"Thank you, Mitch," Robert said quietly, the words forming clouds that the wind snatched away."For everything."
He rolled the body into the water.
The splash was shockingly loud in the pre-dawn silence, echoing off the ice like a gunshot.Robert held his breath, suddenly certain that someone had heard, that flashlights would appear on the shore any moment, that this would be the time his luck finally ran out.
But the night remained still.
He watched Mitch Connelly sink.The water embraced the body with something that looked almost like tenderness, dark currents pulling it down, down, down into the cold depths where Superior kept her secrets.The lake was deep here—over a hundred feet, according to the charts Robert had studied years ago—and the current would carry the body even deeper, into the lightless trenches where nothing human was ever meant to go.
By spring, when the ice melted and the shipping lanes opened again, Mitch would be somewhere in the middle of the lake.Maybe he'd wash up eventually, bloated and unrecognizable, on some Canadian shore.Maybe he'd stay down there forever, another ghost in the watery graveyard that stretched beneath the waves.
Either way, he was the lake's problem now.
Robert stood at the edge of the channel until the last ripples faded, until the water was black and still again, until his fingers had gone numb inside his thin gloves.The whispers were quiet now—truly quiet, the way they only got after a fresh offering.For a few days, maybe a week, he'd be able to think clearly.Sleep without dreams.Feel something like peace.
Then the hunger would start again.It always did.
They'll come looking, the lake reminded him, its voice distant and drowsy.Rivers.The FBI.They're still out there.Still hunting.
"I know."Robert turned away from the water and began the long walk back to his container."Let them hunt."
Special Agent Isla Rivers had been chasing him for almost a year now, ever since she'd started putting together the pattern of "accidents" that had marked his offerings to the lake.She was smart—smarter than the others who'd come before her, the local cops who'd written off his work as nothing more than tragic mishaps.She'd seen through his careful staging, recognized the hand behind what should have looked like chaos.
She'd almost caught him.Had stood close enough to look him in the eye before he'd slipped away into the darkness.
He wondered if she still dreamed about that night.He certainly did.
She won't stop, the lake whispered.She'll keep looking until she finds you.Or until you find her.
Robert smiled into the darkness, a thin, humorless expression that cracked his wind-chapped lips.The lake was right, of course.Isla Rivers wasn't the type to give up, to accept defeat, to let a case go cold just because the trail had gone quiet.She'd keep digging, keep watching, keep waiting.
And someday, their paths would cross again.
Behind him, the lake settled into silence, its hunger temporarily sated.Ahead, the scrapyard rose like a maze of shadows, hiding the container that had become his home.
Above, the first pale hints of dawn were beginning to lighten the eastern sky.
The Shipwrecker walked on, leaving no footprints in the frozen ground, disappearing into the maze of metal and rust as the night gave way to morning.
CHAPTER ONE
The ice cream was a terrible idea.
Isla Rivers stood outside The Scoop on Superior Street, her double scoop of salted caramel threatening to drip down her wrist despite the thirty-four-degree temperature, and wondered what had possessed her to order ice cream in early March.The answer was currently standing three feet away, a thirteen-year-old with her father's blue eyes and her mother's dimples, who had declared that ice cream was "scientifically proven to taste better when it's cold outside."
"She's not wrong," James Sullivan had said, and that had been that.
Isla had learned a long time ago that arguing with James about his daughter was pointless.In the almost three years they'd been partners—three years of crime scenes and stakeouts and long drives through Minnesota winters—she'd watched him negotiate with drug dealers, stare down suspects twice his size, and sit patiently through eight-hour interrogations without breaking a sweat.But when Emma Sullivan deployed those blue eyes and that particular tilt of her chin, the man folded like a cheap suit.
It was, Isla had to admit, one of his more endearing qualities.
Now she watched as Emma demolished her cotton candy monstrosity with the single-minded determination of a teenager who had learned that adults could be persuaded to make poor decisions on Sundays.James stood beside his daughter, his own modest vanilla cone already half-finished, the late afternoon light catching the gray at his temples.He was wearing the navy parka today—the one that had seen better days, the one he refused to replace despite the duct tape holding together a seam near the pocket.Isla had teased him about it once, and he'd told her it had been with him through every Minnesota winter for the past decade.
"It's got character," he'd said.
"It's got hypothermia waiting to happen," she'd replied.
But she understood.Some things you held onto, even when they were falling apart.Especially then.