"Twenty minutes."He was already turning toward his daughter, his shoulders set with that particular tension she knew too well."Don't go in without me."
She watched him go, watched him say something to Emma that made her face fall before she masked it with teenage indifference.Watched them walk away together, Emma glancing back once with an expression that was too knowing for a thirteen-year-old.The girl had grown up with a father in law enforcement; she understood what an interrupted Sunday meant.
The ice cream was melting in Isla's hand.She threw it in the nearest trash can and started walking toward her car, her sensible boots clicking against the pavement, the lake glittering cold and indifferent in the distance.
Robert Brune had fed the lake again.
And Isla was going to find out who he'd taken.
CHAPTER TWO
The body had been in the water long enough to bloat.
Isla stood at the edge of the rocky shoreline, her boots crunching on frost-hardened gravel, and forced herself to look.Really look.The way Dr.Delgado had taught her back in Quantico, back when she'd been young enough to believe that training could prepare you for moments like this.
See the victim, he'd said.Not the horror.The victim.
This victim had been identified as Mitch Connelly via the wallet in his pocket, according to the first responders.He laid on his back where the Coast Guard had positioned him, his work clothes waterlogged and stiff with ice, his face turned toward the gray March sky.The bloating had distorted his features—cheeks swollen, eyes bulging beneath closed lids, skin taking on that particular waxy pallor that came from extended submersion in cold water.But Isla could still see the man beneath the damage.Broad shoulders.Thick chest.The kind of build that came from decades of physical labor.
The kind of build that would have made him hard to overpower.
"Body was caught in debris about fifty yards out," Officer Dave Scale was saying, gesturing toward the water.He was a compact man in his forties, his Coast Guard uniform crisp despite the circumstances, his voice carrying that carefully neutral tone she'd heard from a hundred first responders at a hundred crime scenes."Fishing vessel spotted him around noon.We got him to shore about an hour ago."
"You moved him."
"Had to.Ice was breaking up in that section, and we couldn't risk losing him."Scale met her gaze steadily."We documented everything first.Photos, measurements, the works.My team knows how to handle evidence, Agent Rivers."
Isla nodded, the tension in her shoulders easing slightly.The Coast Guard had been good partners throughout the LSK investigation—better than some law enforcement agencies she'd worked with over the years.They understood the lake.Understood what it could do to evidence, to bodies, to hope.
"Walk me through it," she said.
Scale gestured toward the water.The lake stretched out before them, gray and choppy, whitecaps forming where the wind cut across the surface.Two months ago, this whole section would have been frozen solid.Now the ice was retreating, the annual thaw beginning its slow transformation of Superior from frozen wasteland to shipping lane.It was early for a body to surface—usually the lake held onto its dead until late spring, when the warming water released them like secrets reluctantly confessed.
But Mitch Connelly hadn't been in the water that long.
"Debris field is recent," Scale said, as if reading her thoughts."Storm last week broke up some of the ice near the shore, created a pocket where things can collect.Body probably got caught in the current and pushed toward it."He paused."You can see the trauma to the back of the head.That's what made us call you."
Isla crouched beside the body, her knees protesting against the cold ground.The wound was there, just as Scale had described—a depression at the base of the skull, the kind of impact that could have come from a fall onto a dock or a collision with a boat hull.
Or a calculated blow designed to look like an accident.
"Dr.Henley," Isla called over her shoulder."What are you seeing?"
Dr.Patricia Henley approached with the measured pace of someone who had spent decades walking toward the worst humanity had to offer.The medical examiner was a tall woman in her late fifties, her gray-streaked hair pulled back in a practical braid, her face weathered by Minnesota winters and the particular exhaustion that came from spending your career cataloguing the dead.She'd been one of the first people to take Isla seriously when she'd started connecting the dots between supposed accidents along the lakeshore—the "drowning victims" who all seemed to have head trauma, the bodies that surfaced with injuries too consistent to be coincidental.
Henley knelt on the other side of Mitch Connelly's body and pulled on a fresh pair of gloves.Her hands moved with practiced efficiency, examining the wound first, then tilting the head to study the angle of impact.
"Blunt force trauma to the occipital region," she said."Similar placement to the others—base of the skull, consistent with our Lake Superior cases."She paused, her fingers probing the edges of the wound."But something's off."
"What do you mean?"
Henley looked up, her eyes meeting Isla's."The bleeding pattern.With a wound like this, if the victim were alive at the time of impact, we'd expect significant hemorrhaging—the heart would still be pumping, blood would pool and spread."She shook her head slowly."But this wound barely bled at all.The tissues around the injury site show minimal blood infiltration."
Isla felt her pulse quicken."You're saying the head wound was inflicted post-mortem."
"That's exactly what I'm saying.This man was already dead when someone struck the back of his skull."Henley's gloved hands moved to the victim's throat, pressing gently against the swollen flesh."And I think I know what actually killed him.Look here—even with the bloating, you can see the bruising pattern around the neck.And the petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes and face is significant.Burst blood vessels, consistent with asphyxiation."
"He was strangled."