"I'm not hiking," Pierce said.He pulled the lace tight and started on the other boot."I'm riding.There's a difference."
"The difference being what?You'll die faster?"
"The difference being I'll be doing forty miles an hour on a machine with a six-hundred-cc engine.What's the guy going to do, chase me on foot through three feet of powder?"Pierce grabbed his helmet from the hook by the door."I'll be on the Munger trail, not camped out in the middle of nowhere.Quick run, maybe an hour.The snow's perfect right now—you know what it's going to look like by morning?Tracked out.Every sled in the county's going to be on that trail at first light."
Tran said nothing.The silence was its own argument—the silence of a twenty-year-old who recognized stupidity but had roomed with Pierce long enough to know that arguing with it was like arguing with weather.
"One hour," Pierce said."I'll text you when I'm back."
He loaded the board into the cargo rack and fired up the Arctic Cat in the lot behind their duplex.The engine caught on the first pull—clean and loud in the cold air, the sound bouncing off the neighboring houses.The temperature had dropped since afternoon, and the snow that had been falling all day had shifted from the fat, lazy flakes of a warm system to the fine, dry crystals that meant real cold was settling in.Good snow.The kind that compressed under a board's edge and threw up a clean rooster tail behind a sled and made everything in the world feel simple and fast and exactly right.
Pierce pulled onto the access road that connected to the Munger trail system and opened the throttle.
The city fell away quickly.Streetlights gave way to tree-lined corridors, and the trail wound through a stretch of state forest where the only light was the sled's headlamp cutting a bright cone through the darkness.The snow was untouched—no tracks, no ruts, no evidence that anyone else had been out here since the storm.The advisory had done its work.The backcountry was empty, and the emptiness felt less like danger and more like a gift.The whole trail to himself.Fresh powder so deep the sled's skis disappeared into it with every turn, the engine humming beneath him, the cold air sharp and clean against the strip of exposed skin between his helmet and his collar.
He was twenty-one years old and he was invincible.That was the calculation, unexamined and absolute, that underwrote every decision he'd made since arriving at UMD three years ago—the late-night drives, the ice climbing without a partner, the conviction that bad things happened to people who weren't paying attention and Mike Pierce was always paying attention.
He saw the clearing ahead and eased off the throttle.A meadow opened on the right side of the trail—broad and white and untouched, the kind of open snowfield that begged for turns.He could unload the board here, hike up the gentle slope on the far side, and ride it back down.Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty.Then back on the sled and home before Tran had time to finish whatever documentary he was pretending to watch.
Pierce slowed to a crawl.The headlamp swept the tree line as the trail curved, illuminating trunks and branches and the endless white between them.
He never saw the figure step out.
Something struck him from the left—not from ahead, not from behind, but from the side, where the trees pressed closest to the trail.A body, heavy and fast, slamming into him with enough force to tear him off the sled entirely.The Arctic Cat kept going, riderless, before the kill switch lanyard snapped taut and the engine died.
Pierce hit the snow hard.His shoulder took the impact first, then his head—the helmet absorbing enough of the blow to keep him conscious but not enough to stop the world from tilting sideways, the trees and sky and snow trading places in a sickening rotation that refused to settle.He was on his back.He was looking up at branches and falling flakes and his breath was coming in short, ragged bursts that fogged inside his visor.
Get up.
The thought arrived with animal clarity—the part of his brain that predated college and confidence and the belief in his own invincibility, the part that understood impact and proximity and the danger of being on the ground when something wanted him there.
He rolled onto his side.Pain bloomed in his left shoulder—deep, structural, the kind of pain that meant something had moved where it shouldn't have.He pushed up with his right arm and made it to one knee and the world was still tilting but he was moving, he was getting up, he was—
The shape came out of the darkness to his left.Not running.Walking.Moving through the deep snow with a steady, unhurried stride that was worse than speed, that communicated something Pierce's twenty-one-year-old mind couldn't fully process but his body understood with perfect, devastating clarity.
He saw the hammer.A flash in the headlamp's dying glow—metal, short-handled, raised above a shoulder he couldn't see clearly because the figure was backlit by the snow's ambient luminescence and the details were lost in the contrast between dark and white.
Pierce tried to stand.His left leg buckled—something wrong with the knee, the ankle, something—and he went back down to both knees in the snow, his right hand raised in front of him in a gesture that was not defense but supplication, the universal language of a body that had just discovered it was not invincible after all.
The hammer came down.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The docks had become her confessional.
Every night for the past week—longer, if she was honest—Isla had driven to the waterfront after dark and walked.Past the loading bays where forklifts sat dormant.Past the coils of rope and bollards and container stacks rising like monoliths against the sky.Past the security lights that carved hard white cones into the darkness, each one a stage she stepped onto and stood in, deliberate, visible, daring the shadows to produce the man she’d been hunting for months.
Robert Brune.The Lake Superior Killer.
She reached the end of the eastern pier with her hand on her Glock and her breath fogging in the March air.The ice shelf along the harbor was fracturing, great plates separating with the slow inevitability of a season turning, and the sounds the lake made at night had shifted—less glacial silence, more restless movement.Water finding its way back to itself.
She stood in the last security light and let it illuminate her.The ponytail, the badge at her belt.A woman standing alone on a dock at night with a weapon on her hip.
Come on, Brune.I’m right here.
She knew it was irrational.Brune’s photograph was taped to the break room wall of every dock operation within five miles; patrols had tripled since James’s attack.Forty years of killing had taught Brune the difference between compulsion and recklessness.But Isla came anyway, because the anger had to go somewhere, and the hospital was too quiet and her apartment was too empty and the field office after dark was a place where James’s absence pressed against her like a physical weight.
She turned from the water and started back along the pier.Halfway down, she saw the movement.
