He withdrew his hand from the coat and Marissa saw the knife.
It was old.That registered first—the way the blade caught the lamplight with a dull, tarnished gleam that spoke of decades, not days.A heavy thing with a brass handle and a triangular blade and a set of spiked knuckle guards that gave it the look of something designed not just to cut but to break.It was an old trench knife.The kind of weapon men had carried into the mud of no-man’s-land a century ago, built for the close, desperate work of fighting in a space too narrow for rifles.
Palmer held it at his side with the ease of a man holding a pen.
"Raymond—" Her voice came out thin, a wire pulled taut.The word was all she managed before he moved.
He was faster than a soft-spoken man in his fifties had any right to be.The knife came up and forward in a short, economical arc aimed at her midsection, and the only thing that saved her was the step she’d already been taking backward—away from the wrongness she’d seen in his expression before her conscious mind had named it.The blade passed through the space where her stomach had been a half-second earlier, close enough that she felt the displaced air against her shirt.
Marissa didn’t scream.She turned and ran.
The stairs were six steps away and she took them at a sprint, her socked feet slipping on the hardwood at the landing as she grabbed the banister and hauled herself upward.She could hear him behind her—not running, not crashing, but following with the measured tread of someone who wasn’t in a hurry.Who had calculated the angles and found them favorable.The front door was behind him.Her phone was upstairs.The children were gone.
She reached the second floor and threw herself into the bathroom, slamming the door and turning the lock in the same motion.The lock was a standard interior mechanism—a push-button in the center of the knob, the kind designed to keep five-year-olds from walking in on their parents, not to stop a man with a knife.Her hands were shaking so badly that the button nearly slipped under her thumb before it caught.
Steam.The bathroom was still full of steam from the bath she’d been drawing, the mirror fogged, the lavender-scented air thick and warm and completely at odds with the cold terror that had taken up residence in her chest.The tub was half full of water.Norah Jones was still playing from her phone, which was—
On the vanity.Right here.She snatched it up and then went still, because the phone’s screen showed exactly what she’d left it showing: the music app, mid-playlist.Not the phone screen.The phone was up here.She’d carried it up when she started the bath.She had it.
No.That was the Bluetooth speaker on the vanity, connected to the phone.The phone itself was downstairs.On the kitchen counter, where she’d left it when Derek called to say they were leaving the house.She’d set it down and walked upstairs and queued the music through the speaker and never gone back for it.
She looked at the window.It was small—a single casement above the toilet, maybe eighteen inches wide and fourteen tall, the kind of window designed to let in light and air and absolutely nothing the size of a grown woman’s shoulders.She could get her head through.Maybe an arm.That was it.
Footsteps on the stairs.Slow.Measured.
The footsteps reached the landing and stopped.
Silence.Then his voice, quiet and conversational, as though they were still standing in her living room discussing immigration patterns.
"Marissa.This doesn’t have to be difficult."
She pressed her back against the far wall and stared at the door and the flimsy lock and the steam that curled between them, and she did the only thing she could think to do.She reached for the small frosted window, wrenched it open against its ancient hinges, and screamed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Vaughn drove like a woman who’d memorized every pothole between the precinct and the east side of Duluth, which she probably had.The unmarked sedan ate the distance in sharp turns and controlled acceleration, the pine air freshener swinging from the rearview like a metronome counting down something neither of them wanted to name.Isla rode with her hand on the door grip and her weapon checked and her mind running calculations she couldn’t yet finish—how long since DiMaggio’s call, how far to Skelling’s address, how much time a man like Palmer would need.
A man like Palmer.She was building the profile in real time, assembling it from the fragments DiMaggio had given them and the shape of the pattern that had finally declared itself.A local historian.Genealogical researcher.Soft-spoken, pleasant, knowledgeable—the kind of person who faded into the background of any room he occupied, who people trusted precisely because he seemed so thoroughly harmless.He’d had access to the renovation plans through his role as exhibit consultant.He’d had proximity to every victim’s ancestry disclosure through the same shared workspace that had made those disclosures possible.And he’d had eight months on the project to watch, and listen, and choose.
"Palmer's been on the distribution list the entire time," Vaughn said, reading Isla's silence."His name was on the board.I interviewed him in the first round, two days after Lane.He was cooperative, polite, gave me forty-five minutes and a detailed account of his movements."Her jaw tightened."I cleared him."
"So did I."Isla had reviewed every interview transcript Vaughn had compiled.Palmer’s had been unremarkable in the way that only the most careful subjects managed—no inconsistencies, no nervous tells, no gaps that invited further scrutiny.He’d been invisible in the data the same way he was invisible in a room."He fits.The weapons knowledge, the building access, the historical expertise—he’d know exactly which weapon to pair with which era, which space.The exhibits were his narrative.He was writing the story the building was supposed to tell."
"And now he’s writing a different one."Vaughn took the turn onto Skelling’s street and Isla saw it immediately—Skelling’s house, a modest Cape Cod set back from the road with a bare front yard and a driveway holding two vehicles.A dark minivan—likely Derek Skelling’s, except Derek and the kids were at a movie.And a silver sedan parked behind it, tucked close, like a guest who intended to stay.
"Second car," Isla said.
"I see it."Vaughn killed the headlights and pulled to the curb three houses down.They were out of the car in the same motion, Vaughn reaching for the radio on her belt to call for backup while Isla drew her weapon and started toward the house at a pace that was faster than a walk and slower than a run—the controlled approach of someone who needed to get there now but needed to get there capable of acting when she arrived.
The house was lit from within—warm lamplight through the ground-floor windows, a fainter glow from the second story.Normal from a distance.A home on a Saturday night.
Then the glass broke.
It came from the second floor—a sharp, bright sound that split the quiet of the residential street like a gunshot.Not a window shattering outward in an explosion but the smaller, more desperate sound of glass being broken by something thrown from inside.And then the scream.
"Help!Someone help me—he’s in the house!"
A woman’s voice, high and ragged and unmistakable in its terror, pouring through the broken window into the cold night air.
