Isla followed the trail out of the trees and onto the open snowfield.At the far edge—perhaps a hundred yards away—she could see movement.A shape, dark against the snow, moving with the steady, unhurried rhythm she’d come to associate with everything this killer did.
He was working.
Even from this distance she could see the beginnings of a pattern.Lines curving outward from a dark mass at the center that was the shape and size of a human body.The first trenches of what would become another design carved with the patience of a man who believed his art was worth more than the lives it consumed.
Isla keyed the radio.Her voice was barely above a whisper.
“Shaw.Split Rock primary meadow.I have visual on the suspect.He has Marshall.I’m engaging.Get me everything.”
She didn’t wait for a response.She drew her Glock and stepped onto the snowfield.
She ran.Her snowshoes drove through the surface and she was running through his pattern—across the trenches he’d carved with his machined edger, her boots obliterating the clean lines, filling the perfect curves with the chaotic disruption of a woman who did not care about his art, who saw in his geometry nothing but murder and the body of her partner lying at its center.
He saw her.
The figure straightened from its crouch beside Marshall’s body and turned, and in the combined glow of his headlamp and the starlight she saw him for the first time.Mid-forties.Brown hair going gray at the temples.A face so unremarkable it could have belonged to anyone—a neighbor, a colleague, the man behind you in line at the hardware store.In his right hand, the carving tool.In his left, the hammer.
Short-handled.Metal head.The instrument that had killed Martin Gallagher and Rebecca Lloyd and Mike Pierce and had just struck the side of Ben Marshall’s head with enough force to drop a trained federal agent in the dark.
The killer looked at her.Looked at the pattern she was destroying with every step—the boot prints through his arcs, the trenches filled, the geometry ruined.And what crossed his face was not fear.
Rage.
Pure, incandescent, the fury of an artist watching his work destroyed by someone who could not see what he was building.The anonymity burned away, the ordinariness peeling back to reveal the thing that lived beneath it.He dropped the edger.He raised the hammer.And he ran at her.
Not away.At her.Through his own half-finished pattern, the hammer high, propelled by a speed that surprised her—the speed of a man who had been navigating this terrain at night for years.
Thirty yards.Twenty.
Isla stopped.Planted her feet.Raised the Glock with both hands and found the front sight and placed it on center mass.
“FBI!Stop!”
He didn’t stop.The hammer cocked back behind his shoulder, and his face was a mask of something beyond anger—grief, maybe, or the anguish of a man whose only honest work was being taken from him.
Ten yards.
Isla fired.
The first shot hit him center-left, the muzzle flash painting the snow orange for a fraction of a second.He staggered but didn’t fall—momentum and rage carrying him two more steps, the hammer still raised, his body refusing the information the bullet had delivered.
She fired again.
The second shot hit his right shoulder and the hammer fell.It dropped from fingers that could no longer hold it, landing in the snow with a soft thud that was the quietest sound in a night full of quiet sounds.He went down.Not dramatically—he folded.Knees first, then sideways, the body collapsing in the particular, graceless way bodies collapsed when the structures holding them upright were no longer intact.
Isla held the Glock on him.Counted to five.He didn’t move.
She crossed the remaining distance at a run.The killer lay on his side, breathing in shallow, rapid gasps, his eyes open and staring at the sky with an expression that was no longer rage but something she’d seen before on the faces of the dying—surprise, maybe.The bewilderment of a person whose body had just informed them the story was almost over.She kicked the hammer out of reach.Found a knife in a belt sheath, pulled it and threw it into the snow.
Then she left him.
Marshall was ten yards away.
He lay on his back at the center of the half-formed pattern, his arms arranged at angles from his body, his legs together—the position she’d seen three times now, the killer’s composition.His eyes were closed.Blood darkened the snow beneath the left side of his head, a spreading stain that the cold was already crystallizing at its edges.
Isla dropped to her knees beside him and pressed two fingers to his throat.
A pulse.Faint, rapid, but present—the thin thread of a heartbeat persisting beneath skin that was already cold, the body’s mechanisms doing what they were designed to do in the absence of the consciousness that usually directed them.
