He wouldn’t be late unless he couldn’t respond.
The fear arrived all at once—not gradual but sudden and total.It filled her body with the chemical urgency of a system that understood, before the conscious mind had finished calculating, that something had gone very wrong.
She pulled the map from her jacket.Marshall would have reached the primary meadow by now—the depression a mile north of the river.
Isla was thirty miles north.
Thirty miles.She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and forced the panic back beneath the training.Think.Think like you’ve been trained to think.
She keyed the radio once more.“Marshall, if you can hear me, hold on.I’m coming.”
Then she turned and ran.
Back up the trail she'd spent forty minutes descending, back through the spruce and birch and the darkness that pressed against her like a living thing.Her snowshoes bit the surface and she pushed the pace past sustainable into something fueled by adrenaline.
The car was at the junction.She reached it in twenty-two minutes, a pace that left her lungs burning and her legs shaking.She threw the snowshoes in back, started the engine.The tires spun once on ice before catching, and then she was moving, the headlights cutting tunnels through the darkness, County Road 2 unwinding ahead of her.She drove fast—faster than the road deserved, faster than training permitted, the car sliding on curves the cold had polished to glass.
She called Shaw as she drove, one hand on the wheel.
“Shaw.It’s Rivers.I’ve lost contact with Marshall in the Split Rock corridor.I need you in the air now.”
Shaw’s voice came back without the fog of sleep—he’d been awake, waiting.“I can be airborne in twenty minutes.Where am I going?”
“Split Rock River headwaters.The primary meadow—the depression a mile north of the river.”
“Understood.County EMS staging?”
“Trailhead.No sirens, no lights until you’re over the site.If the killer is there, I don’t want him running again.”
A pause.“Rivers.Be careful.”
She pressed the accelerator harder.
***
The Split Rock trailhead was dark and empty.Marshall’s vehicle sat at the pull-off, engine cold, windows already filming with frost.
Isla was out of the car with her weapon drawn before the engine finished ticking.She snapped on the snowshoes and found Marshall’s trail—a single line of prints heading southeast into the forest.He'd gone to Split Rock.She'd been wrong about the site.She'd been wrong and Marshall had been where she wasn't, and she was still thirty miles too far north
She followed.
His prints were steady, evenly spaced, the stride of a man moving with purpose.No signs of haste, no deviations.He’d been walking his route exactly as planned.Isla pushed the pace to its maximum, each step a controlled lunge through the snow.She didn’t call out—didn’t dare, because her voice would carry for a mile in the cold air and she would lose the only advantage she might still have.
The first meadow was undisturbed.Marshall’s tracks skirted its western edge and continued southeast.She followed deeper into the corridor, the terrain descending into the depression.
His tracks stopped at the tree line overlooking the primary meadow.
No—they didn’t stop.They changed.The steady prints collapsed into a churned mess of displaced snow—the violent disruption of someone whose weight had shifted suddenly and catastrophically from vertical to horizontal.Isla crouched and observed the scene with her headlamp.
Blood.
A spray of droplets across the surface, dark against white, already crystallizing in the cold.And beside the blood, pressed into the churned snow where it had fallen from a hand that could no longer hold it, Marshall’s service weapon.The Glock lay on its side, the barrel half-buried.She press-checked it—full magazine, round in the chamber.He hadn’t fired.Hadn’t had time.
She tucked his weapon into her waistband and followed what came next.
A drag trail.Two parallel furrows in the snow where heels had scraped the surface, flanked by the deep, regular prints of someone walking with a heavy load.Size eleven or twelve, heavy-treaded boots—the same profile from Lloyd’s campsite, the same stride she’d studied in photographs for three days.The prints spoke of effort, but not urgency.The killer was in no hurry.He had the night ahead of him and the work to do and no reason to believe anyone was coming.
The killer was dragging Marshall toward the meadow.
