"You'd been up for over thirty hours.You'd just been through a violent confrontation that left a man dead at Enger Tower.If Sullivan had told you he was going, you would have insisted on joining—and then I'd have two agents in surgery instead of one."
"He didn't tell me because he knew I'd insist."Isla's voice was quiet now, stripped bare."He knew I'd go with him, and he thought I needed rest more than he needed backup, and now he's in there with a fractured skull because I was sleeping on my couch."
Kate returned the note.Her hand lingered on Isla's wrist—a brief pressure, firm and warm, so unlike the SAC's usual reserve that it landed like a shock.
"Sit down," Kate said.Not unkindly.
Isla didn't sit down.
She stood at the window, looking out at mostly darkness—the parking lot, distant buildings, bare trees, and beyond all of it, somewhere past the edge of the city, Lake Superior.She couldn't see it, but she could feel it.She'd always been able to feel it, ever since arriving in Duluth almost three years ago with a dead woman in Miami haunting her sleep and a transfer she'd viewed as punishment.The lake was always there—patient, cold—holding its secrets beneath water so deep that nothing surrendered to it was ever returned.
Brune was out there.Following whatever mad compass the lake's whispers provided.He'd been cornered in that container and come out swinging with the desperate violence of a caged animal.He'd put James on the ground and walked away, and the city had swallowed him whole.
But the city wouldn't hold him forever.Brune was compelled.The lake called and he answered, and sooner or later the compulsion would drive him to the water, to the docks, to the places where people became vulnerable to a man who made murder look like accidents.
He would kill again.If he hadn't already.
Isla pressed her forehead against the cold glass.Behind her, Kate was on the phone—quiet, controlled, issuing orders that would set a manhunt into motion.More agents, more search teams, every port and dock and marina from Duluth to the Canadian border.
But Isla's mind was already at the scrapyard, standing in front of the shipping container where James had nearly died.The container would tell a story.Every crime scene told a story, if you knew how to listen.And Brune's story had been writing itself across this city for decades in a language of drownings and dock accidents and bodies the lake never gave back.
She'd been learning that language.She'd found him once—identified him, named him, forced him into the light—and he'd run into the margins of a city he knew better than anyone alive.A fisherman's son who'd grown up on these shores and learned their every hiding place the way other children learned their own backyards.
He wouldn't run forever.The lake wouldn't let him.
Neither would she.
"The surgeon is Dr.Ahuja," Kate said, appearing beside her with two cups of vending machine coffee."Twelve years at St.Luke's, neurosurgery.She's good."
Isla took the cup.It burned her palm through the thin paper, and she held on to that—the small, sharp reality of it—because the night had taken on the dislocating quality of a nightmare.
"How long?"
"Three to five hours, depending on what they find."Kate sipped her coffee."I've called Stacey.She's keeping Emma home from school and will bring her when there's news."
Emma.The name pierced something in Isla's chest she hadn't known was still unarmored.Thirteen years old, her father's world, a girl Isla had met exactly four times—each time with an expression that was equal parts curiosity and wariness, as if trying to determine what this woman meant to the father she adored.
"Does Emma know?"
"She knows he's hurt.Stacey said she'd tell her what she needed to when the time came."
"I need to get to the scrapyard," Isla said.
"No."Quiet but absolute."Not tonight.The scene is being processed and they don't need you contaminating their work while you're running on three hours of sleep and more guilt than any one person should carry."
"Kate—"
"I'll have a preliminary report on your desk by eight.You will read it after you've had rest and a meal that doesn't come from a vending machine."The SAC turned to face her."Sullivan wouldn't want you to run yourself into the ground over this."
"Sullivan doesn't get a vote right now."
The words came out harder than she'd intended.Kate absorbed them without flinching.
"No.He doesn't.Which is why you need to be the one thinking clearly.For both of you."
Isla wanted to argue.Wanted to push past the logic and do what every instinct was screaming at her to do—get to the scene, pick up the trail, hunt Brune through the dark until she found him.She could feel the compulsion like a physical force, the same driven urgency that had gotten her through every case in Duluth.
But Kate was right.The admission sat in her chest like a stone.
