She wasn't any good to James if she couldn't think straight.Wasn't any good to anyone—least of all to the thirteen-year-old girl who might be about to lose her father because Isla hadn't been awake to answer a note left on a coffee table.
"I'm not leaving the hospital," she said.
Kate nodded once."I'll have someone bring you a change of clothes and your laptop.The report will come to your email as soon as it's ready."She paused at the door."And Isla?Eat something.That's an order."
Then she was gone.
Isla sat.
The waiting room was nearly empty—a young couple in the far corner, the woman asleep on the man's shoulder, and an older gentleman reading a paperback.Ordinary people in the grip of ordinary fear, waiting for news from behind doors that separated the living from the dying.
She pulled the note from her pocket again.
Gone to check on the Brune search.Call me when you wake up.—J
Call me when you wake up.Such a simple sentence.Such an ordinary assumption—that she would wake up, that she would call, that he would answer, that the world would continue along its familiar lines.He'd written it with the casual confidence of a man who expected to be reachable when her name appeared on his screen.
She thought about his hand holding hers on the tailgate of the ambulance.The dried blood between their palms.The way he'd looked at her as if she were something he was afraid of losing, and the way she'd looked back knowing she was afraid of exactly the same thing but unable to name it.
Through the window, the sky was beginning to show the faintest light along the eastern edge.Not dawn—too early—but the promise of it.And beneath that lightening sky, somewhere in the sprawl of city and shore and lake, Robert Brune was running.
Isla closed her eyes.James Sullivan was alive.The surgeons were working.The net was closing.
And when she opened her eyes again, when the coffee was cold and the report was in her inbox and dawn had broken over Lake Superior, she would go to the scrapyard.She would stand where James had stood and see what he had seen.She would find the thread that Brune had left behind—the thread that every killer left, no matter how careful, no matter how desperate—and she would follow it.
All the way to the water, if she had to.
All the way to the end.
CHAPTER TWO
She lasted forty-seven minutes.
Forty-seven minutes of sitting in the surgical waiting room with vending machine coffee going cold in her hand and the fluorescent lights pressing down on her like something with weight.Forty-seven minutes of watching the clock above the nurses' station tick through increments that felt like geological epochs while behind the double doors at the end of the corridor, surgeons worked to repair the damage a killer had done to the skull of a man who had held her hand six hours ago.
Then she stood, dropped the coffee in the trash, and walked out.
The night hit her like a reprimand.She'd left the hospital through a side exit to avoid Kate's people in the lobby—an FBI field coordinator Kate had stationed there, presumably to keep Isla from doing exactly what she was doing—and the cold was immediate, absolute, the kind that crawled inside your lungs and set up residence.She still didn't have a coat.
She didn't care.
Her car started on the second try, the engine protesting the cold with a shudder that rattled through the chassis.Isla pulled out of the parking lot and turned north, toward the industrial district, toward the scrapyard where James Sullivan was still bleeding into the ground in some version of events that hadn't stopped playing behind her eyes since Kate's phone call.
The streets were empty.Duluth at this hour—somewhere between the dead center of the night and the first suggestion of morning—was a city of absence.Streetlights casting their amber cones over pavement that gleamed with black ice.Storefronts dark behind frost-glazed glass.The occasional set of headlights in the distance, appearing and vanishing like the running lights of ships passing in the dark.
She drove too fast.Knew she was driving too fast and didn't ease off the accelerator because the alternative was slowing down, and slowing down meant thinking, and thinking meant the image of James face-down on ground with his hand stretched toward a phone he couldn't reach.So she took the turns sharp and felt the tires catch on ice and correct, and she kept her eyes on the road and her mind on the destination and she did not think about what the surgeon was doing right now to the inside of James Sullivan's skull.
Hendrickson's Salvage & Scrap announced itself first as a change in the landscape—the residential blocks giving way to warehouses and industrial lots, the buildings growing larger and less inhabited, until the road dead-ended at a chain-link fence topped with razor wire that enclosed what looked, in the darkness, like the skeletal remains of a mechanical civilization.
Two cruisers sat at the gate, their light bars dark, their engines running for warmth.Crime scene tape stretched across the entrance in an X pattern, and beyond it Isla could see the orange glow of portable work lights deep inside the yard, where the forensics team was still processing whatever James had found.
She parked behind the cruisers and got out.The cold clamped down on her instantly, finding every gap in her layering—the collar of her blazer, the cuffs of her sleeves, the thin spot at her lower back where the thermal undershirt had ridden up.She ignored it.She'd been ignoring cold in this city.It was one of the few things she'd gotten good at.
A uniformed officer materialized from the nearest cruiser as she approached the tape.Young, stocky, breath fogging around his face like a personal weather system.
"Ma'am, this area is—" He stopped when she held up her badge.Looked at it, then at her, and something shifted in his expression—recognition or sympathy or some combination of the two."Agent Rivers.We were told you might—I mean, SAC Channing said—"
"I know what she said."Isla ducked under the tape."I won't disturb the scene.I need to see it."
