Nothing moved.
Probably an animal, he told himself.Deer were common in the park, even in winter.Foxes, too.He'd photographed both dozens of times, knew their sounds and their silences.
But his hand went to his chest pocket anyway, fingers closing around the solid weight of his phone.
Another sound.Closer this time.
The crunch of snow beneath a boot.
Robert's breath caught.He pulled out his phone, thumb already moving toward Marcus's contact, toward 911, toward anything that might bring help to this isolated overlook where he'd stupidly come alone despite everything he knew—
A figure emerged from the tree line.
Robert's mouth opened to call out—a warning, a greeting, something—but the figure moved too fast, closing the distance with a speed that seemed impossible, and Robert understood in one terrible instant that he'd been wrong about everything.
Wrong about different circles.
Wrong about different enemies.
Wrong about being careful.
He fumbled with the phone, his cold fingers clumsy on the screen.The figure was almost on him now, and Robert turned to run, to scream, to do anything except stand frozen while death came for him—
The blow caught him at the base of the skull.
White-hot.Final.
Robert Yamada fell forward, his phone tumbling from his fingers into the snow, its screen still glowing with Marcus's contact photo—the two of them at Pride last summer, smiling in the Minneapolis sunlight, alive and together and impossibly far from this frozen place.
The falls roared on, indifferent, as the figure bent over Robert's body and began the careful work of composition.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The cold woke her before the alarm.
Isla lay in the darkness of her bedroom, her breath forming small clouds that dissolved into nothing, and knew before she opened her eyes that the heater had failed again.The radiator beneath her window sat silent and cold, its usual metallic ticking conspicuously absent.Through the frost-etched glass, Lake Superior stretched gray and endless toward a horizon that was only beginning to lighten with the first hints of dawn.
She pulled the blankets tighter around her shoulders and stared at the ceiling, her mind already churning through the details that had kept her at the office until well past midnight.Thomas Kramer's student lists.Thirty years of names, faces, academic records—hundreds of potential suspects reduced, through hours of cross-referencing and background checks, to a handful of maybes and a mountain of dead ends.
Her phone showed 6:47 AM.Thursday, March 9.Less than twenty-four hours since Derek Paulson's body had been found at Hawk Ridge, and they were no closer to catching his killer than they'd been when the first call came in.
Isla threw back the covers and forced herself upright, her bare feet hitting the cold hardwood floor with a shock that traveled up her spine.The apartment was freezing—not the merely-uncomfortable cold of a Minnesota morning, but the bone-deep chill that came from a heating system that had given up entirely.Her landlord had fixed it twice already this winter, and twice it had failed again within weeks.
She padded to the kitchen in wool socks and the oversized FBI Academy sweatshirt she'd owned since Quantico, her arms wrapped around herself against the cold.The coffee maker—the one luxury she'd splurged on when she'd first arrived in Duluth, back when she'd still believed she might learn to love this frozen purgatory—sat waiting on the counter.She filled it with water, measured grounds with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd performed this ritual thousands of times, and pressed the button that would transform raw materials into something approaching consciousness.
While the coffee brewed, she stood at the window and watched the lake.
It was still half-frozen at this time of year, great sheets of ice stretching from the shore toward the shipping lanes, their surfaces glinting silver in the pale morning light.In another month, the thaw would be complete—the ice would break apart, the ore boats would resume their endless journeys between Duluth and the steel mills of the east, and Lake Superior would transform from frozen wasteland to working waterway.
But for now, the lake kept its secrets beneath a shell of ice and silence.
They're still out there, she thought.Both of them.
Robert Brune, the Lake Superior Killer, hiding somewhere in the maze of warehouses and scrapyards that lined the waterfront.The photographer killer—still nameless, still faceless—stalking the scenic overlooks where artists came to capture beauty and found death instead.
Two monsters.One city.And Isla standing at her kitchen window, watching the ice and wondering which one would claim another victim first.
The coffee maker beeped.She poured herself a cup, black and bitter, and carried it to the small table where she'd spread out the files she'd brought home from the office.The student lists stared up at her—names highlighted in yellow, notes scrawled in the margins, connections that might mean everything or nothing at all.