By eleven o'clock, Isla had commandeered one of the conference room's computers and surrounded herself with a fortress of files, printouts, and hastily scrawled notes.The coffee had been replaced by water—she'd learned the hard way that too much caffeine made her hands shake when she was trying to read fine print—and the morning light streaming through the windows had taken on the particular quality of time passing faster than she wanted it to.
Catherine Wells's file lay open beside her keyboard, its contents spread across the table like evidence at a trial.Employment records.Performance evaluations.The ranger logs that documented her patrols with meticulous detail.
That was the first thing Isla had noticed—the logs were thorough.More thorough than they needed to be, really.Every patrol route documented, every observation recorded, every deviation from standard procedure explained and justified.It was the kind of documentation that came from someone who had been trained to expect scrutiny, or who had learned through painful experience that records could save you when memories failed.
The unauthorized night patrols were there too, but they weren't what Isla had expected.Instead of gaps and suspicious absences, the logs showed a pattern of extra coverage—Wells adding hours to her shifts, walking routes that weren't assigned to her, checking on locations that had been flagged as potential trouble spots.The notes were detailed, professional, almost obsessive in their attention to detail.
2/15, 11:47 PM: Upper falls overlook.No activity.Ice formations stable.Trail conditions acceptable for morning traffic.
2/18, 10:23 PM: Lester River corridor.Possible campfire remnants near eastern trailhead.Reported to supervisor.
2/22, 12:15 AM: Gooseberry upper parking lot.Unusual tire tracks noted.Possibly late-arriving visitor, possibly unauthorized access.Photographed for documentation.
Isla flipped through page after page of similar entries, watching the pattern emerge.Catherine Wells wasn't sneaking around the parks looking for victims—she was conducting her own private surveillance operation, trying to catch whatever threat she'd convinced herself was lurking in the wilderness she loved.
The psychiatrist's notes confirmed what Isla had begun to suspect.Wells had been referred for evaluation six months ago, after a supervisor noticed the increasing erratic behavior that Ranger Hendricks had mentioned.The diagnosis was straightforward: post-traumatic stress disorder, unresolved grief, hypervigilance triggered by her brother's death and manifesting as an obsessive need to prevent similar tragedies.
Patient exhibits classic symptoms of survivor's guilt,the notes read.Blames herself for brother's death despite no reasonable culpability.Has transferred protective instincts onto the park system as a whole, viewing wilderness areas as inherently dangerous spaces that require constant monitoring.Recommends therapy and possible medical leave.
Wells had declined the medical leave.Had continued working, continued patrolling, continued trying to protect landscapes that had already taken someone she loved.
It was sad.Tragic, even.But it wasn't the profile of a killer.
The security footage had sealed it.Isla had requested recordings from every park facility in the region, and the timestamps told a story that Catherine Wells couldn't have manufactured.During the window when Derek Paulson was being killed at Hawk Ridge, Wells had been at ranger headquarters, signing in for her shift and attending a mandatory safety briefing.During Jennifer Hayes's murder, she'd been conducting a legitimate patrol of a different section of the park system, her movements documented by multiple security cameras and corroborated by radio check-ins.
She couldn't have committed the murders.Physically, logistically, impossibly—Catherine Wells was not their killer.
Isla pushed back from the desk, rubbing her eyes against the strain of too many hours staring at screens.Another lead eliminated.Another suspect cleared.And three photographers still dead, their killer still free, still planning whatever came next.
She turned to the whiteboard, to the crime scene photographs she'd pinned there that morning.The staging was so precise—the positioning of the bodies, the angles of the cameras, the specific compositions that seemed to reference something Isla couldn't quite identify.Thomas Kramer had talked about photographers recreating other people's visions, about the "theft" of compositions that had been captured decades ago.
What if that was the key?
The killer wasn't just murdering photographers—they were recreating specific images.Historical photographs that the victims had allegedly copied, compositions that belonged to someone else.The staging wasn't random artistry; it was deliberate homage.Or maybe deliberate punishment.
But homage to whom?Punishment for what?
Isla needed someone who understood the history of Duluth landscape photography.Someone who could look at the crime scene compositions and identify what they were referencing.Someone who had spent their life studying the evolution of images in this region.
Thomas Kramer.
The name surfaced with the uncomfortable weight of a lead she'd already dismissed.Kramer wasn't their killer—the surveillance had proven that, definitively and beyond doubt.But he was an expert.Possibly the only expert who could help her see what she was missing.
She gathered the crime scene photographs and headed for the door.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The building on East Fourth Street looked even more weathered in the harsh light of late morning, its brick facade bearing the scars of decades of Minnesota winters.Isla climbed the front steps and found the security door propped open with the same folded newspaper—a continuity that seemed almost absurd given everything that had happened since her last visit.
Thomas Kramer answered her knock after a long pause, his thin frame appearing in the doorway with the careful deliberation of someone who had learned to negotiate every movement with a body that was failing him.His wire-rimmed glasses sat slightly askew on his face, and his cardigan—the same one he'd been wearing before, or one identical to it—hung on shoulders that seemed even more diminished than they had two days ago.
“Agent Rivers.”His voice carried no surprise, only a kind of weary resignation.“I wondered when you’d be back.”
“May I come in?”
He stepped aside without answering, gesturing her into the apartment that had become a temple to the photography he’d devoted his life to preserving.The walls still pressed in with their burden of images—the vintage prints, the framed reproductions, the endless documentation of Lake Superior and its shores captured across more than a century of photographic history.
“I assume this isn’t a social call,” Kramer said, shuffling toward his worn armchair.“Have there been more murders?”