Which left the main entrance, which Lane himself had unlocked when he arrived that morning, and the side loading door with its alarm, which had not been triggered.And the push-bar exits, which could have let someone out but not back in.
Her phone buzzed.Henley.
“I’ve completed the preliminary examination,” the medical examiner said without preamble.Patricia Henley did not believe in small talk on professional calls, a quality Sarah had come to value deeply.“The wound is consistent with a single deliberate thrust, not a fall or accidental impalement.The blade entered below the xiphoid process at an upward angle of approximately twenty degrees, penetrating the pericardium and the left ventricle.Depth of penetration is roughly eight inches.The force required, combined with the angle and precision of entry, is inconsistent with self-infliction or an accidental mechanism.”
“So someone drove it into him.”
“Someone who either knew what they were doing or got exceptionally lucky with the angle.The wound is clean, single-entry, no hesitation marks.Whoever did this committed to the act.”A pause.“Time of death, based on liver temperature and lividity, is preliminary—I’d estimate somewhere between five and seven this morning.He hadn’t been dead long when he was found.”
Sarah thanked her and hung up.She sat for a moment with her hand flat on the table, feeling the faint vibration of a truck passing on the road outside, and thought about Thomas Lane letting himself into a locked building before dawn to get a head start on his framing.A man alone in a cavernous hall with a bayonet locked behind glass forty feet away, and someone who decided that was an opportunity.
She picked up her phone again and called the station.
“This is Vaughn.I’m opening a homicide investigation on the Thomas Lane case, Armory building.I need a case number and I need someone to pull everything we have on the Duluth Historical Society’s key inventory for the display cases.Every person who had access.”She paused.“And get me the architectural plans for the Armory, including the basement utility tunnels.All of them.”
She hung up and looked out the window at the old brick building with its arched windows and scaffolded walls.Eight men who’d worked beside Thomas Lane and liked him.A locked display case opened without a scratch.A building locked from the outside with a dead man inside it, and no clear way anyone could have gotten in or out without a key.
Somewhere in that geometry was an answer.Sarah intended to find it.
CHAPTER SIX
The therapist's office was on the second floor of a converted Victorian on East Fourth Street, wedged between a dentist and an accountant, which Isla thought was either a coincidence or a commentary on the kinds of professionals people visited only when the pain became unignorable.The building had the over-maintained charm of old Duluth real estate—fresh paint on ornate trim, original hardwood floors that creaked with every step, the kind of radiator that clanked and hissed like it had opinions about the weather.A small brass plaque by the door read DR.MARGARET LINDEN, PsyD, and below it, in smaller letters, LICENSED CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST.
Isla arrived at 9:56.Not early enough to seem eager, not late enough to seem defiant.She'd thought about the timing more than she wanted to admit.
The waiting room was small and deliberately inoffensive—two upholstered chairs, a side table with a white noise machine humming softly, a print of Lake Superior on the wall that looked like it had been chosen by someone who understood that the people sitting in this room probably spent enough time staring at the real thing.No magazines.Isla sat in the chair farthest from the door and did not touch the tissues.
At exactly ten o'clock, the inner door opened.
Dr.Margaret Linden was younger than Isla had expected—mid-forties, maybe, with the kind of face that suggested she smiled often and meant it.She was average height, average build, with dark hair cut to her shoulders and brown eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses that she wore pushed slightly down her nose, giving her the look of someone perpetually about to read something.She wore a cardigan over a blouse, dark slacks, no jewelry except a thin gold chain.Nothing sharp, nothing threatening, nothing that would give a hostile patient anything to push against.Isla recognized the strategy immediately because it was good, and because she'd used versions of it herself in interview rooms.
"Agent Rivers.I'm Dr.Linden.Come on in."
The office continued the theme of studied neutrality—warm colors, soft lighting, two chairs angled toward each other with a low table between them.No couch, which Isla appreciated for reasons she didn't examine too closely.The desk in the corner was cluttered with files and books in a way that felt deliberate in its ordinariness, as if to say: I'm a person who works here, not a stage set designed to extract your secrets.A window looked out onto the street, where a delivery truck was double-parked and a man in a puffy jacket was walking a dog that didn't want to go in the direction they were heading.
Isla sat.Crossed her legs.Placed her hands on the armrests in a position that she knew projected calm and openness, because she'd read the same body-language literature that therapists read, and she wasn't above using it.
Dr.Linden settled into the opposite chair with the unhurried ease of someone who did this forty times a week and had learned that the first thirty seconds set the temperature for everything that followed.She held a thin folder—Isla's file, presumably, whatever Kate had sent over—but she didn't open it.She set it on the table between them and left it there, a boundary marker neither of them acknowledged.
"I appreciate you coming in," Dr.Linden said."I know these sessions aren't always voluntary in the way that word usually implies."
"They're not voluntary at all," Isla said."My SAC ordered a psychological evaluation as a condition of returning to active duty.I'm here because the alternative is not going back to work."
She said it without hostility, which was its own kind of performance.Not hostile.Not warm.The flat, cooperative tone of a woman who intended to check a box and leave.
Dr.Linden nodded as though this were a perfectly reasonable thing to say, which it was."That's fair.And I want to be upfront about what this is and isn't.I'm not here to decide whether you're fit for duty—that's a separate evaluation, and it's not what we're doing today.What SAC Channing has asked for is a series of counseling sessions.You and I, talking.My role is to support you, not to grade you."
"How many sessions?"
"We'll start with six and reassess.Weekly."
Isla did the math.Six weeks.Six Thursdays in this chair while Robert Brune breathed free air somewhere in Duluth and the Armory case—she'd heard about it, everyone in town had heard about it—ran its course without her.Six sessions of performing wellness for a woman she'd never met, in exchange for the privilege of doing her job.
"Fine," she said.
Dr.Linden let the word sit.She didn't rush to fill the silence, which told Isla she was dealing with someone who understood silence as a tool rather than an absence.Therapists who were good with law enforcement knew that cops and agents lived in silence—stakeouts, interview pauses, the long stretches between action where the real thinking happened.Trying to fill every gap was an amateur's move.
"Why don't you tell me what's been going on?"Dr.Linden said after a moment.Not really a question.An invitation, gently phrased, with no sharp edges to push against.
