He checked in by radio.Isla’s voice came back, compressed but recognizable: “Copy.I’m forty minutes from the Stony River meadow.Stay sharp.”
He started moving again toward the primary site—Shaw’s depression, a mile north of the Split Rock River.The forest thickened, then thinned, the terrain shifting as he descended into the corridor.
Maybe he’d be the one to catch the killer.The thought arrived unexpectedly, bright and sharp amid the fear, and he held it the way you hold a match in a dark room—carefully, aware of how quickly the flame could die.Maybe the killer had chosen Split Rock tonight.Maybe Marshall would find the meadow occupied, the pattern being carved, and he would radio Isla and draw his weapon and do the thing he’d trained four years to do.He imagined the approach, the confrontation, the arrest.Imagined standing in Kate Channing’s office afterward, not as the rookie who’d been sent to fill a chair but as the agent who’d ended the case.
He shook his head.Fantasy was a dangerous companion in the backcountry—it pulled your attention, softened your alertness, invited the kind of complacency that turned cautious people into careless ones.He refocused on the trail, on the sounds the forest made.
Or maybe they were wrong entirely.Maybe the killer wouldn’t show tonight.Maybe the near-miss at the Munger trail—Shaw’s helicopter descending, the abandoned pattern, the frantic flight through his own design—had scared him so badly that he’d stop.Go home.Sit in whatever house contained him and decide that the risk had grown too great.
But Marshall didn’t believe that.He’d stood in the snowfield where Mike Pierce had been laid out, and he'd seen the unfinished pattern—the outer rings perfect, the interior dissolving into chaos—and he’d understood something about the person who’d made it.Not the way Isla understood, with her profiler’s eye.But in a simpler, more instinctive way.He’d seen the incompletion and recognized how much it must have cost the person who’d carved those perfect outer rings to leave the center unfinished.A man like that didn’t stop because he was scared.A man like that stopped only when he was caught or killed.
The forest thinned.The terrain sloped downward, the trees pulling back, the air moving with more freedom.The primary meadow.Shaw's depression is sheltered by the surrounding ridge.
He slowed.Dimmed his headlamp to its faintest setting and approached the tree line the way Isla had taught him at the first crime scene—carefully, reading the ground before committing, letting the evidence speak before boots could silence it.His hand rested on his holstered weapon, the leather warm from his body heat against the bitter cold of everything else.
The meadow opened before him.Two hundred yards across, a broad bowl of snow sits in a natural depression, the surrounding forest rising on three sides like the walls of an amphitheater.Starlight lay across its surface in a pale wash, and the snow was pristine.Untouched.Another empty canvas.
Marshall exhaled.Relief and disappointment arrived simultaneously, canceling each other into a flat neutrality.He stood at the tree line and scanned the meadow methodically—left to right, near to far, then the opposite tree line, looking for movement, for shape, for the irregular geometry of a human form against the organic lines of the forest.
Nothing.
He reached for the radio.
The sound came from behind him.
Not loud.A compression of snow—the soft, unmistakable sound of a boot settling into the surface.Close.Too close.The closeness of someone who had been there for a while, waiting in the trees with the patience of a man who understood that stillness was a kind of invisibility.
Marshall's hand dropped from the radio to his weapon.The motion was trained and fast—four years of range practice and scenario drills coded into muscle memory that operated independently of the terror flooding his nervous system.His fingers found the grip, closed around it, and began the draw.
He didn’t finish.
The blow came from his right side—just outside his peripheral vision, delivered with a force that spoke of strength and the mechanical advantage of a short-handled tool swung in a tight, practiced arc.It struck the side of his head above the ear, and the world detonated.
The headlamp died.Or his eyes stopped working.Everything was the same color now—a searing white that was not light but pain, vast and absolute, filling every corner of his awareness.
He was on the ground.He knew this because the snow was against his face, and gravity had rearranged itself so that down was the only direction that existed.His hand was still reaching for the Glock, but his fingers had stopped obeying, the connection between intention and action severed by the impact still reverberating through his skull.
The gun fell from his holster.He heard the soft thud of it landing in the snow, and the sound of losing it was worse than the pain, because the gun was the last scrap of distance between himself and whatever stood behind him in the dark.
A hand gripped the collar of his jacket.Strong.Methodical.The grip of someone who had done this before—not with rage but with purpose, the way a craftsman grips a tool.
Marshall was dragged.The snow moved under him, cold against his face.He tried to reach the radio on his chest, to press the transmit button, to send anything—a word, a sound, the open carrier of a keyed mic.His hand made it to his chest.His fingers found the button.
He pressed it.Or thought he did.The darkness was very close now, pressing in from the edges, and the last thing Ben Marshall was aware of before consciousness released its grip was the sound of snow compressing under steady footsteps and the crystalline silence of a night that had been waiting for exactly this.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Isla stopped on the trail and pulled the radio from her chest.The digital display glowed green in the darkness—frequency correct, battery full, the device doing everything it was supposed to do except deliver the voice she needed to hear.
“Marshall.Radio check.”
Static.The thin, empty hiss of a channel with no one transmitting.
“Marshall.Respond.”
Nothing.
Five minutes late.Marshall was five minutes late on a check-in he’d agreed to with the quiet seriousness of a man who understood what a missed check-in would mean.He was methodical.Careful.The kind of agent who treated protocols the way some people treated promises—as things that mattered because you said they would.
