the forest, headlamps cutting tunnels through darkness.Isla gripped the passenger holds as the machine plowed through drifts, the trail winding through spruce and birch that pressed close on either side.She heard the helicopter before she saw the clearing—the Bell's rotors cutting through the engine noise—and then the trees opened, and Shaw's searchlight was painting the scene from three hundred feet.
The body was at the center.
Young.That was the first thing—the proportions, the clothing of someone who hadn’t yet learned that invincibility was a lie.He lay on his back in the position she’d come to recognize with a sickness that deepened each time: arms extended, legs together, axis aligned with the surrounding geometry.A snowmobile helmet lay nearby, removed with a care grotesquely incongruent with what had preceded it.
Around him, the pattern.
The most complex yet—or would have been.Even at ground level, Isla could see the killer had been building something that surpassed both the Gallagher spiral and the Lloyd mandala.Concentric shapes, intersecting lines, motifs she couldn’t fully parse in the searchlight’s moving glare.The outer rings were complete—carved with the impossible precision she’d come to expect, trenches clean-edged and geometrically exact.
But the inner portion was wrong.
Lines closest to the body trailed off into shallow, hurried scratches that abandoned their geometric intention partway through.And cutting through the design like a wound through a painting was a single chaotic trail of footprints leading from the body toward the northern tree line.Deep prints, widely spaced—someone running hard through knee-deep snow.
The killer’s own footprints.The first time they’d ever been left outside a pattern’s lines.
He’d heard the helicopter.He’d been working—carving the innermost elements—and he’d heard the rotors and understood what they meant.And he’d run.Abandoned his work, ruined his own pattern with the frantic passage of his escape.
It must have cost him something, Isla thought.A man who spent hours carving perfect geometry without stepping outside the lines would not have destroyed his own work easily.The footprints through the pattern were an act of desperation.Shaw’s helicopter had forced him to violate the only thing that seemed to matter.
“The trail goes north,” Marshall said, scanning the tree line with his flashlight.“Clear prints.He wasn’t trying to hide his tracks this time.”
“He didn’t have time.”Isla swept her flashlight across the clearing one final time, burning the image into memory, then turned toward the northern tree line.“We’re going in after him.”
She was already moving, Marshall beside her, two deputies falling in behind.The killer's prints entered the forest in deep, urgent depressions—each one a record of the speed and weight of the man who'd made them.The trail was clearer than anything from the previous scenes, where the killer's exits had been erased by patience.This time, there had been no patience.This was pure flight.
