He leaned closer.His eyes found hers—amber meeting gray-blue in the dark—and held them with an intensity that was intimate in a way that made her skin crawl.
“I’m the Shipwrecker,” he said.“That’s what the lake called me, and that’s what I am.Ships go down.That’s what happens on Superior—always has, always will.The lake takes what it takes, and I’m the one who makes sure it gets what it needs.Not a killer.A wrecker.The difference matters.”
Isla stared at him through the pain and the cold and the fury that was the only warm thing left in her body.The Shipwrecker.He’d given himself a title the way zealots did, the way men who confused murder with mission always did—a name that elevated the work into something mythic, something larger than one broken man feeding bodies to a lake because his mother had drowned and left him alone with a grief he’d alchemized into religion.
He stood.Walked to the anchor.Wrapped one hand around the shank and tested its weight with the casual familiarity of a man who’d handled anchors his whole life.
“Destiny,” he said, and the word sounded different in his mouth—not grandiose, but simple, factual, the way a fisherman might say tide or current.“You coming to Duluth.You found me, after all those years, nobody else even looked.Me finding you.The lake brought us both here, Agent Rivers.It brought you to this city, and it brought you to this ice, and it's going to take you the way it's taken everything it's ever wanted.Not because I choose it.Because the water does."
He began dragging the anchor toward the hole.The chain scraped across the ice, each link catching and releasing with a sound like bones clicking together.Isla felt the tension translate through the rope at her ankles—a tug, then a pull, the first physical intimation of what was about to happen.The anchor would go into the hole.The chain would follow.And then the rope at her ankles would go taut and she would be dragged across the ice and into water so cold that the shock alone could stop her heart.
She pulled against the ropes again.Harder this time, putting everything she had into it—shoulders, back, the muscles of her forearms straining against nylon that was designed to hold boats against storms.The rope held.Her wrists screamed—or they would have, if she could feel them.She couldn’t.Couldn’t feel her hands, couldn’t feel her feet, couldn’t feel anything below mid-forearm or mid-calf except a dull, distant pressure that was the memory of sensation rather than sensation itself.
The Shipwrecker positioned the anchor at the edge of the hole.The black water moved beneath it, patient, hungry, old.
“It’ll be fast,” he said.He wasn’t looking at her.He was looking at the water, and the expression on his face was reverence.“The cold takes you quick.Thirty seconds, maybe less, and you won’t feel anything.Just the water.Just the deep.It’s not a bad way to go, Agent Rivers.It’s the way my mother went, and she was at peace.I saw her face after they pulled her out.She was at peace.”
Isla’s mind was racing behind the gag, behind the cold, behind the fear that she was controlling through sheer force of will because she was not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing her break.Think.Think.Her hands were dead.Her feet were dead.The ropes were immovable.The anchor was thirty pounds of steel about to pull her into water that would kill her in minutes.Nobody knew where she was—nobody except James, who’d been on the floor of her apartment with his cracked ribs seizing, reaching for her as Brune dragged her into the dark.
James.
He’d been conscious.He’d seen Brune take her.He’d been shouting her name down the stairwell, and James Sullivan was not a man who shouted into the dark and then did nothing.He would have called it in.Even from the floor, even with his body refusing to cooperate, he would have found his phone and called Kate or called 911 or called anyone, because that was who he was—steady, methodical, the kind of man who did the right thing, even when the right thing had to be done from the floor of a hallway with broken ribs and a voice that was breaking too.
But how long ago had that been?The drive from her apartment to the lakeshore—Brune’s truck, the bed of it, the cold and the dark and the gag—could have been thirty minutes or an hour.She didn’t know.Time had lost its shape.And even if James had called immediately, even if backup was coming, even if every patrol car in Duluth was converging on the waterfront right now, they didn’t know where on the waterfront.The lakeshore stretched for miles.The ice extended hundreds of yards from the shore in late March.Finding one man and one woman on a frozen lake in the dark was not a thirty-minute operation.
The Shipwrecker wrapped both hands around the anchor.He lifted it to his chest.The chain went taut between the anchor and her ankles, and Isla felt herself slide two inches across the ice toward the hole.
She had seconds.Maybe less.
She pulled against the ropes one more time, and the nylon held, and the cold held, and the lake waited beneath the ice with the patience of something that had been waiting for a very long time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Light came from the shore.
Not headlights this time—not the sweeping accident of a patrol car on its rounds.This was different.Blue and red, strobing in alternating flashes that painted the ice in lurid, pulsing color, turning the flat white expanse into something that looked like the inside of a wound.One set of lights.Then two.Then three, materializing along the shoreline in rapid succession, and with them the distant wail of sirens cutting through the wind and the grinding silence of the frozen lake.
A spotlight swept the ice.Industrial, mounted on a vehicle, its beam white and surgical as it tracked across the surface in a slow arc that turned every ridge and crack and pressure fold into sharp relief.It hadn’t found them yet—the beam was two hundred yards to the west, working its way along the shore ice—but it was searching, and the dark that had been the Shipwrecker’s ally was evaporating under those lights with the speed of something that had never been real.
Brune froze.The anchor was at his chest, his arms locked beneath it, his body half-turned toward the hole.His head snapped toward the shore and Isla watched his face change—not panic, not exactly, but the first crack in the devotional calm that had carried him through every step of this ritual.His eyes moved fast, calculating distances, trajectories, the geometry of escape that a man who’d evaded capture for decades computed instinctively.
The spotlight swung east.Closer.Its leading edge brushed the ice fifty yards to their left and kept coming.
James.James had called it in.From the floor of her apartment, from the hallway where his body had refused to carry him, he’d found a way to bring the cavalry.The thought broke through the cold and the fear like a fist through ice—not hope, not yet, because hope required the belief that salvation would arrive in time, and the anchor was still in Brune’s hands and the hole was still three feet away and time was the one thing she didn’t have.
“No,” Brune said.The word came out low, guttural, the first sound she’d heard from him that wasn’t composed.“No.Not now.Not when we’re this close.”
He looked at her.Then at the hole.Then at the shore, where the lights were multiplying—four vehicles now, five, their strobes creating a corridor of blue and red that stretched along the access road above the beach.Voices carried on the wind, faint but unmistakable.The organized urgency of law enforcement arriving in force.
The Shipwrecker made his decision.Isla saw it happen—the calculation completing behind his eyes, the answer arriving with the certainty of a man who’d always trusted the water over the world.He wasn’t going to run.He wasn’t going to abandon the offering.Forty-six years of listening to the lake had built something inside Robert Brune that was stronger than self-preservation, and it said: finish.
He adjusted his grip on the anchor and turned toward the hole.
“The lake won’t wait,” he said.His voice had found its calm again—or a version of it, thinner than before, stretched over something that hummed with urgency.“It’s been waiting too long already.You feel it, don’t you?Under the ice.It’s right there.It’s been right there your whole—”
The impact came from behind and to his left, and it came with the force of a man who had no business being on his feet, let alone running across ice, let alone throwing his body into a serial killer at full speed.
James Sullivan hit Robert Brune at the waist.
