A fracturing ritual made him unpredictable.Unpredictablewas the word that kept her awake at night and walking the docks in the dark, regardless of what she'd told Dr.Linden.
"Ben said they're expanding the search radius," Isla continued."North shore, up toward Two Harbors.The theory is he might have access to a boat—someone with forty years on the water probably has options nobody's thought to check.They're cross-referencing marina registrations and pulling records on any vessel connected to Brune or anyone in his known circle."
"It's the right move."James turned the coffee cup slowly between his hands, watching the surface."He lived on boats half his life.If he's got access to one—even a small fishing rig—he could be anywhere on the lake."
"Two hundred miles of Minnesota shoreline.More if he crosses into Wisconsin."Isla stared at the sliver of lake visible through the window, the familiar gray expanse that had become the backdrop of every case she'd worked since arriving in Duluth."And we still don't have a clear picture of his support network.He lived alone, worked alone, kept to himself for decades.But someone has helped him at some point—rented the containers he was hiding in, kept a vehicle registered, something.People don't exist completely off the grid, not in a city this size."
"Unless they've been doing it for forty years."
The room was quiet for a moment.Outside in the corridor, a cart rattled past and someone laughed—the easy, unconscious sound of people going about their day in a building full of people who couldn't.James closed his eyes, and for a moment Isla thought he'd drifted off.He did that now—fell asleep mid-conversation without warning, the exhaustion pulling him under like a current.Patel said it was normal that his body was diverting energy to healing and would take what it needed when it needed it, but each time it happened, Isla felt a small, involuntary spike of the fear she'd carried during those two weeks when he hadn't woken up at all.
But his eyes opened again after a few seconds, bluer for the brief rest, and he looked at her with the focused attention that meant he'd been thinking, not sleeping.
"We'll get him," he said.Quietly, without drama.A statement of fact from a man who didn't make promises he couldn't keep."When I'm out of here.We'll get him."
Isla looked at him—the hospital gown, the IV port still taped to the back of his hand, the tiredness that lived in the lines around his eyes even when the eyes themselves were sharp—and felt the familiar collision of things she didn't say.Gratitude that he was alive.Fury at the man who'd nearly killed him.Something else, underneath both, that she'd been not-naming for three years and wasn't about to start naming in a hospital room.
"You look tired," she said instead.
"I am tired.I've been sitting up for three hours, which is apparently an Olympic event now."He settled deeper into the pillows, the effort of conversation catching up with him visibly.His eyelids were heavy again."You'll come back tomorrow?"
"I come back every day."
"You do."Something in the way he said it—simple, certain, grateful—landed in a place she wasn't prepared for."Isla.The paperwork.Linden.Do it right, okay?Don't just go through the motions."
"I went this morning."
"I know you went.I'm asking if you were there."
The question was so precisely James—quiet, understated, cutting straight to the center of a thing without ever raising his voice—that she couldn't do anything with it except let it sit.He knew her.That was the problem with partners who were good at their jobs.They watched, they listened, they assembled a picture of you that was more accurate than the one you'd built of yourself, and occasionally they held it up and asked you to look.
"I'm trying," she said.It was the most honest thing she'd said all day.
James held her gaze for another moment, then let his eyes close."Bring coffee tomorrow," he murmured."The good stuff."
"I always bring the good stuff."
"I know."His breathing slowed, deepened.She watched the monitor trace its steady green line and thought about the fact that a week ago this room had been a ventilator and a silence, and now it was a man who fell asleep asking for coffee, and how the distance between those two things was both enormous and impossibly small.
She stood quietly, collected the empty cup, and paused at the door the way she always did.James Sullivan, asleep in a shaft of gray light from the window, his father's watch ticking on his wrist.The whiteboard with its dry-erase names.The corridor beyond, with its cart sounds and its laughter and its steady business of recovery.
She walked out of the hospital into the late-morning cold.The sky was low and gray, threatening something—rain or sleet or the indecisive mix of both that Duluth specialized in at the end of March.She sat in her car for a moment before starting the engine, hands on the wheel, looking at the building she'd been visiting every day for almost three weeks.
Dr.Linden's question surfaced again, unbidden.What it looks like when you're not presenting it for evaluation.
It looked like this.Coffee she bought for a man who was learning to walk again.Lies she told to a therapist who she suspected could see through them.Nights on the docks that she couldn't stop and didn't want to, walking the dark perimeter of a waterfront where a killer lived in the spaces between the things people were willing to see.It looked like sitting in a hospital chair and holding a conversation that was really two conversations—the one about the case, which was safe, and the one underneath it, which was not.
She started the car and pulled out of the lot.The lake was visible from the road, a flat gray plane that merged with the sky at the horizon, and somewhere along its edge Robert Brune was waiting with the patience of a man who believed the water spoke to him.The task force would search.The grid would expand.The bureaucratic machinery of law enforcement would grind forward at the pace it always ground.
And tonight, after dark, Isla would lace up her boots and walk the docks again.Because the distance between what she'd told Dr.Linden and what she couldn't stop doing was the exact shape of the thing she refused to name.It was not recklessness, and it was not obsession, but the simple, unbearable math of a woman who knew that waiting was a luxury measured in other people's lives.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A small fire was all he needed.
Robert Brune fed it with driftwood he'd collected from the shore, pieces worn smooth and pale by the lake's patient hands, and watched the flames work through the grain the way water worked through stone—finding the weakest point and consuming from the inside.The fire popped and hissed against the cold.He sat on an overturned bucket outside the fishing shack and held his hands toward the warmth and listened.
The shack was nobody’s now.It had belonged to a man named Gunderson once, twenty years back, a pike fisherman who'd kept it stocked with gear and canned goods and a cot that smelled like mildew and kerosene.Gunderson had died of a heart attack on his kitchen floor in 2014 and his children, who lived in the Cities and wanted nothing to do with the shore, had never bothered to sell or demolish the structure.It sat alone on a gravel spit twelve miles northeast of Duluth, tucked into a stand of birch where the shoreline curved inward and the road didn't reach.Robert had known about it for years.He knew about most things along this stretch of coast.Forty years on the water taught you the landscape the way priests came to know scripture—not just the words but the spaces between them, the silences where meaning lived.
