"Why?"
Marshall set his keys on the desk.The small metallic sound was the loudest thing in the room."Because it wasn't relevant to what she was deciding.She'd already made up her mind.Telling her would have been—" He paused, choosing the word."Gratuitous."
"It would have been honest."
"It was your mistake to own.Not mine to report."
Isla held his gaze.In the unflattering light of the empty bullpen, with the case board behind her and the night pressing against the windows and three bodies in three clearings waiting for the morning and the strangers who would take over the work of understanding them, she made a decision.
"He's going to kill again tonight," she said.
Marshall didn't flinch.Didn't blink."Yes."
"Three nights, three victims.The acceleration isn't random—it's a pattern.He's building toward something.And Walker and Harris won't be here until noon, which means for the next fourteen hours, nobody is in the field."
"Nobody with case knowledge," Marshall corrected.
"State patrol is running perimeters.Sheriff's office has units on the main trailheads.But they're looking for a man in the woods, and this killer doesn't behave like a man in the woods.He behaves like someone who understands how searches work and builds his movements around them."
Marshall pulled out his chair and sat down.Not the posture of a man leaving—the posture of a man settling in."On the pier, before Shaw called.We were talking about a trap."
"We were."
"You said we'd need Channing's authorization."
"I did."
"We don't have that anymore."
"No," Isla said."We don't."
The fluorescent lights hummed.The case board held its images.Isla sat on the edge of her desk.She could feel the shape of the night ahead—its risks, its boundaries, the line between dedication and recklessness that she'd been walking since James's bed and the sound of ventilators and the loneliness of a woman whose partner existed only as a heartbeat on a monitor.
"The advisory cleared the backcountry," she said."Which means no targets.Which means he'll have to get creative—closer to the city, less isolated terrain, higher risk.Unless someone gives him what he's looking for."
"Someone alone," Marshall said."In the backcountry.At night."
"Someone who looks like a victim."
"Someone who's armed and trained and expecting him."
They looked at each other across the bullpen.The space between them had changed—not dramatically, not with the sudden shift of revelation, but with the quieter realignment of two people who had arrived at the same conclusion by different roads and were now standing on common ground.
Marshall spoke first."If we do this, it's without authorization.Without backup.Without anyone knowing where we are.If it goes wrong—"
"It goes on us.Not Kate.Not the Bureau."
"It could end both our careers."
"It could also end the killing."
Another silence.Marshall's eyes moved to the case board—to the photographs of three people who had walked into the wilderness and never walked out, whose last hours had been spent in the company of someone who saw in their deaths not tragedy but raw material for a design.
"I'm not sitting in this office while he takes a fourth," Marshall said.The words came out quiet but with a firmness she hadn't heard from him before—not the borrowed confidence of a new agent performing competence, but something earned.Something that had been forged in three crime scenes and a backcountry search and the education of watching a killer's work grow more ambitious with each iteration."Walker and Harris can have the case tomorrow.Tonight, we go."
Isla nodded.The decision had been made—not in this moment but in the accumulation of moments that had led to it, the spiral of evidence and frustration and loss that tightened with each body until the only possible center was action.
"We'll need the right location," she said."Somewhere that fits his selection criteria—open meadow, forest cover, accessible but remote.Close enough to the city that he could reach it in the timeframe, far enough that patrol units wouldn't stumble across the operation."
