Lang answered the door on the first knock, which meant she’d seen them coming.She was a compact woman—five-four, maybe five-five, with broad shoulders and strong hands that spoke of years spent handling heavy objects with care.Her hair was dark brown streaked with gray, cut short in a style that prioritized function over form, and her face had the angular, watchful quality of someone who spent more time observing than speaking.She wore a flannel shirt over a thermal, jeans, and work boots—the clothes of a person who’d been doing something physical before they arrived.
She looked at their badges with an expression that was difficult to read.Not surprise.Not fear.Something closer to resignation, as though she’d been expecting a knock on this door for longer than just the time it took them to walk from the car.
“Ms.Lang,” Isla said.“I’m Special Agent Rivers, FBI.This is Detective Vaughn, Duluth PD.We’d like to ask you some questions about the Armory investigation.”
“Come in,” Lang said.She stepped aside without ceremony.
The interior was sparse but organized.A living room with a worn couch, a coffee table stacked with museum journals, shelves holding books on American history and material culture.A few artifacts on display—a framed daguerreotype, a pair of antique spectacles in a glass case, a piece of pottery that looked Native American.Nothing overtly military.Nothing that screamed weapons collection.But the ordering of the space told Isla something: this was a woman who lived with objects the way other people lived with pets, attentively and with a respect that bordered on devotion.
They sat.Lang took the armchair across from them and folded her hands in her lap.Her posture was upright but not rigid—the posture of a woman who’d been interviewed before and knew the choreography.
Vaughn led the questioning.She started with the basics—Lang’s role at the museum annex, her involvement in the renovation, her access to the collection.Lang answered everything directly.Yes, she had access to the full weapons catalog.Yes, she’d been involved in the exhibit planning from the beginning.Yes, she knew the building intimately—she’d been working in and around the Armory for nearly a decade.
“Ms.Lang, can you tell us where you were on the morning of March twenty-ninth, between seven and eleven AM?”
Lang’s hands tightened fractionally in her lap.“I was at the annex.I’ve been doing inventory assessments all week—the renovation has everything in flux.Pieces being moved, recataloged, reassigned to different exhibits.”She paused.“I was also at a meeting at City Hall on Thursday evening about the project timeline.And I attended the town hall on Wednesday.This week has been—I’ve been all over the place.”
“Was anyone with you at the annex this morning?”
“Not the whole time.Margaret Dunlop stopped in around nine to sign off on a transfer form.Before that I was alone.After that—” She hesitated.“I went to the Armory around ten to check on the storage units in the basement.The ones that hadn’t been moved yet.”
Isla felt the stillness that descended the way weather changed—a pressure shift, invisible but real.Lang had been in the Armory that morning.The morning Zach Welles was killed in the basement.
“How long were you there?”Isla asked.
“Maybe forty-five minutes.I was checking condition reports on the textile pieces stored in the east utility closet.I didn’t go near the main corridor where—” Lang stopped.“I heard about Zach later.From Margaret.”
“Did you see Zach Welles while you were in the building?”
“No.I came in through the loading door and went straight to the east utility.I didn’t go through the main hall.”
“Can anyone verify that?”
The silence that followed was the kind that answered the question before words did.Lang looked at her hands.“No,” she said.“I was alone.”
Vaughn glanced at Isla.The glance was brief but it carried the weight of a shared calculation: Lang was verifiably in the building at the time Welles was killed, and without a precise time of death, her account of being in a different part of the basement was unverifiable.
Isla shifted her attention from Lang’s face to her clothes—the flannel, the thermal, the jeans.The kind of thorough, automatic scan she’d learned to do in her first year at the Bureau, when her training officer had told her that evidence didn’t announce itself and the best investigators were the ones who looked when they weren’t expected to be looking.
Lang's right sleeve.Just above the cuff, on the inside of the forearm, where the flannel folded over itself.A small, dark stain.Not large—the size of a dime, maybe slightly bigger.But it was there, and it was the particular brownish-red that blood turned when it dried on fabric.
“Ms.Lang,” Isla said.“Is that blood on your sleeve?”
Lang looked down.Her expression did something complicated—surprise first, then something that might have been annoyance, or might have been the look of a person who realized they’d been careless about something that suddenly mattered very much.
“I had a nosebleed this morning,” she said.“I get them when the air is dry.It’s been a problem since—it’s a recurring thing.”
It was plausible.Late March in Duluth, the heating systems still running, the air stripped of moisture by months of winter—nosebleeds were common enough that the explanation didn’t require any particular stretch.But plausible and verified were different things, and the stain on Patricia Lang’s sleeve was the first piece of physical evidence they’d collected in three murders.
“Ms.Lang,” Isla said, keeping her voice level, “we’re going to need you to come to the precinct with us to continue this conversation.”
The shift in Lang’s face was immediate.The resignation cracked, and beneath it was something harder—defiance, or fear, or the particular outrage of a person who understood exactly what was happening and objected to every part of it.
“Am I under arrest?”
“No.But we have additional questions, and given your access to the building and the collection, and the fact that you were present in the Armory this morning, we need to conduct a more thorough interview.We’d also like to collect that shirt for testing.”
Lang stood.She was trembling slightly—not dramatically, not the way guilty people trembled in interrogation rooms when the walls closed in, but the fine, controlled vibration of a woman fighting to maintain her composure while the ground shifted beneath her feet.
