OUTSIDE

THE

DARK

(An Isla Rivers FBI Suspense Thriller—Book Thirteen)

Blake Pierce

USA Today and #1 bestselling author Blake Pierce is the author of numerous series in the mystery and thriller genres, spanning 10 years of work, including the Jessie Hunt, Ella Dark, Rylie Page, Faith Bold and Rachel Gift series. Blake's most recent latest releases are the Alison Payne, Isla Rivers Kari Blackhorse, Kate Valentine, and Miles Sterling series.

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Copyright © 2026  by Blake Pierce. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

SERIES BY BLAKE PIERCE

MILES STERLING

KATE VALENTINE

KARI BLACKHORSE

ISLA RIVERS

ALISON PAYNE

JENNA GRAVES

THE GOVERNESS

RACHEL BLACKWOOD

SHEILA STONE

FINN WRIGHT

MORGAN CROSS

JULIETTE HART

FAITH BOLD

FIONA RED

DAISY FORTUNE

AMBER YOUNG

CAMI LARK

NICKY LYONS

CORA SHIELDS

MAY MOORE

PAIGE KING

VALERIE LAW

RACHEL GIFT

AVA GOLD

A YEAR IN EUROPE

ELLA DARK

LAURA FROST

EUROPEAN VOYAGE

ADELE SHARP

THE AU PAIR

ZOE PRIME

JESSIE HUNT

CHLOE FINE

KATE WISE

THE MAKING OF RILEY PAIGE

RILEY PAIGE

MACKENZIE WHITE

AVERY BLACK

KERI LOCKE

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Ray Hendricks had walked this route so many times he could have done it blind, which was useful, because the Consolidated Ore facility had no lights anymore and the moon was hidden behind a ceiling of cloud that smelled like the rain it hadn't dropped yet.

The Claddagh closed its kitchen at ten, but Doreen never rushed him out, and it was past eleven by the time Ray let the door swing shut behind him and turned up his collar against the September chill. Four beers, maybe five. Enough to put a pleasant looseness in his knees, not enough to lose his way. He'd been cutting home through this dead industrial corpse for twenty years now, ever since the plant shut down and the fence along Garfield Avenue sprouted a hole nobody bothered to fix.

Twenty-two years he'd worked inside these walls. He knew the place the way you knew a body you'd shared a bed with — every groan, every settling sigh, every spot where the floor dipped. The skeletal conveyor gantries overhead. The rust-bled tanks. The long shed where they'd run the crushers, its corrugated flank peeled back now like something half-eaten. Ray cut diagonally across the yard, gravel crunching, hands jammed in his pockets, and let his feet carry him, because his head was somewhere warmer.

His daughter's voicemail. Whether he'd call her back tomorrow or let it sit another week the way he'd let the last one sit. How the cold had come early this year, and how his knee always knew before the weatherman did.

Then he heard it.

Movement. Off to his left, near the crusher shed. A scrape, low and deliberate — the kind of sound metal made when something pressed against it, or a foot made shifting its weight. Ray stopped.

He stood very still in the dark and listened. The wind came off the lake and rattled a loose sheet of siding somewhere far off, a tinny irregular flapping he knew well. That wasn't it. This had been closer. This had been near.

"Hello?" His voice came out smaller than he intended, swallowed up by all that empty space. He cleared his throat. "Somebody there?"

Kids, probably. Teenagers came through here to drink and break things, and he'd startled a few over the years, sent them scattering like cats. Or one of the men who slept rough in the old office block when the shelters filled. Ray wasn't afraid of them. He'd been one bad month from sleeping there himself once.

But he squinted toward the crusher anyway — the big one, the primary, squat in the deeper black of the shed's mouth. Twenty-two years he'd fed ore into those jaws. He knew the silhouette better than he knew his own. And tonight the shape of it was wrong. There was an extra darkness against it. A vertical seam in the shadow that hadn't been there a breath ago.

"I'm just passing through," Ray called, lifting his hands a little, the way you did to show you meant nothing. "Cutting home. Don't want any trouble."

The extra darkness moved.

It came away from the crusher's flank, unhurried, resolving as it crossed into the gray ambient nothing of the open yard — a figure, a man, broad and patient, stepping out as though he'd been waiting and had all the time in the world to keep waiting. Ray's heart gave a single hard knock against his ribs. It was the stillness of him. The way he didn't speak.

"Hey," Ray said. "Hey, now—"

He took a step back. His mind, sluggish with beer, reached for explanations and found only the cold certainty that he should not have stopped, that he should have kept walking, that the route he could walk blind had a thing standing in it tonight that did not belong.

He started to turn. He never finished the motion.

He heard, in the last clear instant, a soft exhalation from the figure — almost gentle, almost a sigh — and beneath it, threaded through the wind and the flapping siding, a sound that might have been water moving under ice in a place where there was no ice at all.

Then something came across the back of his skull, hard and final, a white detonation that took the world out from under him.

The gravel rose up to meet his cheek. The cold pressed in. And the last thing Ray Hendricks knew was the smell of rust and lake water, and somewhere very close, the sound of a man breathing.

CHAPTER ONE

The coldest cases were the quiet ones, and Isla Rivers had learned to love the quiet.

It was nine in the morning on the ninth of September, and her office in the Duluth field office held the particular stillness of a room where someone had been working long before anyone else arrived. Three case files lay open across her desk in a fan she'd arranged by year, oldest at her left elbow, and a fourth waited in her hands. The blinds were half-drawn against the light coming off the lake. The radiator ticked. Somewhere down the hall a copier woke and began its slow mechanical clearing of the throat.

The file in her hands belonged to a man named Gerald Pichette, dead eleven years, found floating against the breakwall near Park Point with a head wound the original investigators had attributed to a fall from the rocks. Isla had read it four times. She would read it a fifth. The Great Lakes task force — her task force, a phrase she still couldn't quite make fit comfortably in her mouth — existed precisely because of files like this one: deaths filed as accidents because the lake made accidents easy to believe in. Drunk men, dark water, slick stone. For decades, nobody had looked twice.

She'd built it out of the wreckage of the Shipwrecker investigation, the way you might build a house out of the timber of one that had burned. Robert Brune had operated for forty years, and the only reason anyone knew now was that she had stood on the ice and watched the lake take him instead of her. The task force was the institutional admission that he had not been alone in his methods — that the lake's geography and the region's habits had likely made him one predator among an unknown number, and that somebody ought to go back through the old files assuming, now, that some of those falls had been pushes.

It was good work. Patient work. The kind that closed nothing fast and asked nothing of her body. She turned a page on Gerald Pichette and felt the familiar low satisfaction of a man's life being attended to, finally, by someone willing to look.

She caught herself doing it again before she registered she'd started — her right hand had drifted from the page, and her thumb was moving over the place where her left ring finger used to be.

Isla made herself stop.

The stub had healed clean. The surgeon in Duluth had done careful work, the prosthetics consultant had offered options she hadn't taken, and the truth was that most days she barely thought about the finger itself. It was the gesture she couldn't break. Some buried part of her kept reaching for it, the way the tongue keeps finding the gap where a tooth has come out, checking whether the loss was still true. She had dislocated her own thumb on the ice to slip the rope, and lost the finger to frostbite in the hospital after, the cold having done its work on the joints she'd wrenched. A small price. She told herself that with great regularity. A small price, against an anchor and a hole in the ice and thirty pounds of iron meant to drag her down into the black.

She flexed the hand flat on the desk, four fingers and a smooth absence, and went back to Pichette.

The question she couldn't stop turning over wasn't in the file. It was this: six months had gone by since the ice, and nothing had come for her. No body left to float against a pier. No boot print at a scene that vanished when she went looking. For half a year the accidents around the lake had gone back to being only accidents — or at least nobody had brought her one that wasn't. And she didn't know what to make of the quiet. Either she was healing, the way her boss, Kate Channing, kept telling her she would, the body and the mind both knitting back together in their own slow time. Or she was standing in the dead calm before the next thing, the way the air goes still and strange in the minutes before a storm comes screaming down the length of the lake. Four years in this city had taught her that the calm was not to be trusted. The lake was at its most beautiful right before it killed you.

She didn't like that the two possibilities felt, from the inside, exactly the same.

A knock came at the doorframe — two knuckles, unhurried, a rhythm she'd have known anywhere — and she looked up to find James Sullivan filling the doorway with a coffee in each hand.

"You've been here since when," he said. It wasn't a question. He'd clearly already asked the night-desk officer.

"Reasonable hour."

"Donna says your car was in the lot at six-fifteen."

"Donna should mind the lot and not my car."

He came in and set one of the coffees on the corner of her desk, away from the files, the way he always did — he had a deep, almost superstitious horror of liquid near paper that she suspected came from some long-ago ruined case. He'd brought it the way she liked it, which was to say barely interfered with: black, one sugar, from the good place on Superior Street and not the swill from the break room. She wrapped both hands around the cup, four fingers and the absence, and didn't hide the hand from him. That was one thing the last six months had given her.

He had healed too, more visibly. The cut over his eye from the ice had left a thin pale line through his eyebrow that she found, privately, she liked, though she'd never tell him so in a way that would make him self-conscious about it. He'd been the one in the hospital first, months before her, after Brune got the jump on him at the scrapyard. Then the ice, and his ribs, and the long spring of both of them mending in parallel. There was a version of all this in which they had not survived it, and they both knew that version intimately, and it had closed the space between them faster than either of them would have managed on their own.

"You sleep?" he asked, lowering himself into the chair across from her with the small care he still took, the rib on his left side not quite forgiven.

"Some."

"Isla."

"Four hours. Maybe five." She sipped. "It was good sleep. Quality over quantity."

He gave her the look — the one that managed to be exasperated and fond at the same time, the corners of his eyes crinkling even as his mouth stayed flat. She had learned over four years exactly what it cost him to deploy it instead of saying the harder thing underneath. The harder thing was I worry about you, and they had a careful agreement, mostly unspoken, about when that thing got said with words and when it got said with a coffee placed carefully away from the files.

"Pichette," he said, reading the name off the tab upside down. "The breakwall."

"Eleven years. Skull fracture ruled a fall. But the original ME noted bruising on the upper arms that nobody followed up on. Like somebody held him." She turned the file so he could see. "Could be the rocks. People grab at rocks when they go in. Or could be hands."

"Or could be the rocks," he said.

"Or could be hands."

"You always go to hands."

"That's the job."

"That's a job," he allowed. "It used to be other people's job, so you could go home at a reasonable hour and sleep more than five."

She let that sit, because it wasn't unfair, and because there was no version of her that was going to do that, and they both knew it, and the knowing was somehow part of what was warm between them. He'd stopped trying to fix her about a year ago. He'd started, instead, just showing up with the coffee. It was a better strategy, and she suspected he knew it.

For a moment neither of them said anything. The radiator ticked. The light shifted as a cloud passed over whatever weak sun was up there. James had his father's old watch on, as always, the leather band gone soft and dark with age, and he turned it once around his wrist the way he did when he was deciding whether to say something. She watched him decide.

"Emma asked about you," he said finally. "Wants to know if you're coming to the thing. The recital." He cleared his throat. "It's not a recital. It's a — she'd kill me. It's a band showcase. She plays bass now. She's loud about it."

Isla felt something turn over softly in her chest. "She asked about me."

"She likes you. God knows why." He said it lightly, but he was watching her over the rim of his cup, and the lightness was a kind of question, and the question was bigger than a band showcase.

Half a year, that was what they'd had, in the careful way they'd had it — since the hospital, since the parallel mending, since the night in the spring when neither of them had bothered pretending anymore. They still kept two apartments. There was a toothbrush of his in her bathroom and a sweater of hers folded into a drawer at his place, and neither of them had said a word about either, which was its own kind of agreement. They went slowly on purpose. James had a marriage in the rearview that had ended civilly and sadly, and Isla had Reggie in Miami, and they both knew precisely what it cost when a thing was named too early and turned out to be the wrong name. So they let it be what it was and become what it became, and Isla found, to her continual surprise, that she didn't mind the pace at all.

But a fourteen-year-old asking whether her father's partner was coming to a thing — that was Emma putting a name to it, in the sideways way fourteen-year-olds did everything. That was the private arrangement leaking out of the place they kept it.

"I'll come," she said. "Tell her I'll come."

"Yeah?"

"If she's loud about the bass I want to hear it."

He smiled then, the real one, the one that wasn't often anymore, and it took years off his weathered face, and Isla looked back down at Gerald Pichette's file so she wouldn't do something unprofessional in a federal building at nine in the morning.

"This is nice," she said, before she'd decided to say it. "This. The quiet. The coffee. I keep waiting for it to mean something's wrong."

James didn't answer right away. He'd been there. He knew exactly what she meant, in the way only someone who had also stood at the edge of the worst thing could know it. He reached over — carefully, the rib — and for a second his calloused hand covered her healed one on the desk, four fingers and the absence, and he didn't say anything about the finger because he never did. He just held the hand that was there.

"Let it be nice," he said. "It's allowed to just be nice, Isla."

She was about to answer him.

That was when her desk phone rang — the internal line, the one that went straight through, not the front desk — and James's cell buzzed against his thigh in the same half-second, and they both went still in the particular way that two people who have done this job a long time go still, because there are calls you feel coming the way an old knee feels the cold.

Isla picked up the phone.

"Rivers," she said.

And the quiet, which she had not trusted, ended.

CHAPTER TWO

The Consolidated Ore facility crouched on the city's industrial fringe like something that had died and not been buried, and Isla saw it from half a mile off — the skeletal gantries against the dreary sky, the long peeled shed, the rust-stained tanks — and felt the morning's warmth drain out of her with every yard the car closed.

James drove. He always drove out to scenes; it was one of the small economies of their partnership, the way she always read the files and he always handled the road. The wipers swept once, twice, at a rain that couldn't commit. Neither of them had said much since the office. The dispatcher's words had been spare — body, male, found by trespassers, Duluth PD on scene and requesting Bureau assist — but it was the location that had pulled them both upright. A dead plant. Water in walking distance. The lake right there beyond the breakwall, endless.

"Could be nothing," James said as they turned in off Garfield Avenue through the gap where the chain-link had been peeled back and never fixed.

"Could be," Isla said, and didn't believe it, and neither did he.

Two Duluth PD cruisers were parked at angles in the yard, light bars turning slow blue across the rust, and an ambulance idled that nobody was in any hurry to load. A young officer stood near the mouth of the long shed with the specific gray-green pallor of a man who'd recently been sick and was working hard not to be again. Off to the side, wrapped in foil blankets on the tailgate of a third cruiser, sat two kids — not children, but kids, twenty maybe, a boy and a girl, both with the expensive headlamps and good boots of people who went into abandoned buildings for fun and filmed it. The girl was crying in the wrung-out, hollow way of someone who has already cried as hard as a body can and is now just leaking. The boy stared at nothing. Urban explorers, the dispatcher had said. They'd woken the whole neighborhood with their screaming. Isla believed it.

A detective she knew slightly — Halvorsen, heavyset, decent — came toward them across the gravel, and the look on his face told her most of it before he opened his mouth.

"Agent Rivers." He nodded at James. "Sullivan. Thanks for coming quick. I want—" He stopped. Started again. "I want you to see it before we move anything. I want it on record that I didn't touch it. That nobody touched it." He scrubbed a hand down his jaw. "I've been doing this nineteen years. I want somebody who's seen worse to tell me I'm overreacting."

"You're not overreacting," Isla said, before she'd even seen it. The way he was standing told her.

Halvorsen led them to the mouth of the shed, where the corrugated flank hung peeled open and the flat morning light fell in through the gap in a long dust-thick wedge. Inside, the air changed — colder, mineral, that mix of rust and standing water that lived in dead industrial places. And there, squat in the deeper dark, sat the crusher.

It was enormous. The primary crusher, a hulking iron thing the size of a delivery truck, its great jaws fixed open in the position they'd died in years ago when the power was cut for the last time. Decades of ore had gone through that mouth. Now something else was in it.

The man — and that was all they had yet, a man — had been placed inside the open jaws. Not dumped. Not hidden. Placed. He sat upright within the iron mouth, his back against the angled steel, his arms extended outward to either side and arranged along the lower jaw so that they reached, palms upturned, in a posture the animal part of Isla's brain read before the trained part could catch up: a man offering something. A man receiving something. A man on display.

She stopped at the edge of the light and did not go closer, not yet. James stopped beside her, and she heard him let out a slow breath through his nose, the way he did when a thing was bad.

"Talk to me," James said quietly.

Isla made herself look. That was the whole of the job, in the end — the willingness to look at the thing other people screamed and turned away from, and to keep looking until it gave up what it knew.

"He didn't fall," she said. "He didn't crawl in there to die. Look at the hands." The palms were up. A body did not do that on its own; gravity took the hands one way and this had taken them another. "Somebody set him. Somebody spent time."

"Robbery gone wrong, this isn't," Halvorsen said behind them.

"No." Isla's eyes moved over the scene in the methodical sweep she'd trained into herself two decades ago, and everything she catalogued made the cold in her sit deeper. The arms arranged with care. The head — she could see now, as her eyes adjusted, a darkness matting the gray hair at the back of the skull, the kind of head wound she had spent four years learning to read, the kind someone wanted you to think came from a fall. But you didn't fall and then climb into the jaws of a crusher and lay your own arms out like wings. The wound said accident. The staging said look at me. The two things did not belong together, and the space between them was where the truth was, and the truth made the hair stand up along her arms.

Because here was the thing that set the cold deeper in her: whoever had done this wanted it seen. In every file the Great Lakes task force had reopened, the deaths around this lake had been made to look like nothing — a man slipped on wet rock, a man drowned drunk, the violence folded so neatly back into the ordinary that no one ever came to stand where she was standing now. The whole craft of it, when there was a craft at all, had been erasure.

This was the opposite. Not a body made to disappear into an accident. A body made to be found. Arms out, palms up, in the mouth of an iron machine, in a dead place, arranged and waited over and left for the morning and the screaming kids and the blue lights and her.

"This is somebody new," she said, half to herself.

"New how?" Halvorsen asked.

She didn't answer right away. Some reflex she wasn't proud of had reached, for half a second, toward the closed drawer in her where Robert Brune lived — and found it exactly as closed as it had been for six months. Brune was dead. She had been on the ice; she had felt the chain go taut and take him instead of her. They had never recovered the body, and that absence had cost her a few bad nights last winter, but the lake kept what it took, and she had made her peace with it the way you made peace with a scar. This wasn't him. It couldn't be, and more than that, it wasn't even his language. Brune had spent forty years making people vanish into the lake's indifference. He had never once wanted an audience.

"He made people disappear," she said finally, and it was the past tense she'd earned. "He hid what he did. This—" she nodded at the upturned palms, the deliberate wings of the arms "—this is a performance. Somebody wants us to watch."

She thought of the six quiet months. She thought of the dead calm before the storm comes down the length of the lake. She thought, Either I'm healing or I'm waiting, and standing in the cold mouth of the shed with a man's upturned palms catching the light, she understood which one it had been all along.

"Get me the ME," she said. "Get me Henley out here before anybody moves him an inch." She turned to James, and his face had gone to the flat careful stillness it took on when he was holding something down hard, and she knew his mind had gone exactly where hers had. "And get those two kids' footage. All of it. If they filmed their way in, they filmed the route, and if they filmed the route—"

"—we see who was here before them," James finished.

Outside, the girl in the foil blanket had started crying again. Isla stood at the edge of the light and looked at the thing she had been waiting for without letting herself know she was waiting, and did not look away.

CHAPTER THREE

The second plant was older than the first, and he had loved it longer.

He had come to it in the last hours of the dark — hours after leaving Ray, while the yard at Consolidated still stood empty and the iron there still held what he had put in it — because that was when he came to everything now, when the city pulled its blinds and forgot that places like this existed. The Erlandson works had stood empty for nineteen years. Most men his age remembered it only as a smell that used to hang over the east end on certain wind, or as the reason a father or an uncle had come home with his hearing gone soft at the edges. But he remembered the inside of it. The heat of it, the great rolling thunder of the line when it ran, the way a man learned to read a furnace by the color in its throat and never by the gauge, because the gauge lied and the color never did.

He moved through the gutted hall with his hands out, the way a blind man moves through a house he was born in. The machinery rose around him in the dark, vast, gone to rust now but still holding the shape of what it had been. He let his palm travel the cold flank of the annealing line. The metal had a grain to it under the corrosion, a roughness his fingertips knew. He had operated this stretch for eleven years. He had been proud of it then, in the small hard way a man is proud of a thing he does well and no one thanks him for. The pride had been a poor thing, he understood now. A man's pride. It had wanted recognition. It had wanted a foreman to nod, a check to clear, a name on a plaque that never came.

What he had now did not want any of that.

He stopped where the floor dipped and stood listening. Far off, under everything, he could hear the water. He always could now. It was not a sound the ears made — he had given up trying to explain that even to himself — but a pressure, a low and constant knowing, the lake breathing against the shore three streets away and breathing, too, somewhere behind his own ribs. It had been speaking to him a long time before he had been ready to hear it. He was ashamed, a little, of how long it had taken. All those years he had thought the work was the work. He had not understood that the work was only practice. A hand learning its tools.

He thought of Hendricks.

Not with regret. Regret was for men who had done a thing poorly, and he had done it well — better than well, he thought, with the still private satisfaction of a craftsman who stands back from the bench and finds the joint true, the seam clean, nothing he would change. Ray had been the right material. Twenty-two years inside those walls, a man who knew the crusher's silhouette better than his own face, who had walked that dead yard so many nights it had worn a groove in him. There had been a fitness to it. A rightness in returning Ray to the place that had made and discarded him, in arranging him so, in the open mouth of the iron. He had taken his time. He had wanted it seen, and that wanting was the new thing, the thing that separated what he was becoming from what he had been.

Poor Ray. Ray could never have understood, in the dull warm middle of his living, what waited on the far side of it. You could not be told. He saw that clearly now. The understanding did not fit into a living head; it came only after, in the cold, in the new form, when the small loud self finally went quiet and let the larger thing speak through the space it left. He had tried, in the last instant, to give Ray a glimpse. He liked to believe a little of it had reached him. He liked to believe Ray had heard the water too, there at the end.

He let his hand fall from the line.

There was a place he had been turning over for some weeks, and standing here in the cold breath of the old hall he found that he had decided. He held the choosing in his mind the way he had once held a billet over the fire — not rushing it, not forcing it, waiting for the color to come up true. The wrong heat ruined the metal. Too cool and it would not take the shape; too hot and it crumbled in the hand. The location had to be right the way the heat had to be right. Seen, but not too soon. Near the water. A place that had meant something, once, to someone.

He had it now. He could feel it come up to the proper color.

Outside, the dark was beginning to thin. He turned and went back the way he had come, unhurried, a craftsman walking home from a long shift, and behind him the dead machines stood in their rows and kept his counsel, and beyond the wall the lake went on breathing his name.

CHAPTER FOUR

By eleven the field office had filled with the ordinary sounds of a Monday, and Isla resented every one of them. The copier. The break-room laughter. A phone ringing four desks down and going, mercifully, unanswered. She sat with Ray Hendricks's name typed into three databases at once and the image of his upturned palms refusing to leave the inside of her eyelids, and thought the world had no business sounding so normal.

James had pulled a chair up to the side of her desk rather than taking his own across the bullpen, and they worked the way they'd learned to work over four years — her on the records, him on the people. He had a way of getting a stranger on the phone to tell him things, a flat Midwestern patience that made men feel they were doing him a favor by talking. She did the reading. He did the road, and the road sometimes ran through a telephone.

"Sixty-one years old," she said, scrolling. "Worked Consolidated Ore twenty-two years, started on the floor, ended on the floor. Never made foreman." She clicked. "Married once, divorced eighteen years ago. One daughter, Megan, lives in St. Paul. There's a voicemail in the phone records from her three days ago that he never returned."

James wrote that down without comment, but she saw the small tightening at the corner of his mouth, and knew he was thinking of Emma. He had a way of carrying other people's children around with him.

"Plant shut down in 2003," she went on. "Hendricks was part of the last group laid off. And here's where it gets loud." She turned the monitor so he could see. "He filed a wrongful termination suit against the holding company in 2004. Lost it. Filed a grievance with the union in 2005 over his severance and pension calculation. That one dragged on two years, and he lost that too, more or less — they settled for pennies." She scrolled. "Then a long quiet stretch. Bartending, seasonal work, a stint driving for a parts supplier. The man spent two decades angry and broke in the same city that broke him."

"That's half of Duluth's east end," James said. "Being angry and broke about the plants isn't a motive. It's a demographic."

"No," she agreed. "It isn't a motive. But look at this." She brought up a city clerk's portal, agendas and minutes, the dull civic exhaust of a small municipal government. "Two weeks ago. City council meeting, public comment period. Ray Hendricks signed up to speak. He's listed right here. R. Hendricks, three minutes, against."

"Against what?"

"That's the part I can't pull from here. The agenda item's a docket number and a line that says heritage designation, proposed. The minutes aren't posted yet." She made a note. "But a man who hasn't been in a newspaper in twenty years stands up in front of the city council two weeks before somebody arranges him in the mouth of a crusher — that's a thing I want to understand."

James leaned back, careful of the rib, and turned his father's watch once around his wrist. "You're building him a life," he said. "Grievances, a lawsuit, a public appearance. You're making him into a man somebody would want to kill."

"I'm making him into a man," she said. "The wanting is somebody else's. I just want to know who was paying attention to him."

Her desk phone rang before James could answer. It was the medical examiner's office, and she put it on speaker so they could both hear Patricia Henley, who did not waste time on Mondays or any other day.

"I'll have the full report tomorrow," Henley said, "but you wanted the headline, so here it is. Your man did not die in that crusher."

Isla pulled a legal pad toward her. "Tell me."

"Single impact, posterior, slightly left of the midline of the occipital bone. Heavy, broad, blunt. Not an edge — a face. Something like a maul, a sledge, the flat of a large hammer." A rustle of paper. "It fractured the skull, and there was significant bleeding before the heart stopped, which means he was alive when it landed and not for very long after. He was struck from behind, almost certainly standing, almost certainly by someone he didn't know was there or didn't fear."

"And then?"

"And then he was moved. There's lividity that's wrong for the position you found him in — blood settled along his back and the backs of his legs, which tells me he lay flat on the ground for a stretch after death, an hour at minimum, before somebody lifted him into that machine and arranged him sitting up. By the time the arms were positioned, rigor was beginning. Whoever did it had to work against a stiffening body to lay those hands out palm-up." A pause. "That takes time, Agent Rivers. And strength. Hendricks was a hundred and ninety pounds of dead weight. Lifting that into the jaws of a crusher and posing it isn't a thing a person does in a hurry, and it isn't a thing most people can do alone."

"But one strong person could."

"One strong person who was patient," Henley said, "and didn't mind the company of a dead man for an hour or two. Yes."

When she'd hung up, the office sounds came rushing back in, and Isla sat very still inside them and turned the timeline over. Struck once, from behind, by surprise. Left to lie on the ground long enough for the blood to settle. Then lifted, and arranged, and waited over, and left.

"He didn't bring him there to kill him," she said slowly. "He killed him on the ground and then decided what to do with him. Or no—" She stopped, because that wasn't right either, and made herself be precise the way Delgado had taught her a lifetime ago in Quantico. Don't tell me the story you like. Tell me the story the body tells. "He killed him quick and clean. The killing wasn't the point. The killing was just how you get a body to work with. The point was after. The point was the arranging."

James was watching her. "You want to go back out there."

"I want to go back out there."

The light at Consolidated Ore had changed in the hours they'd been gone, gone flatter and grayer, and the Duluth PD had strung tape and posted a uniform at the gap in the fence, but the place carried the same dead weight it had that morning — a building that had finished its life and was only waiting to fall down about it. Halvorsen met them at the shed.

Isla stood at the mouth of it and did not look at the body this time. Henley's people had bagged him and he was gone, a chalk-and-tape absence in the iron mouth. She looked at everything else.

That was the thing that had been bothering her since the morning, sitting just under the surface of her attention like a stone under shallow water, and now, with the body gone and the scene laid bare, she could finally see the shape of it.

The place was a charnel house of ways to kill a man. That was what an abandoned ore facility was, if you thought about it the way her work had taught her to think — a cathedral of edges and weights and drops. There was rebar in the rubble along the south wall, lengths of it rusted to a wicked roughness. There was a steel cable hanging from the gantry overhead, frayed at the end into a metal broom. There was broken glass, and a fifty-gallon drum lying on its side, and the great iron jaws themselves, built for nothing in this world but the crushing of hard things into smaller hard things. A man who wanted to kill another man here and make it look like the place had done it had a hundred tools to choose from, and every one of them would have told the story the lake had been telling for a century: he came here drunk, he fell, the dead plant took him, the way dead plants do.

The killer had used none of it.

He had brought his own weapon — Henley's broad, flat face, the maul or the sledge — and carried it in and carried it out again, because Isla had walked the whole shed now and there was nothing here that matched the wound. He had not let the building do the work. He had not made it an accident. He had carried death in with him and taken the means of it back out, and what he'd left was the exact opposite of an accident: a thing arranged, displayed, signed.

And the rest of the scene — she turned slowly, taking it in — the rest of the scene was undisturbed. That was the word that had been waiting for her. There was a film of dust over everything in the shed, the soft gray settling of twenty empty years, and it lay unbroken across the drum and the cable and the rubble. No scuffs in it but the ones the urban explorers had left coming in, and Halvorsen's people, and her own from the morning, all of them documented. The killer had moved through this place and the place had barely registered him. He hadn't thrashed. He hadn't struggled. He hadn't dragged Hendricks across the floor leaving a smear in the dust — and a body dragged would leave a smear, she'd have staked her career on it. Which meant he'd carried him. One hundred and ninety pounds lifted and carried, so as not to mar the floor of a building nobody had cared about in twenty years.

"Look at the floor," she said to James, quietly. "Look how clean he was."

James looked. She watched him see it, the slow, careful sweep of his eyes that mirrored her own, and watched his face do the thing it did when a scene turned from sad to wrong.

"He respected it," James said. It came out almost reluctant, as if he didn't want to give the man that word. "The place. He moved through it like he didn't want to disturb it."

"Like it was his," Isla said.

The wind came in off the lake through the peeled flank of the shed and lifted a corner of the crime-scene tape, and the cable on the gantry swung an inch and went still, and Isla stood in the dust the killer had been careful not to break and understood that she was not looking at a man's rage. Rage was loud and clumsy and left smears. This was something colder and more terrible. This was care.

CHAPTER FIVE

They had the two urban explorers in separate rooms at the Duluth PD by one o'clock, which was generous as interview spaces went — a county building with bad coffee and good heat, a step up from talking to traumatized twenty-year-olds on the tailgate of a cruiser. Isla took the girl. James took the boy. They'd compare notes after, but she already knew, walking in, that neither of these kids had carried one hundred and ninety pounds anywhere.

The girl's name was Brynn Tasker, a sophomore at UMD, and she had stopped crying somewhere in the last hour and arrived now at the brittle, talkative aftermath where the body wants to fill the silence with anything at all. She had a phone she clutched like a rosary and a username, Isla learned, with more followers than the Bureau had agents in the entire state.

"It's called Rust Belt After Dark," Brynn said. "It's me and Cody. We do abandoned places. Not just here — we did the old Nopeming sanatorium, we did a grain elevator in Superior, we did —" She stopped, hearing herself. "It's not, like, illegal. I mean it's trespassing, technically, but we don't take anything, we don't break anything, we just film and we leave it how we found it. That's the whole rule. Take nothing, break nothing. We have it in the channel description."

Take nothing, break nothing. Isla thought of the dust lying unbroken across the shed and felt a cold finger move down the back of her neck, and set it aside, because it wasn't the same thing, and a frightened girl who filmed ruins for strangers on the internet was not a man who carried bodies. But she filed it. She filed everything now.

"Tell me about this morning," Isla said gently. "From the start. You parked where?"

Brynn told it. They'd come in before dawn for the light — the magic hour stuff, when the sun comes through the gaps, it's the whole reason you go early — through the gap in the fence on Garfield like they had twice before, and they'd been filming the crusher shed because Cody said the crusher was the money shot, and Brynn had been the one to round the iron flank of the machine with her headlamp up, and there he was. She didn't cry telling it. She'd used up the crying. She just went pale and far away, and Isla let her get there and back at her own speed.

"You said twice before," Isla said. "You'd been to Consolidated before this morning?"

"Twice. Like, months ago. Spring." Brynn turned the phone over in her hands. "It's a good location. Big machines, lots of texture, the light's good in the morning." Then she hesitated, and Isla saw the hesitation and went very still inside, the way she did when a scene was about to give something up.

"What is it, Brynn?"

"It's probably nothing."

"Tell me the nothing."

"There's a guy." Brynn looked up. "We've seen him there. Both times before. An older guy, gray hair. He — okay, this sounds dumb, but he acts like he owns the place. As he works there, except nobody works there; it's been dead forever. My dad worked at a plant near there, and he says they've all been dead since before I was born. But this guy, he came at us out of nowhere the first time, like out of one of the buildings, and he told us to get out. Not — he wasn't yelling. That was the weird part. He was really calm. He just said this isn't a place for you and you need to leave now, like he was doing us a favor telling us. And we left because it freaked us out, the calm. And the second time we saw him across the yard and we just didn't go near him. We did a different building."

"Can you describe him?"

"Older. Gray hair, kind of long, kind of — unkempt? A beard, I think. Big. Not fat, just — broad. Like he could pick you up." Brynn shrugged helplessly. "It was dark both times. And I wasn't trying to remember his face, I was trying to leave. I'm sorry. That's all I've got. Gray hair, and he acted like the place was his, and he scared us without doing anything, you know? Some people are just like that."

Like it was his, James had said in the shed, an hour ago. Isla kept her face still and her voice gentle and got every detail the girl had, which was almost nothing — no scar, no limp, no name, no vehicle, no face she could swear to in a courtroom or even a photo array. A big older man with gray hair who behaved as though an abandoned facility belonged to him. In a city full of big older men who'd given their working lives to plants like that one, it was barely a description at all. It was a silhouette. It was a vertical seam in the shadow.

She filed it anyway.

By the time she and James pulled out of the county lot, the rain had made up its mind, a thin, steady September drizzle that beaded on the windshield and turned the wipers on at intervals. James drove. The lake was off to their left somewhere behind the warehouses, sensed more than seen, the way you always sensed it in this city, a vast presence holding down the edge of the world.

"The kids are clear," James said. It wasn't a question, but she answered it.

"They're clear. She couldn't lift her own backpack into that machine. The boy?"

"Cried twice. Threw up once before we got there, the uniform told me. He's a film student who found his first dead body and it's going to be in his head for the rest of his life." James shook his head slowly. "They wandered into the worst morning of their lives. They're not it."

"No."

He drove a while. The wipers swept. She could feel him working up to something, the way she always could, and she waited him out, watching the dead industrial east end slide past the glass, the chain-link and the FOR LEASE signs gone gray with age.

"The staging," James said finally. "The arms. The palms. Carrying him so he wouldn't mark the floor." He turned the watch around his wrist at a stoplight. "I keep trying to make it small in my head. A guy who hated Hendricks, a fight that went too far, some panicked over-elaborate thing to throw us off. I keep trying to make it a one-time thing. A man does a terrible thing once and dresses it up." He looked over at her, and the deep-set blue eyes had the careful flatness in them that she'd learned meant he was afraid. "Tell me it's a one-time thing, Isla. Tell me a guy lost his temper and got theatrical, and we close this in a week and Hendricks is just Hendricks, one sad dead man and not the start of a list."

The light went green. He didn't move until the car behind them tapped its horn, and then he eased through the intersection, and Isla looked out at the rain and the dead plants and the weight of the lake she couldn't see, and thought about the dust lying unbroken, and the weapon carried in and carried out, and the hour the killer had spent in the company of a corpse arranging its hands toward the light.

"James," she said.

"Don't."

"You asked me to tell you."

"I asked you to tell me it's a one-time thing."

"I can't tell you that." She said it quietly, and kindly, because he was a man who carried other people's children around with him and he was asking her to give him a smaller world than the one they were in, and she loved him too much to lie to him about the size of it. "A man who hates another man and loses his temper — he hits him and he runs. He doesn't carry the body so he won't scuff the floor. He doesn't pose the hands. He doesn't bring his own weapon and take it home again. Everything about that scene was done by someone who's done it before, or thought about doing it so long that the first time came out finished." She watched the rain. "You don't arrange a man like that, that perfectly, the first time the feeling moves you. That's not a first. That's a graduation."

"Agreed," James said. The wipers swept, and held, and swept.

"I already know the answer. I knew it this morning. He wants it seen, James. He went to all that trouble so we'd stand there and look. A man who wants to be seen has more to show us. They always do." She turned from the window and made her voice as steady as she could make it, which was very steady, because being steady for him was a thing she could still do. "This is the beginning of something. I'm sorry. But you knew that, or you wouldn't have asked me to tell you it wasn't."

He drove the rest of the way to the office in silence, and she let him have it.

CHAPTER SIX

The name came to them at two in the afternoon, and it came, the way these things often did, not from the dramatic part of the work but from the dull part — from James on the phone with the city clerk's office, charming a harried administrative assistant into reading him the unposted minutes of a council meeting nobody but a handful of cranks had attended.

"Heritage designation," James said, hanging up, grim satisfaction under the words. "The agenda item Hendricks signed up to speak against. The city's got a proposal in front of the historic preservation commission to designate one of the old ore facilities as a heritage landmark. Protect it, stabilize it, maybe turn part of it into an industrial museum eventually. There's grant money attached. There's a coalition pushing for it." He looked at her. "And there's a man who's been pushing for it thirty years, loud enough that the clerk knew his name before I finished asking. Derek Paulson."

Isla was already typing it. "Tell me."

"Former union man. Organizer, the real kind, the old kind. The clerk says he's at every meeting that so much as mentions the plants. Calls in. Writes letters to the paper. He got the heritage proposal in front of the commission in the first place — it's basically his life's project." James paused. "And he and Hendricks went at each other at that meeting two weeks ago. The assistant remembered because it got heated. Two old men from the same dead industry, screaming at each other across a council chamber about what to do with its corpse."

Derek Paulson lived in a third-floor walk-up in a tired brick building off Sixth Avenue East, and when he opened the door to Isla's knock and her badge he didn't look surprised, only tired in a deep settled way, the tiredness of a man who'd been expecting bad news his whole life and was rarely disappointed. He was seventy if he was a day, stooped, with a fringe of white hair and reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and ink on the side of his hand like a man who still wrote things out in longhand.

"You'll be about Ray," he said. "Come in, then. I've been waiting for somebody to come about Ray."

The apartment stopped her in the doorway. Every wall was covered — not cluttered, covered, arranged with the deliberate care of a curator — with the history of an industry. Black-and-white photographs of men in hard hats lined up in front of furnaces. The great gantries against a working sky, smoke and steam, the plants alive. Union rally flyers, the paper gone soft and amber, dates from the seventies and eighties in bold defiant type: MEMBERSHIP MEETING. SOLIDARITY. The language of a war lost so long ago that most of the city had forgotten it was ever fought. A framed photograph of a younger Paulson with a bullhorn, mouth open, a crowd behind him.

"You can look," Paulson said, lowering himself into a chair with a wince. "Everybody does. Some men put up their kids' pictures. I never had kids. I had the local." He gestured vaguely at his whole vanished world. "Eleven hundred members at the peak. Eleven hundred families. You know how many work those facilities now? None. Zero. They knocked down half of them and let the other half rot, and now—" his mouth twisted "—now they want to put a little plaque on one and call it heritage. Charge school kids admission to look at the place that fed this city for a hundred years and then got thrown away. Heritage."

"I thought you supported the heritage designation," Isla said.

"I do." He said it fiercely, and then, more quietly: "I'm the only thing keeping it alive, near enough. Somebody's got to make them remember. If we don't mark it, in twenty years it's like none of it happened. Like none of those men ever existed. That's what I can't—" He stopped, and pressed his lips together, and she saw the grief in him then, old and structural, holding up the whole apartment like a load-bearing wall. "That's what I won't allow. They don't get to throw us away twice."

"And Ray Hendricks disagreed with you about that."

The change in Paulson's face was immediate and ugly. "Ray Hendricks," he said, "was a sellout." The word came out of him like something he'd been carrying. "Stood up at that meeting two weeks ago and spoke against the designation. Against it. A man who gave that company twenty years and got laid off for his trouble, same as me, same as all of us, and he stood up in front of the council and said — I can hear him saying it — said we ought to let it go. Said monument-making was just a way of refusing to move on. Said tear them down and build something that pays. To my face. In public." His hands had closed into fists on the arms of the chair. "We had words. I'll not pretend we didn't. The whole chamber heard us. I told him he was spitting on every man who ever clocked in there, and he told me I was in love with a corpse, and we'd have gone if they hadn't gaveled us down." He breathed. The fists opened. "And now he's dead, and you're in my front room. So. There it is. You'd have heard it from somebody."

"How did you hear he was dead?" Isla asked.

"It's on the radio. They found a body at Consolidated this morning. Half the east end's already saying it's Ray, because Ray's the one who walks home through that yard every night and everybody knows it." He looked at her steadily. "I didn't kill him, Agent. I'm seventy-one years old with a hip that's bone on bone and a heart that skips. I can barely carry my own groceries up those stairs. But I won't sit here and tell you I'm sorry, and I won't tell you we were friends, because I'd be lying on both counts and you'd see it."

It was, Isla thought, almost the perfect alibi — not because it cleared him, but because it was too honest to be performance. A guilty man dressed his story. Paulson had handed her his motive across the coffee table without being asked. And yet the body in the crusher had been a hundred and ninety pounds lifted and carried and arranged by someone strong and patient, and the man in front of her could not, she believed, have done it. She believed his hip. She believed his heart. She had watched him lower himself into the chair.

But.

"Mr. Paulson," she said. "This facility. The one the city wants to designate. Is it Consolidated Ore?"

He frowned. "Consolidated? No. Consolidated's a wreck, nothing worth saving there, they'll bulldoze it inside the decade." He said it dismissively, and then he said the thing that put the cold finger back on the nape of her neck. "The one we're fighting for is the Erlandson works. East end, down by the water. That's the one with the bones still in it. That's the one worth a plaque." His eyes sharpened on her. "Why? What's Erlandson got to do with Ray?"

"Probably nothing," Isla said, and heard Brynn Tasker's voice saying it back to her — it's probably nothing — and disliked the echo. Hendricks had died at Consolidated. The heritage fight was over Erlandson. Two different dead plants, two different corners of the same dying industry. It was the kind of detail a good investigator learned to set down gently and not lean on, because the world was full of coincidences, and a man who saw a pattern in everything eventually saw the wrong one and got somebody killed. She knew that better than anyone alive. She had the smooth absence of a finger to remind her.

And still. A place that had meant something, once, to someone. She didn't know where the thought came from; it surfaced on its own, unbidden, and she pushed it back down. Two dead plants. Not the same site. But not a thing she could throw away either, and so she did with it what she did with everything now.

She filed it.

James asked the rest of the questions — where Paulson had been the night before, whether anyone could account for him, the dull necessary scaffolding — and Paulson answered them all, bitterly and completely, and none of it amounted to anything that would let her arrest him or anything that would let her cross him off. He'd been home alone. Of course he had. He was a seventy-one-year-old man who lived alone with the photographs of dead men. Where else would he be.

At the door, on the way out, Isla stopped and looked once more at the wall, at the framed young man with the bullhorn and his mouth open and his whole future ahead of him, before any of it had been thrown away.

"You really do think it's worth saving," she said. "The plant."

"I think the men are worth remembering," Paulson said. "The plant's just where they were." He held the door. "You find who did that to Ray. I hated the man and I'll say so to anybody. But nobody deserves—" His voice failed, and he steadied it, and finished. "I heard how they left him. Nobody deserves to be made into a thing. Whatever he was, he was a man. You find who forgot that."

He shut the door, and Isla and James went down the three flights in silence, and out into the thin rain that hadn't stopped all afternoon, and the lake was down there at the bottom of the east end, out of sight behind the buildings, holding the Erlandson works at its edge like a stone it hadn't yet decided to throw.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The meeting ran two hours past its scheduled end, and Teresa Mack was the last one out of the building.

She'd expected that. After eleven years on the council she expected most things about civic life — the cameras leaving when the contentious item closed, the public emptying out behind them, and then the slow business of governing: line-item amendments, procedural votes nobody filmed, the long work of keeping a small city running through another winter. She stayed for all of it, because somebody had to, and because the alternative was going home to an empty house and the radio.

She wished, tonight, she hadn't heard the radio.

City Hall sat dark behind her as she came down the steps, only the security lights burning in the lobby and one window on the third floor where a janitor worked his way down the hall. The September night had teeth in it. Teresa pulled her coat closer and started across the empty plaza toward the side lot where she always parked, her heels loud on the wet concrete, her satchel heavy against her hip with the printouts she never managed to leave at the office.

The heritage designation had passed committee tonight. That should have felt like something. She'd carried the Erlandson proposal three years — through the budget objections, the developers' lawyers, the editorials that called her a nostalgist standing in the way of progress — and tonight it had cleared the last procedural hurdle before the full vote. By rights she should have been driving home elated. Instead she kept hearing what the clerk had said in the hallway afterward, low, the way people said things they shouldn't.

They found a body out at Consolidated this morning. They're saying it's one of the old plant men.

One of the old plant men. There were so few of them left. Teresa had spent her whole career chasing their stories before they vanished — the oral histories, the photographs nobody else wanted, the names she'd fought to keep on the public record. She knew the men who'd worked those facilities the way she knew the rooms of her own house. That one of them was dead, that he'd died in that place, in the wreck of a building she'd spent three years arguing was worth saving, had sat in her chest all evening like a swallowed stone.

She reached the edge of the plaza and the lot opened in front of her, a dim quadrangle of cracked asphalt under two working sodium lamps, her sedan alone near the far fence.

She stopped.

There was a man near the entrance.

He stood just past the low brick pillar that marked the lot's mouth, half in the throw of the streetlight and half out of it, and he was not doing anything. Her body understood that before her mind caught up — that he was not walking to a car, not waiting on a ride, not checking a phone the way people did when they were idling with a purpose. He was simply standing, broad and still, and he was facing her.

An older man. She could see that much: the gray of his hair where the light caught it, the heaviness through the shoulders, a settled patience in the way he held himself, as though he'd been standing there a long while and could stand a good while longer. She couldn't see his face. The angle of the light put it in shadow, a dark smooth blank where features should have been, and still she had the unmistakable sense that he was looking at her. Directly at her. With an expression she couldn't read and didn't want to.

A chill went through her that had nothing to do with the cold off the lake.

"Can I help you?" she called, and hated how thin it came out across the empty asphalt.

He didn't answer. He held there another moment — one slow heartbeat, two — and then turned, unhurried, and walked away into the dark beyond the pillar, gone before she could fix a single thing about him in her mind.

Teresa stood very still. Her heart was going hard. The lot was empty again, just the two lamps and her lonely car and the wet shine of the asphalt, and she made herself breathe.

Nothing, she thought. It was nothing. A man cutting through the lot. Somebody waiting on a wife inside, a son, anybody. She was rattled from the radio and the clerk and the long day, that was all. She'd been jumping at shadows since she'd heard about the body, seeing meaning in every gray-haired stranger, and a woman who saw a pattern in everything eventually frightened herself half to death over nothing at all.

She started toward her car, keys already in her fist.

And then she thought: he was looking at me before I came around the corner. He was already facing this way. He was waiting for someone to come out of that building.

She didn't let herself finish it. She got to the car and got the door open and got in and locked it, all in one motion, and sat there in the dark with her hands on the wheel and her breath fogging the glass, telling herself, over and over, that it was nothing.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Isla woke before the alarm, into the blue underwater light that came off the lake at this hour and filled the apartment like something poured.

For a moment she didn't move. The radiator wasn't running — September was still mild enough that the landlord's long-suffering boiler got to sleep in — and the only sound was the lake, that low ceaseless breathing of water against the breakwall a few hundred yards down the slope, and beneath it, closer, the slower breathing of the man beside her.

James lay on his back with one arm flung over his head and the other resting across her, heavy and warm, his calloused hand open against her hip, the old fishing scar pale along the back of it. He slept the way he did everything, without apology, taking up the space he took up. His face had gone slack and young in the dim light, the weathered watchfulness smoothed out of it. His father's watch sat on her nightstand where he always set it, the leather band coiled like something resting.

Isla lay inside the warmth of him and let herself, for once, simply have the morning.

This was the part she hadn't expected. Not the fact of him in her bed — that she'd half seen coming for a year, the way you see weather forming out over the lake long before it arrives. It was the quiet of it. The wanting, once they'd stopped pretending they didn't, had not turned into the frantic thing she'd braced for but into something slow and unhurried, like the man himself. Six months of it now. Not loudly. Not in a way that had a name. He kept a toothbrush here, and she didn't comment on it; she'd left a sweater at his place, and he had folded it into a drawer rather than ask. Emma knew, in the way fourteen-year-olds knew everything, and had decided to be pleased about it in a manner that involved pretending not to know. Kate, Isla was fairly sure, knew too, and had elected to look the other way as long as the work didn't suffer, which was its own kind of blessing from a woman who considered herself married to the job.

They had not said the word. Either word — the one for what they were, or the bigger one underneath it. Isla had turned this over enough nights to know it wasn't cowardice, or not only. It was that they had both already lost the thing you lose when you say words like that. James had a marriage in his rearview that had ended civilly and sadly, and Isla had Reggie in Miami, a relationship curdled in the wreckage of Alicia Mendez and left behind without ever being properly grieved, because there had been so much else to grieve. They knew exactly what it cost when the words turned out to be wrong. So they had decided — without deciding, the way they decided most things — to let it be what it was, and become what it became, and not to rush the color before it came up true.

She was happy. That was the strange, almost frightening thing she'd had to get used to over the summer. After Miami, after Brune, after the ice and the hospital and the long winter of mending, she had stopped believing happiness happened to people like her, people who'd misread a profile and gotten a schoolteacher killed, people who carried the absence of a finger as a receipt. And then it had crept up on her anyway, in coffees set carefully away from files and late drives up the North Shore and mornings exactly like this one, and she had learned to stop flinching at it. Whatever this became, it would become slowly, and she didn't mind. She had spent her whole life rushing toward things. She could stand to arrive at one in its own time.

James stirred without waking, his hand tightening on her hip, and she turned her head on the pillow to look at him and laid her left hand over his, four fingers and a gap, his hand under hers not minding the gap at all.

The phone rang.

Not her cell. The cell could be the bank or her sister or a wrong number. This was the other one — the secure line she kept on the nightstand because Kate had insisted, the one that did not ring for banks or sisters or wrong numbers. It rang into the underwater quiet like a stone through glass, and Isla was upright and reaching before the second ring, and beside her James came awake all at once, the way cops came awake, no grogginess in him, his eyes already on her face to read what was there.

"Rivers," she said.

The night supervisor at the field office, and his voice was wrong in the way voices were wrong when they were working hard to stay level. There was a body. Superior Iron Works, across the harbor on the Wisconsin side, a dead facility like the last one. A night security guard had found it on his two a.m. round and called it in and was, the supervisor said, currently on with 911 and would not go back inside the building, would not stand near the door, was sitting in his truck with the engine running and the doors locked and refusing every reasonable instruction to so much as confirm the scene.

"He keeps saying it's looking at him," the supervisor said. "The guard. He keeps saying that."

Isla was already standing, reaching for the clothes folded over the chair, the phone tucked against her shoulder. "Tell him not to go back in. Tell him he did exactly right and he doesn't have to go anywhere near it. Tell him we're coming." She covered the receiver. James was up, pulling his shirt on over the rib he still favored, his face gone to the flat careful stillness she'd watched come over it in the shed at Consolidated. He didn't ask. He'd heard enough of her end.

"Superior Iron Works," she said, and saw the name land.

"That's the second dead plant in two days."

"I know."

"Isla. That's the second one."

"I know," she said again, and the gray-blue morning that had held them so gently a minute ago drained out of the room, and what was left was the work, and the lake breathing down the slope, and the knowledge that had been sitting in her since she'd stood in the crusher's mouth and understood which of her two possibilities it had been all along.

They were out the door in six minutes. He drove.

The harbor at that hour was a held breath. They crossed the high span with the lift towers black against a sky just beginning to think about light, and below them the water lay flat and gunmetal and enormous, the ore docks reaching into it like the fingers of a hand laid flat. Superior sat low on the far shore, flatter and harder than Duluth, more honest about what it was. Isla watched it come and said nothing, and James said nothing, and the wipers stayed dry because the rain had finally, sometime in the night, given up.

Superior Iron Works crouched at the end of a road that had no other reason to exist. It was bigger than Consolidated — a true works, not a single shed but a campus of dead industry, blast stoves and stock houses and a long high casting hall, all of it gone the deep rust-brown of abandonment, all of it ringed by a fence that had given up in several places. A Superior PD cruiser sat in the lot with its light bar turning, and beside it a security company pickup, engine running, exhaust pluming white, a man's silhouette rigid behind the wheel.

Isla went to the guard first. He was forty-some and pale and gripping the wheel with both hands, and he rolled the window down two inches when she showed her badge and would not get out. He'd done his round, he said. Same loop as every night for eleven years. He'd come through the casting hall with his light and he'd seen — and here his voice climbed and broke — he'd seen it sitting up in the furnace mouth looking at him, and he'd run, and he wasn't going back, they could fire him, he wasn't going back in there.

"You're not going back in," Isla told him, gently, the same words she'd given the supervisor to give him. "You did everything right. Stay in the truck. Keep it warm."

She left him with the engine running and walked with James toward the long dark mouth of the casting hall, and the lake was at her back now, across the harbor, and she could feel it the way you feel a thing standing behind you in an empty room.

Inside, the hall went up and up into dark she couldn't see the top of, and the air was the same as the shed had been, colder than outside, mineral, rust and standing water. The Superior officer's flashlight made a shaking cone ahead of them that found, at the far end, the blast furnace.

It was a vast thing, a riveted iron tower wider than a house at its base, and at its foot the casting opening had been cut for the tapping of molten iron a lifetime ago, a dark arched mouth the height of a man. In the mouth, in the cold dead throat where the fire had been, the second body sat.

Isla stopped at the edge of the light and made herself look.

He had been placed the way the first man was placed — sitting, upright, back against the iron — but where Hendricks's arms had been flung wide, palms up, this man's arms were folded across his chest. Folded with care. The left over the right, the hands tucked, the whole posture composed and unbearably deliberate, the way the dead were laid out in coffins, the way bodies were arranged by people who believed the arranging mattered. His head was bowed slightly forward. The gray hair at the back of it caught the light and showed, even from here, the dark matting she had learned to read.

A man at peace. A man in state. A man set into the mouth of a furnace and folded into rest, in a dead place, by the water, waited over and left for the morning round and the screaming guard and the turning lights and her.

Behind her James let out the slow breath he let out when a thing was bad, and after it the hall was utterly silent, and Isla stood in the cold throat of the works and felt the whole weight of it settle onto her — the particular gravity of a case that was not ending but only just getting started.

"It's more careful than the last one," she said quietly. "He's getting more careful."

"You mean better," James said.

"I mean," she said, not looking away from the folded hands, "that he's practicing."

CHAPTER NINE

The name came faster this time, because this time they knew to look for it.

By eight they were back across the bridge in the Duluth field office, in the small windowless conference room they'd taken over, the gray light up properly now over the harbor and doing nothing to warm the day. James had the phone and his flat way with strangers; Isla had the records. Between them, in under an hour, the second body stopped being a body and became a man.

Owen Marsh. Sixty-eight. A retired city engineer, thirty-one years with Duluth's public works department before his pension, a widower, two grown children out of state, a tidy house in Lakeside, and a habit in retirement of being a great deal of trouble at public meetings.

They'd had him off the guard's description before the records came back, in truth, though Isla had made herself wait for the records the way she made herself do everything now, in order, twice. The guard had calmed enough by the time the Superior officers walked him through it to say the dead man looked like the engineer who used to come around. Marsh had been a fixture out at the works — had done the city's last structural survey of the Erlandson site on contract after his retirement, and had a way of turning up at the dead plants on the Wisconsin side too, walking the perimeters, taking his photographs, building the case he carried to the council that these places were past saving. He'd had permission, more or less. He'd known the guards. One of them had just found him folded into a furnace.

That detail sat badly with Isla, and she set it carefully aside to come back to: the man had known the buildings, had walked them freely, would not have been alarmed to meet someone in one. A man who feared nothing in a place was a man who could be approached in it.

"He's everywhere," James said, scrolling through what the clerk's office had sent over, the same harried assistant who'd given them Hendricks now positively eager to help. "Letters to the editor. Public comment at half the council meetings for two years. The man retired and made civic nuisance into a second career." He looked up. "And guess what he was a nuisance about."

"Tell me."

"The heritage designation." James turned the screen. "The Erlandson works. He was the loudest voice against it at the public forum in the spring — the big one, the one that packed the chamber. The paper quotes him. He gave the council a whole engineer's lecture: the structures were unsafe, preserving them was throwing good money after a hazard, the responsible thing was demolition, and the only people who wanted to save them were sentimentalists who'd never have to sign off on the liability." He sat back, careful of the rib. "He used the word folly. They put it in the headline. Marsh Calls Heritage Plan 'Folly.'"

Isla sat very still and felt the cold finger settle on the back of her neck and stay there.

"Hendricks spoke against it too," she said. "At the council, two weeks ago. Paulson told us — Hendricks stood up and said let it go, tear them down, build something that pays." She pulled the legal pad toward her, wrote the two names, and drew a slow line between them. "Two men. Both old enough to have lived the whole arc of those plants. Both opposed to saving them. Both arranged in the ruins of them like —" She stopped and made herself be precise, the way Delgado had drilled into her in a classroom a lifetime and a country away. Don't tell me the story you like. Tell me the story the body tells. "Both arranged with care. Both struck once from behind. Both moved and posed."

Her desk phone rang. Henley, who did not waste a Tuesday any more than she'd wasted a Monday. Isla put her on speaker.

"Same hand," Henley said, without preamble. "I'll spare you the Latin. Single impact, posterior, heavy and broad, the same flat-faced instrument as your man at Consolidated or its twin. He was alive when it landed and not for long after. And he was killed somewhere else and brought to that furnace — the lividity's all wrong for a seated position. He lay flat a good while before anyone arranged him. Same as Hendricks." A rustle of paper. "I'll tell you the thing I told myself driving in, Agent Rivers, and you can do with it what you like. Whoever folded those arms did it after rigor had started to set. Which means he stood in that cold building and worked a stiffening dead man's arms across his chest and held them until they'd stay. That's not panic. That's not rage. That took time, and it took a kind of —" Henley, who did not reach for words, reached for one. "Tenderness. It looked tender. I've been doing this thirty years and I'll be glad never to use that word about a homicide again."

When she'd hung up the room was quiet, the copier clearing its throat somewhere down the hall, the ordinary Tuesday going on without them.

"Two isn't a pattern," James said. He said it the way you said a thing you didn't believe, to see whether saying it helped. "Legally. We've got two dead men in dead plants. A defense lawyer'd have a field day with anybody who called that a series after forty-eight hours."

"Two isn't a pattern," Isla agreed, because it wasn't, and because she had learned in the hardest possible way what it cost to see a pattern that wasn't there, to lean her whole weight on a shape in the dark and have it give way and a schoolteacher die for it. She would not do that again. She would not call it a pattern until the pattern made her say it. "But."

"But," James said.

She went to the whiteboard and wrote the two names at the top, Hendricks and Marsh, and under each the things that were the same. Old men. The plants. Killed quick, posed slow. Their own deaths made into something to be looked at. And then, in the space between them she'd left because some part of her had known to leave it, she wrote the third thing — the thing that was not about how they died but about how they'd lived, the thing that had been sitting under everything since Paulson lowered himself into his chair with a wince and told her about a fight in a council chamber over the corpse of an industry.

Both of them, in public, with their names in the record, had stood up and said: let it die. Tear it down. It isn't worth saving.

She capped the marker and stood looking at it, and made herself argue against it, because that was the discipline now, the thing she'd learned on Alicia Mendez's grave — that the first job of a pattern was to survive your best attempt to break it.

So she broke at it. Two old men in a dying city full of old men. The east end was thick with pensioners who'd given their bodies to those plants and had opinions about what should happen to the carcasses, and a great many of them had stood up at one meeting or another and said one thing or the other. Hendricks and Marsh might be unconnected, their politics a coincidence she was draping a story over because the story was more bearable than the chaos. A man slips. A drunk falls. Sometimes two unlucky men in a row were only two unlucky men. She knew better than anyone alive the seduction of the line drawn between two points.

But the bodies hadn't fallen. The bodies had been carried. And no drunk slipped, then lay flat for an hour, then sat up in the throat of a furnace and folded his own arms across his chest to wait for morning. The staging wasn't her story laid over the chaos. The staging was the killer's story, written plainly, and she was only the first reader he'd let see it.

"He's answering them," she said slowly, talking to the board as much as to James. "That's what this is. Hendricks and Marsh didn't just oppose it. They went on the record. They put their names down saying these places should die." She turned. "And somebody who thinks the opposite, who thinks the places are sacred, who moves through them like they're his — somebody who can't stand at a public mic and win the argument the way Paulson tries to — he's answering them. In the only language he believes they'll have to look at."

"You don't know that," James said. Quietly. Not arguing. Asking her to be sure.

"No. I don't." She looked at her left hand, four fingers and a gap, the receipt she carried for being sure of the wrong thing once. "I won't say I know it. I won't put it in a report and I won't say it to Kate as a fact, because I don't have it, and because the last time I was sure of a shape in the dark a woman died for it." She let that sit, because James knew the whole of it, knew Alicia Mendez's name, was one of perhaps three people alive she'd ever told the whole of it to. "But I can feel it forming. I've stood in two dead plants in two days and looked at two old men who wanted those plants gone, arranged like offerings in the ruins they wanted torn down. I'd be a worse agent than the one who got Alicia killed if I pretended I couldn't feel it."

A place that had meant something, once, to someone. The thought surfaced again, unbidden, and this time she didn't push it down. Somebody was killing the men who wanted to erase the plants. Somebody who carried the dead so gently they wouldn't scuff a floor nobody had cared about in twenty years. Somebody who thought the buildings were worth more than the men, and who, when the city argued about whether to remember or forget, had cast a vote of his own — in blunt force and folded hands, the only ballot he apparently trusted anyone would have to count.

She thought of the body posed at peace in the furnace mouth. She thought of Owen Marsh standing up in a packed chamber to call it folly, getting his word into the headline, going home pleased with himself — the way Brynn Tasker had said it's probably nothing and Paulson had said it's probably nothing, the way everyone said it right up until it was the only thing.

And she felt the whole shape of the next thing rise toward her, cold and certain: if someone was working down a list of the men who wanted those plants gone, then the question that mattered now was not who was already on it.

It was who else was.

CHAPTER TEN

The hall was warmer than it had any right to be, packed as it was with people who had nothing in common but their grievances, and he sat in the back row with his cap in his hands and let the heat of them wash over him.

He had come early, the way he came to everything now, and he had chosen the seat for its sightlines. From the last row of folding chairs he could see the whole room: the long table at the front where the council members sat behind their little paper name cards, the lectern with its single microphone, the rows of bowed and angry heads. He could see the doors. He always knew where the doors were. A man who had spent forty years in places where the only way out was the way you came in did not sit anywhere he could not leave.

They were frightened tonight. He could smell it on them, under the coffee and the wet wool, a sourness that hadn't been in the room at the spring forum. Two of their own were dead now — Ray in the crusher, Owen in the furnace mouth, the radio full of both — and the fear had changed the shape of the meeting. Tonight they came armed in the way frightened people armed themselves, with anger, which was only fear that had found a direction.

A woman near the front stood when the chair called her name and spoke about safety. She wanted the city to close the sites, fence them properly, post guards, do something before another body turned up in one of those godforsaken ruins. Her voice shook. She was not wrong to be afraid, he thought, and he felt no anger toward her, only a distant and almost gentle attention, the way you might watch weather move across water you knew would never reach you.

It was the men who interested him. The men who came to the microphone not to plead for fences but to win the old argument — who looked at what was happening and saw, even now, with two of their neighbors cold and dead, only the chance to be right.

He listened to them the way he had once listened to a furnace, for the true note under the noise.

A heavyset man in a Carhartt jacket got up and said the killings only proved his point, that the plants were death traps, that the sooner they came down the safer everyone would be, and there was an ugly mutter of agreement through the room. He sat down again pleased with himself. He had said a true thing in a false way and did not know the difference, and so the note he gave off was muddy, and the craftsman in the back row set him aside.

Then Gary Slattery stood.

He knew Slattery. Not to speak to — he did not speak to people anymore, not in any way that left a mark they'd remember — but he knew the shape of him, the way you knew a coworker you'd never liked. Slattery had run a fork truck at the Erlandson works for a handful of years before the layoffs, long enough to call himself a plant man and not long enough to have earned it. He'd done his time at the bottom of the seniority list and gotten out with no scars and a chip on his shoulder, and he'd spent the decades since telling anyone who'd listen that the whole industry had been a swindle and the buildings were good for nothing.

"I'll tell you what they are," Slattery said now, leaning into the microphone so it bumped and squealed. "They're rusted junk. That's it. That's the whole heritage. A bunch of rusted junk falling into the lake, and we're standing here arguing about putting a brass plate on it like it's the Liberty Bell." A few laughs, brittle ones. "My granddad worked the docks and you know what he wanted? A pension and a warm house. He didn't want a museum. The living ones, the ones who fed those furnaces, they're the only thing that was ever worth a damn in there, and they're all dead or dying, and when they go, good. Knock it all down. Salt the ground. I'll drive the dozer myself."

He said it for the laugh and he got it, a meaner one this time, and stepped back from the microphone with his thumbs hooked in his belt like a man who'd settled something.

In the back row, the man with the cap in his hands went very still.

It was not rage. He wanted to be honest with himself about that, the way he was honest about everything now, here in the late clean part of his life where the noise had finally quieted enough to let him see. He did not hate Gary Slattery. Hatred was a hot thing, and what he felt was cold but almost kind. What he felt, watching Slattery grin at his own cruelty, was nearer to pity — the particular pity a man feels for raw ore that has not yet been into the fire, that does not know what it is, that sits in the dull middle of itself believing the dull middle is all there is. Slattery thought the living were the only thing worth a damn. Slattery thought a man was the warm loud noise he made and nothing else. He could not be told otherwise. None of them could. He himself had not been able to be told; he had carried the same blindness for sixty years before the water finally cracked him open and let the larger thing in.

You could not be told. You could only be shown. And the showing was a mercy, though none of them would understand it as one until they were past the place where understanding lived.

He had already decided. He realized it the way he realized most things now — not as a choosing but as the recognition of a choosing already made somewhere below his thinking, the color come up true while he wasn't watching the fire. Gary Slattery. A place by the water that had meant something to him once, or should have. There was a fitness in it that he turned over slowly and found good: to return the man to the work he'd sneered at, to give him at last the dignity he'd refused the dead. It would take preparation. It always did. The right place, the right hour, the long labor of it. He did not rush these things. The wrong heat ruined the metal.

He should go. He had what he'd come for — not a decision, the decision had made itself, but the confirmation of it, the sound of Slattery's voice giving him leave. There was no reason to sit through the procedural droning, the votes nobody filmed. And there was a newer reason to be gone, a reason that had sat in the room with him all evening in the form of a tall man near the wall with a watchful stillness about him and a way of reading a crowd that the man in the back row recognized because it was his own.

Police. He'd known it the moment he came in. There would be police now; that was only sense. He rose, unhurried, settled his cap on his head, and began to move along the back row toward the door he'd marked coming in, a big man made small by the simple craft of seeming to have somewhere ordinary to be.

He was three steps from it when a voice came up over the murmur, clear and level and pitched to carry, a woman's voice from near the front.

"Folks — folks, if I could have your attention. My name is Special Agent Rivers, with the FBI."

He did not stop. A man who stopped was a man who'd heard something that concerned him, and he had spent forty years being a man nothing concerned. But he let his ears stay open behind him as his hand found the cold push-bar of the door.

"I know you're frightened," the woman said, "and you have every right to be, and I promise you we're going to answer every question you have tonight. But I'm going to ask two things of you first. I need everyone to stay calm. And I'm going to need you to identify yourselves to the officers at the doors — names, contact information. It's for your safety as much as ours. Some of you in this room may know something you don't know you know."

The push-bar gave with a soft mechanical sigh, the same sound he made himself when a thing was finished, and the cold of the September night came in around the edge of the door to meet him.

He did not look back. He didn't need to. He had heard everything he needed in the steadiness of her voice — that she was good, that she was not frightened the way the others were frightened, that she was the true note in a muddy room. She was something the work had not yet had to reckon with. He filed that, the way he filed the grain of a metal under his fingers, for when it mattered.

Then he stepped out into the dark and let the door fall shut behind him, and the lake was there at the bottom of the hill, breathing, waiting, and he walked down toward it unhurried with Gary Slattery's name coming up to color in him like iron in the fire.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

James spent the meeting reading the room instead of listening to it, which was the job, and which was also the only way he knew to keep the fear in his own chest off his face.

He'd taken the wall on the long side of the hall, the spot he always took when Isla worked the front — back to something solid, the whole crowd laid out in front of him at an angle so he could watch hands and exits both. It was a habit older than the Bureau, older than the divorce, old as his first years walking Duluth in a uniform. You watched the room. You watched who watched the speaker and who watched the doors, who came to be seen and who came to see. Most of the people here tonight were exactly what they looked like: scared neighbors in wet coats, wanting somebody to tell them it was going to stop.

But somewhere in this room, maybe, was a man who'd carried a grown man's dead weight into the throat of a furnace and folded its arms across its chest with something Henley had been unable to call anything but tenderness. James watched for that man, and hated that he didn't know what that man would look like, and watched anyway.

He'd found Derek Paulson inside the first thirty seconds, before the chair had even gaveled them to order, and was not remotely surprised to.

Third row from the front, left-hand side, the aisle seat. The fringe of white hair. The reading glasses pushed up on his forehead the way James had seen them in the man's own front room yesterday, a legal pad squared on his knee and a pen already in his fist. He'd come early enough to get the seat a man with a hip like that always wanted — end of a row, bad side to the wall, good side to the open floor, nothing to climb over on the way out. His coat was over the back of the chair. His cane was hooked on the seat in front of him. He sat the way old union men sat in halls like this one, upright and forward, as though the meeting were a thing that could be pushed.

James clocked him and went on with the room. But he came back to him every few minutes the rest of the night, the way a tongue comes back to a bad tooth — a quick check down the left-hand aisle, white hair, glasses, pen, still there — and told himself each time that he was only being thorough, and knew each time that he wasn't.

He thought about Emma, which he tried not to do at scenes and could never quite stop doing. She'd asked again about the showcase. He'd told her Isla was coming and watched his daughter try not to look pleased and fail, and the small ordinary warmth of that had sat in him all day under the cold of the work like a coal under ash. There were two worlds, and he lived in both, and the membrane between was thin as the skin on cooling metal, and on nights like this he could feel it flex.

At the front, Isla had taken the floor without being asked to, stepping into the gap when the council chair faltered under the crowd's anger and steering it back to something usable. He watched her do it with the private admiration he never let fully onto his face. She told them she'd answer everything. She told them to stay calm. She told them she'd need names before they left, and he saw the small ripple that went through the room at the word — the flinch of people from a place and a generation that did not, as a rule, hand its name to the federal government on request.

The ripple sent his eyes where they'd been going all evening. Third row, left, the aisle.

The coat was still over the back of the chair, holding the place the way a coat does. The cane was gone off the seat in front of it. Derek Paulson wasn't in it.

James felt that land somewhere under his sternum, cold and quiet, and had no time to do anything with it at all.

Because that was when he saw the gray hair.

It was at the back, on the far side, near the door he'd clocked coming in. A flash of it, gray and a little long, under the brim of a cap, the head turning away — and beneath the head a breadth of shoulder, a settled heaviness, a big older man already in motion toward the exit at the exact moment Isla said the word identify. Already moving. Not startled into it, not scrambling. Moving the way a man moves who decided, calmly, some while earlier, that it was time to be gone.

The whole back of James's neck went cold.

Older. Gray hair, kind of long. Big. Not fat, just — broad. Like he could pick you up. Brynn Tasker's voice, barely a day old, sitting in his head where Isla had put it.

He moved. He didn't run — running in a frightened crowd would start a stampede and lose the man beside him — but he came off the wall fast and cut along the side of the hall toward the back, sliding past knees and coats, his eyes on the door that was even now sighing shut on the dark. A woman said something to him; he didn't hear it. His ribs reminded him, the left side, the old insult never quite forgiven, and he ignored that too. By the time he hit the bar and shouldered out into the night, he'd lost twenty seconds, twenty-five.

It was enough. For a man like that, it was always enough.

The cold took him first, the clean knife of September air off the water, and then the dark. The meeting had been in one of the old union halls down near the east end, and outside there was a strip of cracked lot, a sodium lamp doing its tired orange best, and beyond its reach nothing — the slope of the street running down toward the harbor, the black shapes of dead buildings, the lake somewhere below breathing its long slow breath against the shore.

James stood on the step with his heart going hard and looked.

No figure crossing the lot. No footsteps on the wet concrete, no car door, no engine turning over, no shape moving against the lighter dark where the streetlights gave out. He went down the steps into the middle of the lot and turned a slow full circle, and the night gave him back nothing but the orange lamp buzzing overhead and that vast patient breathing down the hill, which he'd heard his whole life and had never once found sinister until this last year.

The man was gone. Whatever he'd had — and it couldn't have been more than half a minute — he'd used it to dissolve completely into a part of the city he plainly knew the way James knew his own street. An alley, a gap in a fence, the black mouth of a building. Gone.

James made himself stand there another full minute, breathing, listening, giving the dark every chance to cough the man back up. It didn't. Finally he scrubbed a hand down his jaw and admitted what he had to admit: he'd seen a gray-haired man leave a public meeting, and there were a hundred reasons a man left a meeting early, and wanting it to be the killer didn't make it the killer. He had a flash of gray hair and a bad feeling and a vanishing act, and not one of those was evidence, and he'd watched Isla flog herself bloody enough times over the cost of being sure of a shape in the dark to know better than to come back inside saying I saw him.

But.

He stood in the cold and let the but have its say, the way she'd taught him without ever meaning to teach him anything. The man had moved for the door on the word identify. He had not panicked, and he had not hurried, and he had not been findable five seconds later, and that — the calm of it, the craft of it — sat wrong in James's gut and would not be talked out of it. Brynn Tasker had said the man at Consolidated scared her without doing anything, scared her with his calm. Some people are just like that, she'd said. James had just watched a man be exactly like that, and then watched the dark swallow him without a ripple.

And there was the other thing, the smaller one, the one he liked even less because he could not make it mean anything and could not make it go away either. He had looked at an empty chair in the third row for the length of one heartbeat before the gray hair took him, and in that heartbeat he had not been able to say — could not say now, standing out here with his breath going white — whether the man going out the back door was a stranger or was the man whose coat was still hanging on that chair.

He couldn't assume it. He wouldn't say it to Isla as a fact, because facts were the only currency that had ever kept anyone safe and he wasn't going to start counterfeiting them now. But he could do the other thing. The dull thing. The thing the job actually ran on.

He turned and went back up the steps into the warmth and the noise.

The first thing he did — before the uniform, before the pad, before anything — was look down the left-hand aisle.

Derek Paulson was in his seat. Coat still over the back of it, cane hooked on the chair in front, glasses down on his nose now, writing something on the legal pad in slow deliberate longhand while the room churned around him. He had the settled look of a man who'd been sitting there for hours. Whatever had brought him up out of the chair had taken him about the length of time it took a federal agent to lose a man in a parking lot, and had put him back in it, and had left no mark on him at all.

James stood there with the cold still on his coat and looked at him a good five seconds, and Paulson felt it the way old men who have been watched by authority their whole lives always feel it, and raised his head, and met James's eyes across forty feet of crowded hall with no expression whatsoever. Then he went back to his notes.

James found the nearest uniform and started giving instructions in the flat patient voice that made people do what he wanted without quite noticing they'd been told to. Nobody left without a name. Nobody left without a number where they could be reached. And he wanted the speakers especially — everyone who'd stood at that microphone tonight and put a voice on the record, and most of all every man who'd stood up to say the plants should come down. He wanted those names in his own hand before the night was over.

Because if the flash of gray hair had been the man — if, he made himself keep the word — then the man had come here for a reason, and a man like that didn't come to a meeting to argue. He came to look. He came to choose. And somewhere in the warm angry crowd James was now methodically working his way through, somebody had stood up tonight and said a thing out loud that had made a quiet patient man in the back row decide they were next.

James meant to have that man's name on a list before he found out which one it was the hard way.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Derek Paulson did not look any less tired the second time, but he looked considerably less patient.

They put him in the good interview room, the one with the window, because Isla had decided on the drive in that they would not start by treating him like a suspect even though that was, increasingly and inconveniently, what he was. He came in stooped and slow, lowering himself into the chair with the careful wince she'd watched him manage in his own front room, and he set his hands flat on the table and looked from her to James and back with the flat readiness of a man who'd been hauled in front of authority before and lived.

"Another one," he said, before either of them had spoken. "Owen Marsh." His mouth did something bitter. "So you've come back for me."

"We've come back to talk," Isla said. "That's all, for now."

"For now." He huffed something that wasn't a laugh. "I know how for now goes, Agent. I've been across a table from men with badges since before you were born. For now is the warm-up."

James was standing rather than sitting, over by the wall with his arms folded, and Isla felt the temperature of him from across the room and knew last night was still in him — the gray hair and the dark and the long minute in the empty lot. He'd come in this morning quiet and hard, and she'd watched him decide something on the way over that he hadn't fully shared with her, and now he came off the wall.

"You were at the meeting last night," James said. It wasn't a question. "Third row on the left. Aisle seat. Legal pad on your knee."

Paulson turned his head to look at him, and something moved behind the tiredness. "'Course I was. I'm at every meeting that so much as breathes on those plants. You know that. You charmed it out of the clerk yourself, I'd guess."

"I didn't need the clerk. I watched you all night."

"Then you had a dull night."

"What time did you leave?"

"When it ended. Near on eleven." A beat. "Why?"

"You didn't step out early? Partway through?"

"My hip doesn't do step out early. Once I'm down in a chair I'm down for the duration."

"Your coat was on the back of that chair at twenty past nine," James said, "and you weren't in it. Your cane was gone off the seat in front. I know because I looked, because I'd been looking at you every few minutes since half seven, and when Agent Rivers asked that room for names your seat was empty."

The room went very quiet.

Isla watched it happen across the table — watched a proud old man understand, in about a second and a half, exactly what he was going to have to say out loud in a federal building to two people young enough to be his children.

"I was in the toilet," Paulson said.

James didn't move.

"You want it in detail, Agent? All right." His voice had gone hard and flat and there was color coming up his neck. "I'm seventy-one years old. I have a prostate the size of a plum and a hip that's bone on bone, and that hall has got its men's room down a corridor and around a corner, and it takes me four minutes to get down there and four to get back and a while in between. I'd been sat in that chair since half past seven with a coffee in me, because I've learned the hard way I can't do a three-hour meeting without one." His hands came off the table an inch. "So yes. I got up. I went. I came back. It took the better part of twenty minutes, because everything I do takes the better part of twenty minutes now, and I'd rather have told you almost anything else."

"Somebody left that meeting early," James said. "A man. Older, broad through the shoulders. Gray hair, worn a little long." He let it sit. "The girl who found Hendricks described a man like that out at Consolidated. I saw a man like that go out the back door the second Agent Rivers asked for names — in the same twenty minutes you can't put yourself in your chair for." His eyes didn't leave Paulson's face. "And I'm looking at a man like that right now."

The change in Paulson was immediate. The tiredness went out of his face and something younger and angrier came up under it, the organizer, the man with the bullhorn from the photograph on his wall.

"Say it plain," he said, low. "You're not man enough to say it plain, so I will. You think I killed Ray. You think I killed Owen Marsh. You think I, with this hip, with this heart, hauled two grown men into a couple of dead buildings and arranged them." His voice was rising, roughening. "Because I love those plants. Because I won't let the city forget them. You've decided a man can't care about something that hard without it turning into murder, and you've picked me because I'm the one who cares loudest and I'm old and gray and I was in the room — and because an old man had to get up in the middle of a meeting and walk down a hallway to piss."

"I didn't say —" James started.

"You've been saying it since you walked in. The whole — the whole shape of it." Paulson's hands had closed into fists, the knuckles big and arthritic and shaking now. "I spent forty years getting blamed by men in suits for things I didn't do. Wildcat strikes I didn't call. Sabotage that was just machines dying of age and neglect. I know this. I know exactly how this goes, and I'll tell you how it stops — it stops right now, because I want a lawyer. You hear me? I'm not saying one more word to either of you without —"

"Mr. Paulson." Isla didn't raise her voice. She'd found over the years that she almost never had to; the lower she kept it, the more people leaned in to catch it, and a man leaning in to listen was a man no longer shouting. "Derek. Look at me."

He stopped. He looked at her, breathing hard, the fists still clenched.

"You're right," she said.

That landed in the room like a dropped tool. James shifted by the wall. Paulson blinked.

"You're right that he can't prove what he just laid out, and you're right that you're entitled to a lawyer, and the second you say the word again and mean it, this stops, and I'll walk you to the phone myself. I want you to know I mean that." She let it settle. "But I'm going to ask you for thirty seconds first, and then you decide. Fair?"

A long moment. The fists eased, not all the way. "Thirty seconds."

"Here's what's true," Isla said. "Two men are dead. Both of them stood up in public and said the plants should come down. You stood up in public and said the opposite, louder and longer than anyone alive. You knew both men. You know those buildings better than the people who built them. And last night a man who fits a rough description walked out of a meeting during the one stretch of the evening my partner can't put you in your chair." She kept her eyes steady on his, giving him all of it, because she'd learned that people could bear almost anything except being managed. "I'm not going to insult you by pretending that's nothing. If I were sitting where you're sitting I'd be furious too. You'd be a fool not to see how it lines up, and you are not a fool."

"No," Paulson said. "I'm not."

"But here's the other thing that's true, and it's the reason I drove out to your apartment myself instead of sending someone, and the reason you're in the room with the window." She leaned in a fraction. "I watched you get out of a chair. I watched you climb into one. I read your hip and your heart in your own VA records this morning, with your physician's notes, and I believe every word of them. And I believe every word of what it cost you to tell us about that hallway, because a man doesn't invent a story that humiliating to cover himself when he could invent an easier one." Her voice stayed level. "The man who did this carried a hundred and ninety pounds of Ray Hendricks, alone, into the dark, and then held a stiffening body's arms in place until they'd stay. He was out that door and gone off a lit lot in under thirty seconds. You told me two days ago you can't carry your groceries up your own stairs. I believed you then and I believe you now."

The fists came open. Paulson stared at her, and some of the fury drained out of him and left the tiredness behind it, deeper than before.

"Then why," he said, "am I here."

"Because you're the only person in this city who might be able to tell me who can."

The room went quiet. Down the hall, the copier cleared its throat. James, by the wall, had gone still in a different way now, listening.

"You know these people," Isla said. "The ones who care about the plants the way you do. The coalition. The men who show up to the meetings, who write the letters, who walk the perimeters and take the photographs and can't let it go. You're at the center of it — you said so yourself, you're the one keeping it alive. So you know them. The quiet ones and the loud ones. And somewhere in that world, I think, is a man who loves those buildings the way you love them, except that somewhere along the line, for him, the love came loose from anything that could hold it. A man who decided the plants matter more than the men. Who looks at someone standing up to call it rusted junk and doesn't just get angry the way you'd get angry — he goes home and does something about it." She let that hang. "You hate that I'm describing somebody you might know. I understand that. But Derek — if you're not the man, and I don't think you are, then the man is still out there, and last night he was sitting in a room with you, and there's going to be a third one. Maybe soon. You can help me make sure there isn't, or you can call your lawyer and let me find him the slow way and find out who number three was after I'm standing over him in another dead building."

Paulson looked down at his open hands on the table, the ink still ghosted along the side of one of them, a man who still wrote things out in longhand. For a long moment he didn't say anything, and Isla didn't fill the silence, and neither did James, and the three of them sat inside it and let it do its work.

"It's not one of mine," Paulson said finally, slowly, as though the words had to be pried up from somewhere deep. "Understand that first. The people in the cause — the coalition, the letter-writers — they love those plants the way I love them, which is to say they want them remembered. They want plaques and tours and school kids. That's a loving thing. That's a making thing." His jaw worked. "What you're describing isn't loving. What you're describing is something that's gone wrong about a building. And there's a man I've thought about, on and off, who's got a wrongness about those buildings that never sat right with me."

Isla pulled the legal pad toward her and uncapped her pen and did not let a single thing show on her face. "Tell me about him."

"Frank Gallo." Paulson said the name like he was setting down something he'd carried too long. "Scrapper. Late forties, maybe. He's been stripping those facilities for years — copper, brass, any salvageable metal he can pull out and sell. Cuts the wire out of the walls. Pulls the bus bars. There's men do that all over the dead-plant country; it's half of why the places are as gutted as they are. But Gallo —" He shook his head slowly. "Gallo's different. For the others it's money, it's just theft, they'd strip a church the same as a foundry. Gallo knows those buildings. Knows them the way I know them, room by room, machine by machine. I've run into him out at Erlandson more than once, and he doesn't act like a thief caught somewhere he shouldn't be. He acts like I'm the one trespassing. Like the place is his."

The phrase went through Isla like cold water. Like it was his. James had said it in the shed at Consolidated. Brynn Tasker had said it of the man who'd run them off. She kept her pen moving and her face still.

"He's strong," Paulson went on, lower now. "He has to be — you don't haul copper and cut iron all day without it. And he's quiet. I tried to talk to him once, plant man to plant man, thought maybe I could turn him, get him to stop tearing the guts out of a place I'm fighting to save. He just looked at me. Didn't argue. Didn't get angry the way you'd expect a man to when you call him a thief to his face. He just looked at me until I stopped talking, and then he said —" Paulson's hands had gone still on the table. "— he said, They're not yours to save. They were never anybody's. And he picked up his bag and walked off into the building like I wasn't there." He raised his eyes, wet now, and ashamed. "God forgive me for saying it about a man I can't prove a thing against. But you asked me who moves through those places like he owns them, who's strong enough, who's got something gone wrong inside about the iron. And the first face I see is Frank Gallo's."

Isla wrote the name at the top of a clean page and underlined it once, and across the table James came fully off the wall.

"Where do we find him?" she said.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Frank Gallo's yard sat at the end of a gravel spur off Rice Lake Road, a half-acre of fenced chaos that announced itself long before they reached it — the dull mountain ranges of scrap rising over the chain-link, copper coils and stripped engine blocks and the flattened ghosts of cars, all of it sorted by a logic that wasn't obvious until it was. Ferrous one side, non-ferrous the other. A man who knew his metals had built this. A man who could tell brass from bronze by weight in the dark.

James pulled in through the open gate at ten in the morning, gravel popping under the tires, and a dog started up somewhere out of sight, a deep chained bark that meant business and went nowhere. A double-wide trailer served as the office at the yard's edge, and before they'd fully stopped, its door banged open, and Frank Gallo came down the two metal steps already talking.

"Whatever it is, I got the paper for it." He was a big man gone slightly to seed, late forties, with forearms like bridge cable and a gut starting over his belt and a face that had spent a working life in weather. Canvas jacket gone gray with metal dust, gloves with the fingers cut out. He came at the car with his chin up and his hands loose at his sides, the posture of a man who'd been visited by officials before and had learned that the only mistake was looking afraid. "Every load's got a ticket. Every ticket's got a seller. You want to see the book, I'll get you the book, but I'm telling you right now it's clean, and if Brekhus down at the county sent you out here again about the Carlton job—"

"Mr. Gallo." Isla was out of the car, badge already up. "FBI. We're not here about your tickets."

That stopped him. The words went in and took a second to rearrange his face, the practiced grievance sliding off, something more careful coming up underneath. He looked from her badge to James, unfolding himself from the driver's side in his navy parka, and back again.

"FBI," Gallo said. "FBI doesn't come about a scrapyard."

"No," Isla agreed. "We don't."

"Then what." The wariness had a new color in it now. He'd heard the radio, she thought. Everybody in this end of the county had heard the radio.

"You strip the old plants," James said. It wasn't a question. "Consolidated. Erlandson. The works across the harbor in Superior. You've been pulling metal out of the dead facilities for years."

And there it was — the chin came back up, the grievance came back, because that was ground Gallo knew how to fight on and the other ground was a darkness he didn't want to step onto. "I take what nobody owns. Those places are abandoned. Legally abandoned, you understand me? The companies walked. The city won't spend a dime to secure them. It's salvage. It's the same as the lake taking driftwood, and you don't see anybody arresting the lake—"

"Frank." Isla used the first name on purpose, the way she'd used Derek's, and watched it land. "Two men are dead. Ray Hendricks at Consolidated, Owen Marsh across the harbor. Somebody killed them and left them inside the buildings you work. I don't care about your copper. I care about who put two bodies in the places you spend your nights, and I think you might be one of the only people alive who'd know if something was wrong in them."

She watched it work on him. The thing about telling people the truth, she'd learned, was that they could usually feel it, the way you could feel the difference between a wall and a door in the dark. Gallo stood with his cut-off gloves hanging at his sides, and the confusion in his face was, she was nearly certain, the real article — not the studied blankness of a man hiding something but the plain disorientation of a man who'd braced for one fight and been handed another.

"You think I did it," he said slowly. "You think because I'm in there, I—" He turned half away, scrubbed a hand down over his mouth, turned back. "I pull wire. I cut bus bar. I never even seen Hendricks but to know the name. Marsh I knew a little — he ran us off a couple times when he was doing his surveys, called the county on me once. I didn't like him. I'm not going to stand here and tell you I liked the man." His jaw set. "But I didn't put him in a furnace. God. Is that where they found him? The radio didn't say."

Isla didn't answer, which was its own answer, and Gallo read it and went a shade grayer under the dust.

"Sunday night into Monday morning," James said. "And Monday night. Where were you?"

Gallo gave it to him — a girlfriend in Cloquet, a name, a phone, the small ordinary scaffolding of an alibi that would either hold or wouldn't and that Isla already suspected would hold, because the man in front of her was rattled in a way that took no acting, and because the wrongness she was hunting did not feel like it lived in this loud aggrieved man who sorted his metal by weight.

But she'd been sure before. She'd been sure in Miami. So she did what she did now with everything: kept her face still, kept the door open, waited to see what came through it.

What came through it was the thing she hadn't expected.

"You want to know what's wrong in those buildings." Gallo had gone quieter. He glanced back over his shoulder at his sorted mountains, as if checking that the ordinary world was still where he'd left it. "I'll tell you something. And you're going to think I'm pointing you off myself, and maybe I am, I won't lie about that. But it's true regardless."

"Tell me," Isla said.

"There's a guy. I've seen him three, four times now, going back to the spring. Out at Erlandson mostly, once at the Superior works. Older guy. And the thing is—" He stopped, frowning, trying to fit words around something that had bothered him for months without his quite letting it. "He's not scrapping. That's what I couldn't figure. Everybody who's in those places is in there for a reason — stripping metal, kids drinking, guys sleeping rough. Everybody wants something out of the place. This guy doesn't want anything. I watched him a whole twenty minutes once from up on the gantry, before he knew I was there. He just walked. Walked the floor, slow, stopping at the machines." Gallo shook his head. "Putting his hand on them. Standing there. You ever see somebody at a cemetery, standing over a stone, not doing anything, just standing? That. He walked that dead plant like he was visiting a grave."

The cold came up the back of Isla's neck and settled there, an old familiar tenant.

"Describe him," she said.

"Big. Tall, broad, heavy through here." Gallo touched his own shoulders. "Strong-built, but old — that's what made me not say anything to anybody, I figured he was some old plant man come back to mope. Gray hair, longish, kind of wild. Gray beard. Older than me. Older than you'd think a guy could be and still get over those fences." He considered. "Sixties, easy. Maybe more. But he didn't move like an old man. He moved careful. Sure of his feet. Like he'd walked that exact floor ten thousand times and didn't need the light."

Isla kept her pen moving and her voice level. Gray hair, longish. Broad. Strong. Moves like the place is his. It was Brynn Tasker's man almost word for word — the silhouette that had run two college kids off Consolidated, the seam of extra darkness against the crusher. But Brynn had said only older. Gallo was putting him in his sixties, and Gallo had watched him twenty minutes from a gantry in better light than two frightened kids had ever had, and that single detail did something quiet and decisive in Isla's chest.

Because Derek Paulson was seventy-one with a hip that was bone on bone, and she had crossed him off in the interview room watching him climb out of a chair. But a small, ugly part of her — the part that had gotten Alicia Mendez killed, the part she now treated like a dog she didn't trust off the leash — had gone on wondering whether she'd been conned by a good performance. A man in his sixties who moved sure on his feet and got over fences was not Derek Paulson. Whatever fragment of suspicion she'd been carrying, this knocked it loose and let it fall.

"Did you ever speak to him?" James asked.

"Once. Sort of." Gallo's mouth twisted. "I called down off the gantry, asked him what he was doing in there. Territorial, you know — it's my dig, I don't want some guy poking around finding the copper before I pull it. He looked up at me." A pause. "Didn't say anything for a long time. Long enough it got weird. And then he said something like, You shouldn't take from here. This isn't a place for taking. And he turned and walked off into the building like I wasn't there." He looked at Isla, and there was something almost pleading in it, a man asking to be believed about a thing he hadn't fully believed himself. "I didn't follow him. I'm not a guy who scares, you can ask anybody, I don't scare. But I didn't follow him. I told myself he was an old crank. There's a hundred old cranks about those plants."

"You were at the meeting," James said. "Tuesday night."

"No. I keep clear of those. They all know my face there, the heritage people — I'm the guy carrying their precious buildings off a pound at a time. I don't go where I'm hated. I got enough trouble." He looked between them. "Was he there?"

Isla didn't answer that either. She closed the notebook and thanked him and gave him the card with the number on it and the small speech about calling if he saw the man again — do not approach, just call — and Gallo took it and turned it over in his cut-off gloves and looked, for a moment, less like an aggrieved scrapper and more like a man who'd just understood that the thing he'd shrugged off from a gantry in the spring had been the worst thing he'd ever stood near.

"He's been there longer than the bodies," Gallo said as they turned to go. It stopped her. "That's what I can't get out of my head. I been seeing him since spring. The killing's this week. So he's been walking those floors a long time before he ever—" He couldn't finish it. He didn't need to.

"I know," Isla said quietly. "Thank you, Frank."

They drove back toward the city with the lake opening vast on their left and the dog's barking fading behind them, and neither of them said much. James drove the way he always drove, both hands, easy, his father's watch loose on his wrist, and Isla looked out at the water and turned the new shape over and over.

An old man who walked the dead plants like graves. Who'd been doing it since long before the killing started. Who told a scrapper this isn't a place for taking and a thief that he was the trespasser. Sure-footed, strong, in love with the buildings — not the way Paulson loved them, with plaques and tours and school kids, the making kind of love, but some other way, a way that had come loose, as Paulson himself had said, from anything that could hold it.

"Sixties," James said finally, reading her. "Too old for Paulson. Confirms what you already had."

"Confirms it," she agreed.

"But it's not nothing."

"No," she said. "It's nothing." She watched a freighter standing far out on the water. "It's a man who's been visiting a grave that isn't there. And I want to know whose."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

By five the day had gone the way September days went in Duluth, the light leaching out of it early and the gray over the lake thickening toward something that would be dark before anyone was ready, and Isla sat alone in the windowless conference room with James's list spread in front of her and a coffee gone cold at her elbow.

The list was longer than she'd hoped and shorter than it should have been. James had stood at the doors of that union hall the night before and tried to take a name and a number off every soul who walked out, and most of them had given it — reluctantly, some, with the deep instinctive recoil of east-end people handing their particulars to the federal government. Others had balked. A handful had flat refused, pushing past the uniforms with their collars up and their mouths set, citizens within their rights and exercising them out of pure ornery principle, and James had let them go because there was nothing else to do and had written down what he could: heavyset, sixties, Carhartt, drove a gray F-150. The way you'd describe weather you couldn't stop.

Duluth PD had spent the day running it down. That was the dull machinery of the thing, the part that never made the news, and Isla was grateful for it the way she was grateful for the radiator and the good coffee on Superior Street. Officers had gone door to door and phone to phone through every name on the list, the cooperative and the refused alike where the refused could be identified. Checking they were safe. Telling them, gently, what they might not want to hear: that they had stood up in a public room and put their voice on a record, that two men who'd done the same were dead, and that for a little while they should lock their doors and vary their routines and call if anything felt wrong.

Most had taken it the way frightened people took things. A few — Isla turned the page — had taken it as a challenge. Subject declined protective check, stated he'd "like to see him try." Subject was dismissive, said he kept a shotgun and slept light. Subject (Slattery, G.) laughed, stated the agent should "tell the freak where to find me."

Isla read Gary Slattery's note twice.

Bravado. The old reflex of men who'd spent their lives in dangerous work and decided long ago that fear was a thing other people felt. She'd seen it a hundred times, in Miami and here both — the way some people, told they might be hunted, puffed up rather than ducked, as though contempt were a kind of armor. It wasn't. The men who said I'd like to see him try were exactly the men who got seen trying, because this killer didn't announce himself and didn't come at the front where a light-sleeping man could meet him. He came the way he'd come at Hendricks: from behind, once, on a route the man could walk blind. Bravado was just a louder way of standing still.

She set the list down and let her eyes unfocus on the dark window and let the thing that had been forming all day come the rest of the way up.

It was the grave that had done it. Gallo's word, that morning — the man walking the dead floor like he was visiting a stone. She kept circling it. A man who came to the plants not to take from them, and not to remember them in Paulson's bright civic way, but to attend them. To stand over them. To lay his hand on cold machines the way you laid a hand on a coffin lid.

And then to fill their mouths — the crusher's jaws, the furnace's throat — with men.

Her right thumb had found the smooth place where her left ring finger used to be, and she let it, this once, because the gesture was reaching for something true.

The Shipwrecker. She had not let herself think the name in days, and now it came whole. Robert Brune, forty years a fisherman and a dockhand, who had believed the lake whispered to him and demanded sacrifices, who had fed it bodies dressed as accidents for decades because the water had taken his mother when he was eight and he had built his whole ruined self around giving offerings to the thing that ruled him. The lake had been his god and his victims his liturgy. He hadn't killed for rage or money or any of the small loud human reasons. He had killed because the water was owed.

She had stood on the ice and watched that go down into the black.

But the shape of it was here again, six months later, in two old men folded into the mouths of dead machines. Not the lake — the lake was Brune's. The plants. The iron. The vast works that had fed this city for a hundred years and then been thrown away, the furnaces gone cold, the lines gone silent. What if a man had built himself around those the way Brune had built himself around the water? What if the offerings weren't being given to the lake at all but to the machines — to the great rusting god that had eaten men's hearing and their backs and their best years and then died and left them with nothing? Hendricks in the crusher's jaws, palms up, offering. Marsh folded in the furnace mouth, at peace, in state. Not bodies hidden. Bodies given. Returned to the iron.

And the men chosen — not the frightened woman who wanted fences, but Hendricks and Marsh and now, God, maybe Slattery. The men who had stood up in public and said let it die, tear it down, it isn't worth saving. The apostates. A man making offerings to a dead industry would choose, above all others, the men who'd spat on it.

It clicked into place with the particular cold certainty she had learned to both trust and fear.

They were looking for an ironworker. Not a scrapper, not an organizer, not a hobbyist — a man who had given his working life to those floors, decades of it, the way Brune had given his to the water. A man now in his sixties who'd learned to read iron the way Brune read the lake, and who, when the industry died and discarded him, had not let it go but had somewhere down in the place where a self comes loose made it holy. A man who still walked those halls, attending his god, laying his hand on the machines, occasionally glimpsed by a scrapper from a gantry or by two college kids with headlamps. He had been there since spring. He had been there, Gallo said, long before the killing. He had been there for years, she thought — walking and grieving and listening to whatever the iron said, until the listening tipped over into the giving.

She picked up the phone and called James. He answered on the second ring, road noise behind him; he'd gone to pick up Emma, she remembered, the showcase was this week.

"I've got it," she said. "Or I've got the shape of it." And she laid it out fast and low — the grave and the offerings and the machines, the apostates chosen for what they'd said, the man built around the iron the way—

She stopped herself before the name. He heard the stop.

"The way Brune was built around the lake," James finished, quiet. The road noise hummed. "You're describing the Shipwrecker. In the plants."

"I'm describing the type," she said. "A career ironworker, decades in, now in his sixties, who made the industry into a religion and is feeding it the men who wanted it dead. Not the love Paulson has. The other kind. The kind that took Brune." She kept her voice even. "We pull employment records for Erlandson and Superior Iron Works and Consolidated — every man who worked those floors and would be in his sixties now — and cross them against anybody who's ever been cited or warned off those sites since they closed. He's still going there. He has been for years. Somewhere those two lists touch, that's our man."

"That's a lot of records."

"Then it's a lot of records." She heard, faintly, Emma's voice in the background asking something, and James's hand muffling the phone to answer her, and for a second the small warm ordinary world he carried with him pressed against the cold one she was sitting inside, the membrane between them thin as the skin on cooling metal. "Tomorrow, first thing. I'll start tonight."

"Isla. Go home. Sleep four hours, even."

"I will," she lied, and they both knew it, and he let her have it the way he let her have most things.

She sat a while longer in the dark conference room with the list and the cold coffee and the thing she hadn't said to James, the thing she wouldn't have said to anyone, the thought she pushed down the second it surfaced and that surfaced again anyway, the way her thumb kept finding the gap where the finger had been.

A career ironworker built around his dead industry the way Brune was built around the lake. It was a type, she'd told him. A pattern. A profile. And it was. That was all it was.

But Brune's body had never been found.

She had felt the chain go taut. She had watched the black water take him through the hole in the ice. The lake kept what it took — she'd made her peace with that, had made it the foundation of the peace. He's dead, you felt it, the lake has him. And the Shipwrecker was the water's man, not the iron's; the languages didn't even match. Brune had made people vanish. This one made them seen. It wasn't him. Every rational thing in her knew it couldn't be him.

But she sat in the dark a moment longer with the cold certainty she'd learned to trust and the older, colder fear she'd learned she could not, and out past the window the lake lay invisible and enormous at the bottom of the hill, breathing its long slow breath against the shore.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Gary Slattery had told a cop to tell the freak where to find him, and he'd meant it at the time, standing in his own kitchen with the phone against his ear and a beer sweating on the counter. Easy to be brave in a warm kitchen. It was a different thing entirely to stand in the dark at the end of a gravel road with the lake breathing somewhere off to his right and the Erlandson works rising black against a sky going the color of a bruise.

He checked his phone again. 7:52. The email had said eight.

It had come Wednesday afternoon, from a D. Marrin — freelance, the signature said, three tidy lines with a cell number in a Minneapolis area code and contributing, Great Lakes Monthly underneath. Gary had checked. He wanted that understood, if only by himself. He'd sat at his kitchen table and typed the name into his phone and gotten a byline from two years back about the Range, and another about a paper mill in Rhinelander that had closed and taken half the town down with it, and the magazine had a website with a masthead and glossy photographs and everything a real thing was supposed to have. The email itself had come off a plain Gmail account, and that had bothered him for about ninety seconds before he decided it was how those people worked now — no letterhead, no expense account, a laptop and a rented car. He'd even called the number. What he got was voicemail, and not a voice either, just the carrier's robot reading the digits back at him in that flat woman's cadence, and he let that go too, because half the men he knew had never recorded a greeting in their lives and never would.

Then he'd emailed back, and the reply had landed inside four minutes, warm and quick and flattering, and it had quoted him.

"Salt the ground. I'll drive the dozer myself." That's the piece. That's the entire argument in one line and nobody else in that room had the guts to say it out loud.

That was the part that had gotten him out here against his own better sense. We want you outside the building you're fighting to tear down. The man who tells the truth about the ruins. Standing in front of the thing itself. It appealed to something he was not proud of, the same something that stood him up at every meeting to say the loud true thing nobody else would. He liked being the man who told the truth. He liked the idea of his face in a real magazine, in front of the rusted heap, looking like he'd won the argument.

He had asked about the hour. He was not a fool. Why not do it in the daylight like a normal person, he'd written, and the answer had come back sounding like a man who'd explained it a hundred times: The blue hour is the only time these places photograph. Twenty minutes after the sun goes, the buildings read as silhouette and your face still carries the last of the light. Midday is flat — you'd look like a passport photo standing in a junkyard. Eight o'clock, and we'll be done by eight-twenty. And Gary, who had once sat through four minutes of one of those videos the kids made, the ones who went into the plants with headlamps at four in the morning, had thought: sure. The light. They all talk that way about the light.

We won't have to go inside, the email had promised. Just a few minutes out front.

And two men were dead.

He'd thought about that. He was not too proud to admit it now, standing out here with the wind coming off the water. He'd thought about it Wednesday night and again Thursday morning at five, awake in the dark for no reason, and he had very nearly typed no thanks. Two dead men. Both old. Both plant men or near enough. Both of them — and this was the part he had turned over the most — men who'd stood up in a public room and said the same thing he'd said, in the same words, into the same microphone. There was a list, and Gary Slattery's name was somewhere on it, and a cop had called to tell him so.

So he'd made rules, the way you made rules for a job you didn't like the look outside the fence only. In the open, on the apron, in the last of the daylight, on a road people drove past. Truck ten feet away with the keys in his pocket, twenty minutes, in and gone. He'd even set the tire iron on the passenger seat before he backed out of his driveway, and then left it lying there when he got out, because a man does not stand for a photograph in a national magazine holding a tire iron in his fist like he's expecting trouble. He'd thought that through and made the choice, and he'd known it was vanity while he was making it, and he'd made it anyway.

And he could have called the agent. That was the other thing, sitting in him like a stone. Her card was in the junk drawer under the takeout menus, where it had gone the night of the meeting, and it would have taken him ninety seconds — a magazine wants to photograph me at the Erlandson works at eight tonight, could you have a car go by. He'd got as far as opening the drawer. Then he'd had to picture it: the pause on her end, the careful voice, a federal agent arranging protection for a frightened old man who the day before had told a cop to send the freak his way. He would have had to eat every word, and he found, standing there with his hand in the drawer, that he'd rather stand in the dark for twenty minutes.

So where was the man?

Gary turned a slow circle in the gravel lot. No car but his own. No tripod, no lights, none of the gear he vaguely imagined a journalist would haul around. Just the chain-link gone slack in its posts and the great dead campus of the works behind it, the casting hall and the blast stoves and the long stock houses, every one of them the color of old blood in what light was left.

And the gate stood open.

Not forced. Open. The chain that should have run through it hung loose, and the panel had been swung back wide enough for a man to walk through, wide enough to be an invitation. Gary stood looking at it and felt the first cold finger of something move in his gut and told himself it was the wind off the lake.

"Hello?" His voice went out across the lot and got swallowed. He cleared his throat and tried again, louder, the way he talked at the council. "Anybody here? It's Slattery. You emailed me about the photo."

Nothing came back. The wind rattled a loose sheet of siding somewhere deep in the works, a thin tinny flapping, and under it he thought he heard the water, that long slow breathing he'd grown up with and never once feared until tonight.

So he left.

That was the thing he would not get to tell anyone, and it would have mattered to him to be able to tell it: that he'd had the sense. He turned his back on the open gate and walked to his truck with his keys already out and his heart going harder than the walk deserved, thinking about his own kitchen and the light over the stove and how good it was going to feel to be a coward in a warm room. Years of working dangerous ground had taught him that the open door you didn't expect was the one that killed you, that you respected a quiet building the way you respected a quiet machine, because quiet meant something was wrong with it. He had the door open. He had one foot up on the runner.

Then he looked back through the fence and saw the other vehicle.

It was inside. That was what stopped him — inside the gate, nosed in against the flank of the casting hall where the weeds came up through the concrete, a dark panel van or an old pickup, he couldn't tell in that light, but a vehicle, sitting quiet with nobody in it. He hadn't seen it from the lot because the stock house cut the angle. And the whole thing reassembled itself in his head in about three seconds, the way a thing does when you badly want it to: the guy was early. The guy had driven in — that was the open gate, that was the loose chain, some fixer or a caretaker had let him in, they did that for press — and he'd gone in to scout his shot while the light held, because those people were always chasing the light, and now he'd been in there twenty minutes on a floor nineteen years dead.

Rotted plate. Open pits full of black water. Gary had walked floors like that when they were lit and manned and he still hadn't liked them.

He stood with the truck door open, and the dome light making a little yellow room around him, and said, out loud, "Not my problem." And he even believed it for a second.

Then he heard the sound.

It came from inside the casting hall, through the open mouth of the building — low, wavering, the unmistakable thin note of a person in pain. A whimper. A man's whimper, he thought, though it was hard to say, half-drowned in that vast dark space. It came again, weaker, and trailed off into something that might have been a word, and the word might have been help.

Gary got his phone out. He would want that remembered too, if there had been anyone left to remember it for him: that he did the right thing first. He thumbed 911 and put it to his ear and got nothing, and pulled it down to look, and the bar in the corner flickered and died and came back as a small gray X. Out here at the end of the road with a half mile of dead ironwork between him and the nearest tower. He hit it again anyway. Call failed.

The sound came a third time, thinner, going out like something running down.

Every wrong instinct Gary had went quiet, and the one decent reflex left in him — the one that had made him worth something on a bad floor once, the man who moved toward the alarm instead of away from it — took the wheel before his fear could stop it. Nobody was coming. That was the whole arithmetic and it took him no time at all: nobody was coming, an ambulance from town was twenty minutes even if he could raise one, and a man face-down in six inches of standing water did not have twenty minutes.

"Hey!" he shouted, already moving, already through the gate, gravel giving way to cracked concrete under his boots. "Hang on — I'm coming, where are you—"

The dark of the casting hall took him. The temperature dropped the moment he crossed the threshold, the air going cold and mineral, rust and standing water, the smell of a place dead nineteen years. His eyes hadn't adjusted. He could see the vague tower of the furnace at the far end, a blacker shape in the black, and he stumbled toward the sound with his hands out in front of him like a man wading.

"Where are you? Keep talking, I can't—"

The whimper stopped.

It didn't fade. It stopped, cleanly, the way a sound stops when the thing making it has done its job, and in the silence after it Gary understood, far too late, that it had not been a man in pain at all. It had been a sound made for him. A lure, laid in the dark the way you'd set a hook.

He stopped dead, his breath loud in his own ears, his heart going like a fist on a door.

Off to his left, near the cold flank of the furnace, the darkness moved. A seam of it came away from the iron and resolved, unhurried, into a shape — broad, patient, a big man with gray hair gone wild and a beard, stepping out as though he'd been standing there the whole while and had all the time in the world to keep standing. He held something low in one hand, heavy, that swung a little with the weight of itself.

There was no journalist. There had never been a journalist.

He ran.

There was no decision in it. His body simply turned and went, back toward the pale rectangle of the doorway hanging out there in all that black — and the floor took him down inside of four strides. Some rail, some channel sunk in the sand where the metal had once run, and his boot went into it and his ankle rolled and he came down hard on his hands and one shoulder, the concrete tearing his palms open, the phone jumping away and skittering off into the dark, its little screen throwing one useless slab of light across a heap of brick before it went out.

He got up. He was making a sound himself now, a high raw wheeze he didn't recognize, and he had lost the door. That was the terrible part, the part he could not have explained to anyone who hadn't stood in it: he had turned twice going down and the black had no edges, and he ran ten yards deeper into the building before the wind gave him the doorway again, off to his left, further left than it had any right to be. He hauled himself around toward it. A stack of something went over behind him with a great flat clatter, and he didn't know if he'd hit it or if it was the man.

Because the man was coming, Gary could hear him, and what he heard was the thing that finally emptied him out: the footsteps were not running. They were walking. Flat, even, unhurried, boot after boot set down whole on the concrete, the pace of a man crossing a yard toward a shift he'd worked for thirty years — coming on steady behind him while Gary Slattery hauled his sixty-two-year-old body through the dark on a bad ankle, gasping, bleeding from both hands, because a man who does not run knows something you don't.

"HELP—" he got out, into the empty night beyond the doorway, into the gravel lot and the road and the whole indifferent breathing dark. "SOMEBODY—"

The rectangle came up in front of him, gray and cold and wide, the last of the sky in it. He was near enough to see the weeds at the sill. He was near enough to see his own truck out there in the lot with the dome light still burning yellow in the cab, twenty feet past the fence, the door standing open the way he'd left it, a small warm room waiting for him in all that dark.

He never heard the last step.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

In the dream the lake gave him back.

It began the way the worst dreams begin, in a place she half recognized — the ice, the hole cut black and perfect in the white, the spotlight throwing its long cold blade across the shore. She was bound again. She always was, in this one. The marine rope bit her wrists and her ankles, and somewhere behind her James was down and not moving, and the anchor sat on the ice beside the hole like an iron animal, and the night was so quiet she could hear the lake breathing under everything.

Then the water moved.

It did not splash. It rose, the way bread rises, slow and obscene, a swelling at the center of the black hole that pushed up and broke the surface and became a shape, and the shape was Robert Brune. He came up out of the lake the way he had gone down into it, except that the six months had been at him. Bloated now, the flesh of his face gone soft and pale and faintly luminous, a drowned blue under the gray beard, the eyes filmed white and yet, terribly, finding her. Water poured off him and did not seem to lessen him. He had been down there the whole time; the dream told her so with the flat certainty of dreams. He had never left. He had only been waiting for the ice to thin.

He opened his ruined mouth, and what came out was not his voice but the lake's — that low breathing, threaded through with a sound like water moving under ice in a place where there was no ice at all — and he said, without saying it, the thing she had spent six months refusing to believe.

You felt the chain go taut. You never felt me stop.

Isla woke with her heart slamming and the underwater light of six a.m. filling the apartment like something poured, and for one long suspended second she did not know which world she was in. The dream's cold was still on her. Her right hand had already done the thing it did, the thumb pressed hard to the smooth absence where her left ring finger used to be, as if checking the loss were still true, as if checking she was awake.

The phone was ringing.

That was what had pulled her up — not the dream cresting but the secure line on the nightstand going off into the silence like a stone through glass. She had the receiver against her ear before the second ring, the bloated blue face dissolving back into the dark behind her eyes where it lived.

"Rivers," she said, and her voice came out rough.

It was the night supervisor, and she knew before he finished his first sentence, the way an old knee knows the cold. There was a body. Erlandson works, the east end, down by the water — the one Paulson was fighting for, the one with the bones still in it. Found about a half hour ago, by a man who'd called it in himself and was waiting at the scene. A scrapper named Frank Gallo.

"Gallo found it," Isla repeated, and sat up the rest of the way, the cold of the dream and the cold of the morning indistinguishable now.

"He says he came back to finish pulling some copper he'd left. Pipe run, he said. He'd quit it partway a few days back and came in early to finish before anybody was around." A pause. "He's pretty shook, Agent. PD's got him out front. He's not going anywhere near the building again."

She was already moving, the phone tucked against her shoulder, pulling clothes off the chair. She told the supervisor what to tell them — don't let anyone touch it, don't let Gallo leave, get Henley rolling — and hung up and called James, who answered on the first ring with no sleep in his voice at all, because he'd been half awake too, because they both lived now in the thin-skinned country between the warm world and the cold one and slept with one foot in each.

"Erlandson," she said. "There's a third."

The line was quiet for a beat. She heard him breathe. "I'm ten minutes out from you. Be down."

He drove. The harbor at this hour was the held breath she'd come to know, the lift bridge black against a sky just thinking about light, the water flat and gunmetal and enormous, and they crossed down into the east end without speaking. Isla watched the dead industrial coast slide past the glass and could not get the dream all the way out of her. Bloated and blue. You never felt me stop. She set it down, the way she set everything down now, and did not lean on it, and could not quite make it stay where she put it.

The Erlandson works rose at the end of its pointless road exactly the way it had risen in her mind since Paulson first said the name — bigger than the others, a true campus of dead industry, the long high casting hall and the blast stoves and the stock houses, all of it the deep rust-brown of nineteen abandoned years, all of it ringed by a fence that had given up in a dozen places. Two Duluth PD cruisers sat at angles in the gravel with their light bars turning slow blue across the iron, and beside them, on the open tailgate of his own truck with a foil blanket hanging unused off one shoulder, sat Frank Gallo.

He looked smaller than he had at his yard. The aggrieved bulk of him had gone out, the chin that had come up at her two days ago now dropped, and he was talking to a young officer with a notebook in a low, fast, unspooling way, his cut-off gloves twisting in his big hands. Isla caught the shape of it as she came across the gravel. Same as always, I left the run half done, I come in early before the heat, I had my light on the pipe and I looked up and — and there the words ran out of him and his hands kept moving where the sentence had stopped.

He saw her and stood. "Agent. I came back for the copper. That's all. I left a run in the casting hall, I had maybe forty feet of two-inch still up in the rafters, and I—" He scrubbed a hand down over his mouth, the gesture she remembered. "I told you about him. I told you about the old man and I came back here anyway because it's good copper, and he was—" He stopped. "It's the rolling mill. He's in the rolling mill."

"You didn't touch him."

"I didn't touch anything. I ran. I told you I don't scare, and I ran like a kid." His eyes came up to hers, raw and asking. "Is it the guy? The one I told you about? Is it him?"

"Stay here, Frank," she said, as gently as the morning allowed. "You did right. Stay with the officer." And she left him with his unused blanket and walked with James toward the long dark mouth of the casting hall, and behind her she heard him say, to no one, to the gravel, I told her about him, in the voice of a man who would be saying it to himself for a long time.

Inside, the hall went up into a dark she couldn't see the top of, and the air did the thing it did in all of them — dropped cold and mineral, rust and standing water, the breath of a place dead nineteen years. A Duluth officer's flashlight made a shaking cone ahead of them, and Halvorsen, who'd caught the call and beaten them out here, came out of the dark to meet them with a face the color of the light.

"It's different than the others," he said. "I mean it's the same. But it's—" He gave up. "Come see."

The rolling mill stood near the center of the hall, and it was a monster even dead: a long low train of paired iron rollers in their massive housings, the stands marching away into the dark, the thing that had once taken white-hot steel and squeezed it thinner and longer and thinner again, pass after pass, until a slab became a sheet. The rollers were the height of a man's chest, great smooth cylinders pitted now with rust, the gap between each top and bottom roll a dark horizontal seam.

Gary Slattery had been fed into it.

That was the only verb Isla's mind would give her. He had been laid into the entry of the mill on his back, head and shoulders advanced into the first set of rollers so that the iron closed above and below him, his body arranged passing through the gap as though the long-dead machine had caught him and was drawing him in. His arms were stretched ahead of him into the dark of the next stand, reaching, the way a man's arms go when something has him by the shoulders and is pulling. His feet trailed behind toward the entry.

He was not pinned. That was the thing that turned the cold in her all the way over — the rollers hadn't moved in nineteen years and hadn't moved now; nothing had crushed him, nothing held him. He had been placed in the attitude of being rolled, set with great care into a process that was not happening and would never happen, a man passing through a machine that was only iron and rust and stillness.

The hair at the back of his skull caught the light and showed the dark matting she had learned, in four years, to read at a glance.

"Talk to me," James said quietly, beside her.

Isla made herself look the way the job had taught her to look, the long methodical sweep, the willingness to see the thing other people ran from. "Struck once, from behind. We'll let Henley say it, but I'd put money on the wound being the same. Killed somewhere, brought here, posed." Her eyes moved over the reaching arms, the body laid into the gap. "He's not stuck. Nothing's holding him. He arranged Slattery going through, not caught. Through." She heard her own voice flatten into the place it went when a thing was too large to feel in real time. "Hendricks in the crusher's jaws, palms up, offering. Marsh folded in the furnace mouth, at peace. And now a man fed into the mill like stock. Like raw material."

James was silent. The cone of the officer's light trembled and steadied on the reaching hands.

"Three plants. Three machines. He's not just leaving them in the buildings, James. He's putting each one into the work the building did. The crusher crushes. The furnace melts. The mill rolls." She turned to look at him, and his face had gone to the flat held stillness she knew. "He's feeding them into the process. He's running them through."

"Through to what," James said.

She looked back at Gary Slattery reaching into the dark between the stands, a man who two days ago had laughed and said tell the freak where to find me, fed now into the iron he'd called rusted junk.

"I don't know yet," she said. "But it's the same message every time, and he's saying it slower and clearer each time, like he thinks we're not listening." The lake breathed somewhere beyond the wall, and the dream brushed her again, bloated and blue, and she did not let it land. "We're listening," she said, half to the dead man, half to the dark. "Tell me what you're feeding them to."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

By eight the next morning Isla was at the whiteboard in the windowless conference room with a marker going dry in her hand and three names where two had been, and she understood that the time for not saying the word was over.

She'd left it off the board all week. Two isn't a pattern, she'd told James, and meant it, because she had paid for the difference between a pattern and a wish with a woman's life and a piece of her own hand. But three was not two. Three was a sentence with grammar, and the grammar was plain enough now that refusing to write it down had stopped being discipline and started being cowardice.

She had spent two nights on records, and she made herself put that on the board too, in the honest column, the one with nothing in it.

It had been her own idea and she'd run it into the ground personally. Employment rolls for the three dead plants, every man who'd worked those floors and would be in his sixties now — the theory she'd called James with from this same dark room — and what she had at the end of it was an education in how a city loses its own history. Consolidated Ore's personnel files had gone into a bankruptcy trustee's custody in 2004 and out of it four years later into a storage unit in Hermantown whose contents had been auctioned for arrears; nobody could say to whom. Erlandson's had been absorbed by a holding company that had been absorbed twice more since and now existed as a mailing address in Delaware and a woman in Chicago who answered email on Tuesdays. The pension administrator had a database and wanted a subpoena before he'd so much as confirm it existed, which was his right and which would cost them two days. The union local's assistant, who had turned out to be the one genuinely useful human being in the whole apparatus, had sent what the local still had: typed pages photographed crooked, four decades of names in a dozen hands, dues rolls with no birth years on half of them.

Thursday night Isla had read three hundred and forty of those names between nine and one, alone, with the radiator ticking and the lake invisible past the window, and come away with nothing. Not a flicker. Not a name that meant anything to anything else she knew. She'd gone home and slept four hours and got up to a phone call about the Erlandson works.

That was the part she was not going to say out loud in this room or any other. At eight o'clock Thursday evening she had been sitting under fluorescent light reading a dead local's dues rolls, and at eight o'clock Thursday evening Gary Slattery had been standing in a gravel lot at the end of a road with the light going out of the sky, checking his phone.

"Walk it with me," she said. James had pulled a chair around to her side of the table, careful of the rib, two coffees from the good place on Superior Street going cold between them because neither of them had remembered to drink. "Three victims." She tapped each name. "Ray Hendricks. Owen Marsh. Gary Slattery. What do they share."

"Old men. Plant men, or near enough. East end."

"All struck once, from behind, blunt, heavy, broad-faced instrument. Henley's headline on all three before she's even done the Latin." She wrote it. "Killed somewhere first. Carried. Posed. Each one set into a piece of heavy machinery, in the attitude of the work that machine did. Crusher, furnace, mill." She wrote that too, the words going dim as the marker died, and shook it and kept on. "And one more thing. The thing that isn't about how they died."

"They all stood up in public and said let the plants die."

"Hendricks at the council two weeks ago. Marsh at the spring forum, on the record, in the headline — folly." She tapped the third name. "And Slattery, four nights ago, at the meeting you and I were both standing in, telling a packed room to knock it down and salt the ground and he'd drive the dozer himself." She capped the marker because it was finished. "He stood up and profaned the thing. Two days later somebody fed him into it."

"There's a fourth thing they share," James said. "Or there's one we can prove on Slattery and can't yet on the other two." He turned his laptop toward her. "This came in at six."

She'd known it was coming. Slattery's house had been sealed within an hour of the identification yesterday and searched by noon, and the phone he'd dropped in the casting hall had gone into a bag on the scene while Henley was still setting up her lights. Neither was unusual — it was the first thing you did with a homicide, and the part of the job that had never once made anyone's evening news. The unusual part was the speed, and the speed was Kate, who'd had a computer forensics examiner out of the Minneapolis field office sitting over that laptop by four in the afternoon.

"He didn't even have a password," James said. "It was open on his kitchen table. Mail client, everything sitting right there." He scrolled. "Wednesday afternoon he gets an email. D. Marrin, freelance journalist, contributing to Great Lakes Monthly. Wants to photograph him at Erlandson for a piece on the ruins. Three lines, a cell number, a signature block." He turned the screen. "And Slattery checked. That's what I can't get past, Isla. He wasn't a fool. He searched the name, he found real bylines, he called the number. Then he wrote back, and look at the reply."

Isla read it, and read the part that mattered twice.

"Salt the ground. I'll drive the dozer myself." That's the piece. That's the entire argument in one line and nobody else in that room had the guts to say it out loud.

Something went up the back of her neck and settled there.

"He quoted him," she said.

"He quoted him."

"Was that line in the paper?"

"No." He'd gotten there before her; she could hear it. "I checked last night. The Tribune ran four hundred words on that meeting and quoted the fire marshal and Teresa Mack. The clerk's minutes are a paraphrase — speaker expressed opposition to the designation — the clerk doesn't take down a man's jokes. That hall isn't the council chamber. There's no webcast; nobody streams a public information meeting in a union hall. There's no recording of Tuesday night that exists anywhere I can find." He sat back. "That line went out of Gary Slattery's mouth into that room and nowhere else. Eighteen hours later it came back to him in an email."

"He was in the room," Isla said.

"He was in the room."

She stood with that a moment. It was the first hard thing they'd had in six days — not a silhouette, not a scrapper's story from a gantry, not two frightened kids with headlamps. A fact with corners on it. The man who had killed Gary Slattery had been sitting inside four walls with the two of them Tuesday night, close enough to hear a throwaway line at a microphone, and had liked it enough to write it down.

"Then tell me why we can't put a name on the email," she said. "He sat somewhere and typed it. That's a thing that happens in the world and leaves a record."

"It does. And we've got the record." James pulled up the second window, and his voice went into the flat careful register it took on when a thing was solid and useless at the same time. "Emergency disclosure request went to the provider at ten last night — imminent threat to life, Kate signed it, the AUSA had it in front of them inside twenty minutes. They came back at five this morning. Here's what a Google account looks like when a careful man makes one." He read it off. "Created eleven days ago. Subscriber name D. Marrin. No recovery phone, no secondary address. Not one message in it that isn't Gary Slattery. Not one contact. Full logs are still coming — that's a warrant and it'll be days — but the emergency return gave us login IPs, and there are three of them."

"Where."

"The public library branch in Superior. A laundromat on Grand with an open network. And the library again." He shook his head slowly. "All three are guest wifi. No card, no sign-in, no captive portal — you sit in the parking lot with a laptop and you're on. Superior PD sent a car to the branch first thing. The camera on that building points at the front door, not the lot, and it keeps thirty days, and I'll take every frame of it, but hear what I'm telling you. He wasn't in the building."

"The phone number."

"Prepaid. Activated with cash in April at a big-box store in Cloquet, no subscriber record worth the name — the field's filled in as M. Anderson, which in this state is the same as blank. The tolls are the interesting part." He tapped the screen. "It has received exactly one call in its life, from Gary Slattery, Wednesday evening. It has never made one. It was powered on Wednesday afternoon and powered off Wednesday night and it has not been on since. The one tower it hit covers about a third of the east end, and I could stand in that footprint with eleven thousand other people."

"And the real Marrin."

"Dana Marrin. Freelancer, lives in Saint Paul, and she is real, and her bylines are real, and she has never heard of Gary Slattery." James's mouth tightened. "I woke her up at six-fifteen. She hasn't been north of Hinckley since spring, she's got a work trail for the whole week, and the magazine confirms she's never pitched them anything about Duluth. He took her name off the internet because a man like Slattery would check, and he built it so that when the man checked, the checking would reassure him." He looked up. "That's what I keep coming back to. He anticipated being checked."

Isla stood looking at the three lines on the screen and felt the shape of him come a little further out of the dark, and did not like the look of it at all. Patient. Literate. Willing to spend eleven days in advance on an account he'd use once. A man who understood that vanity was a better lure than fear, and who had written four sentences precisely engineered to get a proud old man to stand alone in a gravel lot at the blue hour with his tire iron left behind on the passenger seat because he hadn't wanted to look frightened in a photograph.

"He hunts the way he stages," she said. "Nothing hurried. Everything prepared." She set the marker down. "All right. Cameras."

"Started last night." James was already reaching for his notebook, and she felt the small steadying thing she always felt watching him work, which was that he had thought of it before she'd asked. "Two pieces. The meetings first, then the geography."

"Give me the meetings."

"The meetings are nothing, and I want to be clear that it's nothing, not that we didn't look." He turned pages. "The council chamber sessions are recorded — that's where Hendricks spoke, and the spring forum, and they're posted. I watched two hours of both. The camera is a fixed unit on the wall behind the dais and it frames the lectern and about the first four feet of floor. Everything behind that is out of the shot. You can see every man who got up to speak, which is worth having. You cannot see one single person sitting in that room."

"And the hall Tuesday."

"Worse. There's a dome camera bolted over the entrance at the union hall — I stood under it that night and clocked it and assumed we had him coming in the door." A muscle moved in his jaw. "I called the local's business agent at half five this morning. It's been dead since a break-in in 2019. They left it up because a dead camera keeps kids off the steps as well as a live one, and there was never money for the other kind." He closed the notebook on his finger. "So there is no image of the inside of that hall Tuesday night, and none of anyone entering it, and the only two people alive who can say they saw that man are me — from forty feet, in a crowd, from behind, for about two seconds — and a scrapper who watched him from a gantry in April."

"Then the geography."

"Duluth PD's had two officers on it since eleven last night, and I'll have four more when Kate makes her call." He spread his hands flat on the table, and his voice went into the rhythm of a man laying out the standard, dull, indispensable thing that actually solved cases and that nobody ever wrote a book about. "Four blocks in every direction from that hall. Every business, every ATM, every doorbell, the two gas stations and the credit union and the church. Everything gets pulled, logged, chain of custody, and it all goes to Minneapolis to be viewed properly instead of by me squinting at a shop owner's monitor in a back room."

"When's the window."

"Nine-ten to nine-forty, Tuesday night. He went out that door at about nine-twenty and I was on the step behind him at nine-twenty-one." He said it evenly and she heard what was under it anyway. "He was already moving when you said the word identify. That's what I've been chewing on for three days. Not moving fast — moving early. He'd decided before you finished the sentence. I lost him in twenty-five seconds on a lit lot and he never crossed it, because I'd have seen him cross it. He went somewhere I couldn't follow because he knew it was there and I didn't."

"You told me. I filed it."

"You filed it as a maybe, and it was a maybe. It's not a maybe anymore." He tapped the screen with the email on it. "Whoever wrote this was inside that room. I watched a man leave that room like a man who'd finished his errand. Those two facts belong to each other until something proves otherwise."

"They do," Isla said, and wrote MEETING — HE WAS THERE on the board in the failing marker, and under it, 9:20 P.M. "So we treat that half hour like a crime scene. What's come back so far?"

"Nothing usable, and one thing that's almost something." He grimaced. "The bar on the corner runs a four-camera DVR that overwrites at seventy-two hours, so Tuesday night was gone before we knew we wanted it. That's the one that hurts. The credit union ATM has a hardened camera with a decent lens, and at what its clock says is 9:23 there's a figure crossing at the far edge of frame, going downhill toward the water. Three frames. Dark coat, maybe a cap." He shook his head before she could ask. "The DVR clock has never been set. The technician says it's been running on whatever the box thought the time was since 2016 and it's drifted, and he can't tell me by how much until he gets someone out. So I have three frames of somebody who might be anybody at a time I can't swear to. That's not evidence. It's not even a lead. It's a shape in the rain."

"Get the drift measured anyway."

"It's being measured."

"And I want the rest of it started this morning." Isla came around the table and stood over the board, numbering with a finger against the whiteboard tray because the marker was finished. "One. Camera canvass as you've laid it out, but push it to six blocks on the downhill side, because that's the direction the shape in the rain went and it's the direction the lake is, and every instinct I've got says he walked toward the water. Two. The provider warrant for the full account logs — not the emergency return, the whole thing, every session, every device fingerprint, every user agent. If he's ever logged into anything else from any of those three IPs in the same minutes, I want to know what it was. Three." She turned. "I want a tower dump."

James went still for a second. "Two of them."

"Two of them. The union hall, Tuesday, seven to eleven. And Erlandson, Thursday, seven to nine-thirty. Every device that registered on the cells covering both, and then the intersection." She watched him already writing. "That's a warrant and a fight with three carriers and an analyst who'll want to be paid in blood, and it's forty-eight hours minimum before anybody hands me a spreadsheet, and I want it moving before nine."

"I'll have the affidavit drafted by ten." He was writing fast now. "You know what I think it'll come back as."

"Say it anyway."

"Empty." James set the pen down. "Not nothing — it'll come back with four hundred devices at the hall and sixty out at the works, and the intersection will be a patrol officer and a man who delivers for the pizza place. Because he doesn't carry a phone."

"No," Isla agreed. "I don't think he does either. And I want the paper that proves it, because when we put a name in front of a jury I want to be able to say we looked, and looked properly, and that the reason there's no phone in this case is that the man made a choice about phones twenty years ago." She let a breath go. "Run it. If it's empty, empty is information."

"Then we need the list," James said, and pulled the laptop back, and the engine of him spun up. "Everybody who's spoken against the heritage designation on the record. The forum in the spring, the council meetings, the public comment, the letters to the paper. Anybody who put their name to it."

"Cross it against the three we've got. See what the live ones have in common with the dead ones. And then—" she heard her own voice tighten and let it "—then we find out who's left."

It took him forty minutes, and it was the dull part of the work — the clerk's portal and the newspaper archive and the meeting minutes the harried assistant had grown almost eager to send over — and Isla worked the records beside him the way they'd learned to work, her on one screen and him on the other, and the list grew, and every name that went onto it was a small cold weight.

"Here," James said at last, turning the screen. "Everyone on the public record against the designation, going back to the spring forum. I crossed off the three." He'd done it literally, struck through in red, Hendricks Marsh Slattery, and below the strikes the names that remained. "Eight left. Maybe nine — there's one I can't put a full name to, a man who spoke at the spring forum and the minutes just have him as G. Ahlberg. The rest are clean. Names, most of them addresses or close enough."

"Ahlberg how? Not in the chamber video?"

"He's in it. Fourth speaker, on camera for ninety seconds, says his piece and sits down, and the clerk wrote G. Ahlberg and no address, which she's not required to take." James pulled the frame up: a heavy man in his fifties in a windbreaker, blurred by the room's bad light, one hand on the lectern. "There are eleven Ahlbergs in the two counties and none of them with a G, and PD's been running the rest since an hour ago."

Isla looked at the man on the screen a moment, then reached for her phone.

Frank Gallo answered on the fourth ring sounding like a man who had not slept and did not intend to try again for a while, a dog going somewhere behind him and the flat metal clatter of his yard.

"It's Agent Rivers, Frank."

"Yeah." A pause with weather in it. "I still can't put it down. I was in that building Tuesday, I want you to know that, I was in there pulling that pipe run and there wasn't—"

"I know. We know exactly where you were and I'm not calling about that." She kept her voice level and easy, because the man was a day past finding a body he hadn't been ready to find and she needed him steady. "One question and then I'll let you go. Does the name Ahlberg mean anything to you? Might be a G. Ahlberg. Gordon, Gerald, Gunnar — I don't have the first name."

The silence on the other end was the useful kind, a man actually going and looking rather than performing a search.

"Ahlberg," Gallo said. "No. That's a nothing name to me. I know an Ahlgren, he's got the auto glass place on Central. That's not the same, is it."

"It's not."

"Then no. Never heard it. Not on a job, not in the yards, not at the plants." A rasp of him rubbing his jaw. "Is that him? Is that the guy I—"

"It's a name off a list, Frank. That's all it is. I've got about two hundred of them." She let that sit, then asked the other thing, the one she'd actually called for. "The man you saw. Did anybody ever put a name on him for you? Some other guy in the trade, somebody at a scrapyard, anybody ever say oh, that's so-and-so, he used to work there—"

"No." Immediate this time, and certain. "I asked around a little after the second time. Casual. Nobody knew him. That's what I'm telling you and nobody wants to hear it — he's not from anywhere. He's just in there." A beat, and his voice dropped, and the aggrievedness went out of it entirely. "Agent. If you put him in front of me. If you got him standing in a row of guys. I'd know him. I want that written down somewhere. I'd know him in a second."

"It's written down," Isla said, and meant it, and thanked him, and hung up.

James was watching her. "Nothing on Ahlberg."

"Nothing on Ahlberg from him. He's still a name I can't reach, which makes him either a man in danger or a man I need to look at, and until I know which he's both." She wrote the name on the board with the dying marker and it came out gray. "Keep PD on it."

Then she made herself do the discipline, the thing Delgado had drilled into her in a classroom a lifetime and a country away. Argue against your own shape. The first job of a pattern is to survive your best attempt to break it. So she broke at it. Eight old men in a dying city thick with old men, every one of whom had an opinion about the corpses of the plants and a fair number of whom had stood up at some meeting to say it. Maybe Hendricks and Marsh and Slattery were nothing but the three the plants happened to take in one bad week, their politics a coincidence she was draping a story over because a story was more bearable than chaos. She knew the seduction of the line drawn between points better than anyone alive. She had the smooth absence of a finger to remind her.

But the bodies hadn't fallen. The bodies had been carried, posed, fed into the iron. No coincidence laid a man into the gap of a rolling mill with his arms reaching ahead of him into the dark. And no coincidence sat in a union hall on Tuesday night, wrote down a man's joke about a dozer, built a false journalist out of a stranger's byline, and mailed it to him the next afternoon. The three dead men had one sentence in common that the living thousands of the east end did not: they had gone on the public record saying the thing should die. That was not a demographic. That was a list, and she was holding a copy of it.

"Read me the live ones," she said.

James read them. A retired millwright named Cyril Boone who'd written three letters to the paper calling the designation a boondoggle. A pair of brothers, the Vesterbacks, who owned a trucking concern that wanted the Erlandson parcel rezoned for a depot and had bankrolled half the opposition. A man named Doran who ran a demolition outfit and had stood at the spring forum to say, with obvious self-interest, that the responsible thing was to take it all down. A retired schoolteacher, of all things, who thought the money should go to the living and said so in plain hard words at every chance. And Gary Slattery's own brother-in-law, who'd seconded him Tuesday night and was now, presumably, sitting somewhere learning that the man who'd laughed beside him was on Henley's table.

"Any one of these could be next," Isla said. "Maybe all of them, given time. He's not in a hurry — Gallo's watched him walk those plants since spring; he's had this in his head for years. But he's moving now. Three in a week. He's found his rhythm, and we hand him a fresh congregation every time the council opens the floor."

"Some of these'll be easy to reach. Some were on my list from the union hall, I've already got numbers." He scrolled. "But protecting eight men we can't even confirm are targets — Isla, that's bodies. That's patrol cars and overtime and a thing nobody's authorized."

"Then I authorize it," she said, and stood, and went to find the one person who could make that true.

Kate Channing was at her desk with the door open and her silver bob immaculate and the look on her face of a woman who had already heard there was a third and was waiting to be told the size of it. She gestured Isla in without a word, and Isla shut the door, which she rarely did, and that alone made Kate set down her pen.

"Tell me," Kate said.

Isla told her. She laid it out the way she'd laid it on the board, fast and clean, no story she liked draped over it, only the story the bodies told — three victims, three plants, three machines, one weapon, one method, and underneath all of it the single thread that made it not a coincidence but a campaign: every dead man had stood up in public and said the plants should die. Then she gave her the email, and the quoted line, and the eleven-day-old account and the parking-lot wifi and the burner that had received one call and made none, and the dead camera over the door of a union hall.

"He was in the room with us Tuesday night," Isla said. "I can prove he was in the room, and I can't prove one other thing about him. And there are eight more men who said what the dead ones said. On the record. Reachable. Any one of them could be next, and I think he picks them at the meetings, which means the more public any of them are between now and when we have him, the more exposed they are. I want protection details. Patrol on the ones who'll take it, welfare checks on the ones who won't, and I want it today, before he chooses a fourth off a list I'm holding in my own hand."

She had braced for the fight. She'd had it before with bosses who needed three to be a coincidence because eight details were a budget line and a coincidence was free, and she had her arguments stacked and ready.

Kate didn't make her use them.

"How many cars," Kate said.

Isla blinked. "If we double up the highest-risk and run welfare contact on the rest — four. Six to do it right. Plus I'd want eyes on the dead plants he hasn't used yet. He's working through them. There may be more facilities on his map than the three he's hit."

"You'll get six. I'll call the chief myself and trade him something for it later."

"There's more, and it's the part that costs you." Isla stayed standing. "I need the AUSA on two tower dumps and a full provider warrant this morning, not Monday. I need a subpoena for the pension administrator, because I spent two nights reading union scans and I'm not doing it again for four decades of men I can't put birth years on. And I need bodies to look at video — Duluth PD is pulling every camera inside six blocks of that hall and somebody has to actually watch it, frame by frame. If it's James and me, it doesn't get watched, it gets skimmed."

Kate had picked up her pen again and was writing, which was how she said yes. "You'll have two analysts out of Minneapolis by tomorrow noon. I'll put the request in as a threat to life, which it is, and nobody will argue with me." She wrote another line, then stopped, her hand flat on the pad, and looked up with eyes that missed nothing. "Three bodies in a week. Posed. I don't need convincing. I needed to know you were sure of the shape, and I can see from your face that you've been arguing with it all week, which is exactly how I know to trust it." A beat. "You held it off the board until you couldn't anymore. Good. That's the agent I want running this."

It landed somewhere Isla hadn't expected, and she let it, because Kate Channing did not hand out that kind of thing lightly and had reasons of her own to know what it cost to be right about a dead man. Six months ago Kate had put her on mandatory leave, had ruled her state of mind in need of evaluation, obsessed with the Lake Superior Killer, reeling from Sullivan's injuries. That she was standing in this office now, being trusted with six cars and a campaign, was a distance neither of them named.

"Thank you," Isla said.

"Don't thank me. Find him." Kate lifted the phone. "And Isla — the man's been doing this in his head for years and walking those floors the whole time. He's patient, and he's local, and he loves the iron more than he loves anything alive. That's a man who's hard to rush and hard to scare and very, very hard to find." She held Isla's eyes. "It's also a man who, the moment he learns you've put a wall around his list, may decide to come at the wall instead of the list. Watch your own people. Watch yourself."

Isla thought of the man James saw in the back row of the union hall, moving toward the door the instant she'd asked for names — the calm of it, the craft. She thought of four sentences about the blue hour, written eleven days in advance by somebody who had never once intended to take a photograph. She thought of the dream, bloated and blue, you never felt me stop, and pushed it down, and could not quite make it stay.

"I'll watch," she said, and went out to start the cars rolling.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

While James worked his list from the meeting — phone against his ear, the flat Midwestern patience that made frightened men agree to a patrol car as though they were doing him the favor — Isla drove out alone to see Teresa Mack.

The councilwoman lived in Lakeside, in a neat older house with a deep porch and storm windows already up against a winter still weeks off, and she opened the door before Isla had finished climbing the steps. She had been watching the street. Her face, when she saw the badge, did the thing Isla had seen on a hundred faces this week — not surprise, but confirmation, relief folded into dread.

"You're here about the men. The ones at the plants." She stepped back to let her in. "I've been expecting somebody for three days. Come in. I'll make coffee. I don't know that I can be useful, but I'll try anything."

The house was warm and orderly and full of the same thing Paulson's apartment had been full of, arranged by a different hand — not the curated grief of a lost local but the working clutter of a woman in the middle of a fight. Banker's boxes along one wall. A long folding table laid with maps of the harbor and the east end, the dead facilities ringed in marker. Photographs, archival ones, men at furnaces, the plants alive. The oral histories she'd spent a career chasing. Teresa Mack had carried the Erlandson proposal three years, and her front room was the war room of it.

"You championed the designation," Isla said, settling at the table while Teresa moved in the kitchen. "You're the one who got Erlandson in front of the commission."

"Three years." She came back with two mugs and set one down with hands that weren't quite steady. "Through the budget people and the developers' lawyers and the editorials calling me a nostalgist standing in the way of progress. It passed committee Monday night. The last hurdle before the full vote." Her mouth twisted, not with pleasure. "I should have driven home happy. Instead the clerk told me in the hallway they'd found a body at Consolidated, one of the old plant men, and I haven't slept right since."

"I need to understand the opposition," Isla said. "The men who spoke against you, on the record. The three who've died were all against the designation."

"I know." Very quiet. "Hendricks spoke against me. Marsh called my whole project folly to my face in a packed room. Slattery said the buildings were rusted junk and the living were the only thing in them worth a damn — and he wasn't wrong about that part, that's the terrible thing, he wasn't wrong, and now he's —" She stopped. Started again. "They opposed me. And someone is killing the people who opposed me. So you can imagine the nights I've been having."

"That's not your fault."

"Isn't it? It's my project. My fight. If I'd let the buildings come down three years ago like everyone wanted —"

"Mrs. Mack." Isla waited until the woman looked at her. "Whoever's doing this has been walking those plants like graves since long before your proposal cleared anything. You're not the engine of it. But you've spent three years in rooms with everyone on both sides of this, so tell me — among the people who fought you, was there anyone who provoked a reaction from your side? Whose opposition was so loud, so personal, that it made the people who love those plants angry enough that you noticed?"

Teresa thought about it, really thought, turning the mug in her hands, and Isla let her get there at her own speed.

"Marsh," she said finally. "He wasn't just against it, he was contemptuous. He'd been the city's engineer, he had the authority, and he used it like a club — he'd stand up and explain to a room full of people who'd given their lives to those buildings exactly why their love was sentimental and stupid and a liability. He made it personal without ever raising his voice. The preservation people hated him. There were words after meetings. I had to step between Derek Paulson and Marsh once in a parking lot; Derek was shaking, he was so angry." She looked up. "But Derek couldn't hurt anybody. He can barely walk."

"I know," Isla said. "What about the quiet anger? Not Paulson, not the ones who shout. Is there anyone on the preservation side who's — off? Who loves those buildings in a way that isn't quite like the others? Someone who doesn't want the plaques and the tours, who just comes. Watches."

And there it was — the flinch, the small involuntary thing that crossed Teresa Mack's face, the same hesitation Brynn Tasker had given before the nothing turned out to be the only thing.

"What is it," Isla said, going still inside.

"It's probably nothing." The exact words. Isla had stopped being surprised by them. "It's not even about the meetings. It's —" Teresa set the mug down. "There's a man. I've seen him twice now. Watching me."

"Tell me. Slowly. From the first time."

"Monday night. After the committee vote. I was the last one out of city hall — I always am — and I came across the plaza to the side lot where I park, and there was a man standing at the entrance to the lot. Just standing. Not waiting for a car, not on his phone. He was facing me. He was facing the building I'd come out of, like he'd been watching the door. Older. Gray hair, I could see the gray where the light caught it. Heavy through the shoulders. Big. I couldn't see his face, the light put it in shadow, but I knew he was looking at me. I called out, and he didn't answer, and then he turned and walked off into the dark and was gone before I could fix anything about him." She was gripping her own hands now. "I told myself it was nothing. A man cutting through a lot. I'd just heard about the body. I was jumping at shadows."

"And the second time."

"Wednesday. The grocery on London Road, middle of the afternoon, broad daylight. He was across the parking lot by the carts, facing me again. The same build. The gray hair. The stillness. And the moment I really looked at him, the moment he knew I'd seen him, he turned and walked away. Unhurried. Like he had all the time in the world." The fear in her was bare now. "Two different lots, two days apart. A man doesn't end up facing you in two different parking lots by accident, does he."

Isla kept her face still and her pen moving and got every detail the woman had, which was more than Brynn Tasker had managed and less than she wanted. Big. Broad through the shoulders. Gray hair. The settled patience, the way he dissolved the instant of being seen. It matched Gallo's man almost line for line — the silhouette that walked the dead plants like a grave, the one who'd told a scrapper this isn't a place for taking. The only thing Teresa couldn't give her was the age; she'd seen older, gray, big, but she couldn't put a number on him the way Gallo had from his gantry in better light. Older. That was all. A vertical seam of extra dark against the ordinary world.

"Did he do anything? Either time? Approach you, speak, leave anything?"

"No. That's what makes it — nothing happened. Both times, nothing happened. He stood, he looked, he left. If I told anyone they'd say exactly what I keep telling myself. But Agent Rivers —" she leaned in "— the first time, before I came around the corner, he was already facing the door. He was waiting for someone to come out of that building. And the someone was me."

Isla wrote it down and did not let the cold that had settled on the back of her neck show on her face, because there was a thing wrong here, a thing that did not fit the clean grammar she'd written on the whiteboard an hour ago.

The killer chose the apostates. The men who'd stood up and said let it die. That was the message, three times written, clearer each time. Hendricks, Marsh, Slattery — all of them had profaned the iron, and the iron had taken them back.

And Teresa Mack wanted the plants saved. She was the one human being in this whole story who had fought hardest to keep them standing. By every line of the grammar, she was on his side. He should have no reason in the world to stand in a parking lot and wait for her to come out of a building.

Unless.

Isla turned it over the way she turned everything over now, slow, not leaning. Unless the rule she'd written wasn't the whole rule. Unless making the plants holy meant that anyone who presumed to decide their fate — to put a plaque on them, charge admission, make them into a tamed and domesticated thing — was as much a profaner in his eyes as the man who'd drive the dozer. Paulson had said it himself, unknowing: what you're describing isn't loving, it's something gone wrong about a building. A man for whom the iron was a god might not want it saved any more than he wanted it destroyed. He might want it left. Attended. Fed. Kept exactly as it was, sacred and dead and his.

Which would make Teresa Mack not his ally at all. Which would make her one more person who'd decided she had the right to say what the plants were for.

She didn't say any of it. She wasn't sure of it, and she would not hand a frightened, cooperative woman a theory that might be the chaos and not the pattern.

"I'm going to have a patrol car keep an eye on your street," she said instead, making her voice easy. "It's routine — we're doing it for a number of people connected to this. You won't even notice them most of the time. But if you see that man again, anywhere, any hour, you don't approach him, and you don't call out to him. You get somewhere with people, and you call me. That number reaches me day or night."

Teresa took the card and held it the way Gallo had held his, like a small flat thing that had suddenly become heavy. "You think he's watching me because I'm next," she said. It wasn't quite a question. "But I'm the one who wants to save them. I'm on the side of remembering. Why would he —"

"I don't think anything yet," Isla said gently, and stood. "I'm being careful. Being careful is most of this job."

But driving back with the lake opening gray and vast on her left, she could not stop turning the one piece that didn't fit. Why watch Teresa Mack. Why stand in two parking lots and wait for the woman who loved the buildings to come out into the dark. Either it was nothing — a coincidence draped in a frightened woman's story — or the rule was about to change under her, the way the staging had changed from crusher to furnace to mill, getting clearer, getting surer, getting more ambitious.

He's practicing, she'd told James in the cold throat of the furnace.

She wondered now, with the lake breathing beside her all the long way back, what exactly he was practicing for.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

By noon the conference room had taken on the close, used air of a space that had held two people too long, and Isla had stopped noticing the cold coffee at her elbow.

They had built the morning out of negatives. James said as much around eleven, scrubbing a hand down his jaw: everything they'd done since the rolling mill had been a process of crossing things off. The kids were clear. Paulson was clear — the hip, the heart, the way he'd climbed out of his chair. Gallo was clear, or near enough; the girlfriend in Cloquet had held, the alibi for Sunday night standing up under a phone call, and besides, the man they were hunting did not feel like a thing that lived inside Frank Gallo's loud aggrieved bulk. They had a silhouette and a method and a theory, and not one name to hang any of it on.

"Start over," Isla said. "From the man, not the list."

James looked at her across the spread of records. "The man."

"The victims aren't going to give him to us. He picked them off a public record anyone could read." She tapped the whiteboard without looking at it. "So build him. Not the profile — I did the profile last night in the dark and scared myself with it. Build the person. The one Gallo watched from a gantry. The one Brynn ran from. The one who walked out of that meeting the second you asked for names."

"Older." James fell into it without resistance, the two of them assembling a man out of fragments the way you'd reconstruct a pot from shards. "Sixties. Gallo put him in his sixties and Gallo had the best look — twenty minutes, decent light, from above. Tall, broad through the shoulders, heavy. Strong enough to carry a hundred and ninety pounds of dead weight into a building without dragging it. Gray hair, longish, a little wild. Gray beard."

"Moves sure on his feet," Isla added. "Gets over fences a man his age shouldn't get over. Knows the buildings room by room. Walks them in the dark without a light, Gallo said. Like he'd walked that exact floor ten thousand times."

"Ten thousand times." James went still on the words. "That's not a man who started visiting last spring."

"No. That's a man who worked them." She felt the cold settling certainty come up under her sternum, the thing she had learned to both trust and fear, and made herself say it plainly. "Strip out the religion of it, all the parts I can't put in a report, and here's the whole theory in a sentence: a man who gave his working life to the iron, who never left when it died, and who can't stand the men who want it gone. He's not a hobbyist. He's not a preservationist with a clipboard. He came up inside those plants. He's one of them."

James pulled his laptop around. "Then he worked one of them. Consolidated, Erlandson, Superior Iron Works — or all three at different times. Men moved between the facilities." He was typing now. "Employment records are a nightmare; the companies folded and the parent outfits got bought and dissolved. But the union kept rolls. Paulson's local kept rolls. And the pension administrators kept rolls because they had to — men sued over those pensions for years, Hendricks among them, and lawsuits leave paper."

"Cross the rolls against trespassing," Isla said. "Gallo's been seeing him at the dead plants since spring. If he's local and he's been climbing fences into closed industrial sites for years, somebody's caught him at it at least once. A careful man gets caught less. But a careful man who can't stop going back —"

"— gets caught eventually." James had two windows open, the Duluth PD records portal in one and the union spreadsheet in the other. "Trespassing first. Closed iron facilities, last five years. Citations and field-contact reports both. Most of those nuisance stops never rise to a citation — it's a uniform telling a guy to move along and writing a line about it so there's a record if the guy turns up dead in there later."

Isla came around to his side of the table and watched over his shoulder, four fingers and the absence resting on the back of his chair. The portal ground through its query, and she made herself not lean on the hope of it, because hope was a kind of being-sure, and being-sure was what had cost her a finger and a schoolteacher's life.

What came was a list. Forty-odd field contacts over five years, most of them exactly what James had said — juveniles, vagrancy, the urban-explorer crowd from before urban exploring had a name and a channel. James filtered it. Age first, anyone the reporting officer had put over fifty, and the forty became twelve. Then the facilities, cross-referenced against the three that mattered and the others Paulson had named, and the twelve became six. Then he set the trespassing list beside the union rolls and the pension records and ran the names against each other.

"There," James said.

One name sat in both columns. It had come up twice in the field contacts — two one-page records, two years apart — and it sat on the pension rolls for Consolidated Ore, and it sat, James found a moment later when he widened the search, on something else neither of them had expected.

Walter Kern. Sixty-seven years old.

"Read it to me," Isla said quietly.

"Twenty-seven years at Consolidated." His voice had gone flat and careful the way it went when a thing was turning real. "Started in seventy-six, on the floor, stayed on the floor — same as Hendricks, a working man's whole career feeding a machine. Out in 'oh-three when the plant closed, the same layoff that took Hendricks. He'd have been forty-five." He looked up. "He's sixty-seven now. Gallo said sixties. Gray, big, strong. A man who put twenty-seven years on a plant floor is still going to have the back and the shoulders for it at sixty-seven, especially if he never stopped working — and there's nothing here saying he ever drew steady work after. A few seasonal things. Nothing that stuck."

"Criminal record?"

"None. Not a parking ticket." James pulled up the two field-contact reports side by side. "Except these. The first is three years ago — a Duluth PD officer found him inside the Erlandson works after dark. No tools, no theft, nothing taken. The narrative's two lines. Subject stated he formerly worked in the industry and was 'looking at the equipment.' Subject was cooperative and was released with a warning." He moved to the second. "And this one. Eighteen months ago, Superior PD, across the harbor. Inside the Superior Iron Works after midnight. Same thing — no tools, nothing taken, nothing broken. The narrative's longer." He read it, and Isla watched his face change. "Subject was standing near the blast furnace. Stated he 'just wanted to see it again.' Subject became upset when asked to leave but complied. Released with a warning."

The cold finger settled on the back of Isla's neck, the old familiar tenant. Standing near the blast furnace. Owen Marsh had been folded into a blast furnace eighteen months later.

"He was caught at two of the three plants," she said. "Years before anyone died in them. Standing at the machines."

"Standing at the machines, taking nothing, becoming upset when asked to stop." James sat back, careful of the rib, and turned his father's watch once around his wrist. "That's not a scrapper. Gallo takes the copper because the copper's worth money. This man stood at a furnace in the dark and got upset that he had to stop looking at it."

"Like it was his," Isla said. The phrase had gone hand to hand through the whole case now — James in the shed, Brynn at Consolidated, Paulson and Gallo both, every one of them reaching for the same words about a man who moved through dead places as though they belonged to him.

"There's one more thing." James had kept typing while they talked, and now he turned the screen the last few degrees. He'd pulled the petition — the heritage designation had gathered signatures for two years, the public document of everyone who'd put their name on the side of saving the Erlandson works — and there, on the second page, in a careful old-fashioned hand, the kind a man learned when penmanship was still taught:

Walter Kern had signed it. Three separate times across two years. The same careful signature, a man going out of his way again and again to put his name down in favor of keeping the plants standing.

"He signed for preservation," Isla said slowly. "Every time."

"Every time." James looked at her. "So that's the wrong column, isn't it by your grammar. The dead men wanted the plants gone. Kern wants them saved. He's on Paulson's side of the line, not the victims'."

And there it was again — the thing that had been sitting wrong since Teresa Mack described a man watching her across two parking lots. A man who matched the silhouette in every particular, and who had spent two years signing his name to save the buildings.

"Unless saving them isn't the same as loving them right," Isla said, half to herself. "Paulson signs the petition too. Paulson wants plaques and tours and school kids. That's the making kind of love. But a man could sign that petition meaning something completely different by it. He could mean don't tear it down without meaning turn it into a museum. He could mean leave it. Leave it exactly as it is. Don't touch it, don't tame it, don't put a brass plate on it — just leave it to me."

James was quiet a moment. "That's a lot to read off a signature."

"It's the signature plus the furnace at midnight plus the twenty-seven years plus a man becoming upset that he had to stop looking." She straightened. "I'm not saying I know. I'm saying he's the first name all day that touches every piece we've got. The silhouette. The age. The strength. The trespassing at two of the three sites, years early, standing at the machines. The knowledge of the buildings. And a relationship to them intense enough that he keeps breaking the law just to stand inside them in the dark." She looked at the careful signature on the screen. "He's either exactly our man, or he's a sad old plant man who never let go. I can't tell which from a screen."

"Then we bring him in," James said.

"Then we bring him in." She looked at the two-line reports — just wanted to see it again — and felt the morning's long crossing-off finally invert into the thing it had been building toward: a name, a face, a door to knock on. "Carefully. He's the calmest man anybody's described in this whole thing. The kind who walks out of a room the instant you ask for names. We don't spook him and we don't corner him at one of his plants where he knows every shadow. We do it ordinary. We knock in the daylight and ask him to come talk."

James was already reaching for his coat.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Walter Kern came in without a fuss, which was the first thing about him Isla did not know what to do with.

They had braced for resistance, or flight, or the flat stonewall calm the descriptions had primed them to expect. Instead, when James knocked on the door of the small tidy house off Piedmont Avenue a little after one, Kern opened it himself, looked at the badges with an expression closer to recognition than alarm, and said in a low gravel of a voice that he supposed they'd come about the plants, and that he'd been wondering when somebody would. He put on a clean flannel shirt before he came. He asked, on the way out, whether he should bring his reading glasses, and when James said it couldn't hurt he tucked them into his breast pocket with the care of a man who'd worn the same pair for years.

In the interview room with the window — the good one, because Isla had not yet decided what he was — he sat with his big hands flat on the table and looked around at the cinderblock and the camera in its corner with a kind of interest, and he was, exactly, the silhouette. Sixty-seven and built like a man twenty years stronger, broad through the shoulders, the gray hair longish and pushed back off a weathered face, the gray beard. The hands were enormous and seamed with old scars. He did not look like a monster. He looked like half the old men in the east end, and that was the thing about the worst of them, Isla had learned long ago in a classroom with Delgado. The worst of them looked like everyone.

"You worked Consolidated," she said, when they'd done the recording preliminaries. "Twenty-seven years."

And Walter Kern opened like a door into a warm room.

"Twenty-seven years and four months." He said it the way another man might say the name of a child. "Started in March of seventy-six. I was eighteen. My father got me on — he'd been twenty-two years on the floor himself, and his father before him on the docks, back when it was ore boats and a man's whole arm." His eyes had warmed and gone somewhere thirty years back, lit by a fire that wasn't there anymore. "You can't understand it now. Nobody can. You'd come on for the night shift in January and the cold off the lake would cut you in half walking from the lot, and then you'd come through the doors into the heat of the line and it was like walking into the middle of the earth. The noise of it. The color. You learned to read a furnace by the color in its throat, did you know that? Not the gauge. The gauge lied. The color never did."

Isla let him talk. There was value in letting a man talk himself into a shape you could read, and besides, there was nothing performed in it that she could find. The reverence came up out of him unbidden and unguarded, the way grief did, and she watched him and tried to hold two ideas at once — that this was the most natural human nostalgia in the world, an old man mourning the only work he'd ever loved, and that it was, in its intensity, in the way the iron seemed more alive to him than anything living, exactly the thing she had described to James in the dark last night and frightened herself with.

"You go back to the plants," she said. "Even now. Even closed."

"I do." No hesitation, no flinch, the way an honest man says a thing he sees no shame in. "Erlandson, mostly. There's a stretch of the annealing line out there I'll stand at half an hour some nights just to see it still standing. Consolidated when I can stand it — it's worse to see, the place I gave my life to, gone to rot." His jaw worked. "I know I'm not supposed to. A young fellow ran me off Erlandson a few years back, and one across the water in Superior. I told them both the truth, that I only wanted to see the equipment. They let me go. And I'll tell you what I told them. Those buildings are the most important places in this city, and the city would rather forget they ever stood. A hundred years they fed Duluth. They fed the country. There was a war won on the steel that came off floors I walked, and now they want to knock it down for a trucking depot — or worse, put a little plaque on a corner of it and charge schoolchildren to look. I go because somebody ought to. Because in twenty years there won't be a man alive who remembers what it was to stand on that floor when the line ran. Somebody ought to keep the watch."

Keep the watch. Isla wrote nothing. She held his eyes and let the silence sit, and then she moved the way you moved when you wanted to see the seam in a thing — gently, without warning, into the cold water.

"Walter. I want to talk about the men who died in those plants."

She watched his face closely, because this was the moment the whole interview turned on, and she had been wrong before about exactly this kind of moment. She had read guilt where there was grief and grief where there was guilt and gotten a woman killed for the confusion. So she looked hard.

It was not guilt. There was no flicker of the calculation she'd learned to catch, no half-second where a guilty man checks his own face. What came over Walter Kern was grief — deep, structural, almost physical — and under it something that took her a moment to name, and that, when she named it, sat very strangely against everything she'd built.

It was offense. He was offended.

"That," Kern said, and his voice dropped and roughened, "is the worst thing anybody's done to those places in my lifetime. Worse than the wrecking ball. Worse than the depot." His hands closed slowly on the table, the big scarred knuckles whitening. "I heard how they were left. In the crusher — Ray, they're saying, Ray Hendricks, in the crusher with his arms out. And the furnace." He stopped, and breathed, and when he went on there was a thickness in it that no man Isla had ever interviewed had faked successfully. "Whoever did that is no different than the ones who want to tear it down. No different. He's using the iron to do murder. He's making those machines into a sideshow, so that now when a person thinks of that crusher they'll think of a dead man's arms instead of the work it did and the men who ran it. He's desecrating them. Surer than a dozer would. A dozer only kills the building. This kills what it meant."

The room held still. Down the hall the copier cleared its throat. Isla did not look at James, but she could feel the temperature of him along the wall, and she knew that where her own read had gone — this grief is real — his had gone somewhere harder, the cop's correct refusal to be moved by a performance simply because it was good.

James came off the wall.

"That's a fine speech," he said. It came out flat, almost gentle, which was how James was at his most dangerous. "I mean that. It moved me. But the speech doesn't change a single fact in front of me." He set his hands on the back of the empty chair and leaned on it. "Where were you Sunday night into Monday morning?"

"Home." A beat. "Alone. I'm alone most nights."

"Monday night into Tuesday."

"Home. Alone."

"Wednesday night into yesterday morning."

"Home. Alone." Kern's eyes had gone steady and unhappy. "I live by myself. My wife passed eleven years ago. I don't keep company. I haven't got an alibi for any night you'd care to name, and I expect you knew that before you asked."

"I did," James agreed. "Here's the rest of my problem. You know those buildings better than any living man — you just told us so, and proud of it. Every floor, every machine, every gap in every fence. You go into them in the dark without a light. You're strong enough, even now, to do a thing most men couldn't. And you have, by your own telling, a love for those machines so far past the ordinary that you break the law to stand inside them." He let it sit. "A man who wanted to lay three bodies into three machines, in the dark, without leaving a mark, couldn't ask for better hands or better knowledge than yours. You're not just able to have done this, Mr. Kern. Of everyone in this city, you're the man it would have been easiest for."

It was a good press. Kern did not bluster the way Paulson had blustered or aggrieve himself the way Gallo had. He sat with it a moment, looking at his own enormous hands on the table as if they were the things being accused, which in a sense they were. And then he reached, slowly, telegraphing every inch of the movement the way a careful man does in a room full of police, into the deep inside pocket of his jacket, and brought out something Isla could not, in the moment, place on either side of the ledger.

A notebook. A real one, old, the cover gone soft and furred at the corners with handling, a fat rubber band holding it shut against the swell of loose pages tucked inside. He set it on the table with a care that was its own argument, pulled off the band, and turned it to face them.

"You want to know how well I know those buildings. Here's how well."

It was maps. Page after page, hand-drawn in pencil and the same careful ink, every abandoned ore and iron facility in the region rendered floor by floor — Consolidated, Erlandson, the Superior works, and others Isla didn't recognize, places further up the shore, dead plants she hadn't known existed. And they were not idle sketches. Every machine was drawn and labeled. The margins were dense with notes in that schoolroom hand. Roof bay 3 collapsed spring '22, water intrusion advancing. Annealing line east, bearings seized but housing sound. Fence breach NW corner, never repaired. Crusher primary, jaws fixed open, structurally stable. Dates. Conditions. The slow careful record of a man cataloguing decay year over year.

"I've kept it eleven years," Kern said. "Since Marjorie died and I had the time. I walk them and I write down what's standing and what's fallen and what the weather's done since last I came. I always meant to take it to the historical society. Make them see there was something worth saving while there was still something left to save." His voice caught, and he steadied it. "I never had the nerve. A man like me, walking in with a homemade book. They'd have laughed me out." He turned a page, and another, the maps unspooling, a decade of one man's devotion laid open on a county interview table. "But you asked do I know those buildings. Yes. Better than the men who built them. And now you'll tell me that proves I did it."

Isla looked at the notebook and felt the floor of the case shift under her, because James was right and Kern was right and both of those things could not comfortably be true at once. The notebook was the most damning thing she'd seen — a detailed operational map of every crime scene and a dozen more, in the suspect's own hand, listing the exact security gaps a killer would use. And it was, at the very same time, the most exculpatory: the patient, hopeless project of a lonely old man who loved dead buildings and wanted someone, anyone, to remember them with him.

It was evidence, or it was the opposite of evidence. She turned a page herself, gently, the maps precise and loving under the cold fluorescent light, and could not, for the life of her, yet tell which.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Teresa Mack stood at the two-way glass with her arms wrapped around herself as though the observation room were cold, which it was not, and looked at the man on the other side of it a long time before she said anything.

Isla had called her in within the hour. It was a thing she'd debated — bringing a frightened witness face to face, even through glass, with a man she might have watched from across two parking lots — but Teresa was the only living person who claimed to have seen the watcher more than once, and a wavering identification was still more than nothing. So a car had brought the councilwoman down, and Isla walked her into the narrow dim room beside the interview suite and let her look at Walter Kern, who sat with his hands folded on his closed notebook and his reading glasses perched on his nose, waiting with the patience of a man who had spent his life waiting — for shifts, for whistles, for the color to come up true in a furnace throat.

"He's the right size," Teresa started. "The build. The gray." She leaned a little toward the glass and then drew back from it, as if it might let him see her, which it would not. "But I never saw his face, Agent Rivers. That's the thing. Both times he was across a lot from me, in the dark or near it, the light wrong. I saw a shape. A big older man with gray hair who stood too still and watched me and walked away when I looked." She turned, her eyes wet and frustrated and afraid. "That man through there is a big older man with gray hair. So are a hundred men in this city. So was my father. I want to tell you it's him. I can feel myself wanting to, and that's exactly why I don't trust it — because I'm scared and I want this to be over, and the wanting would make me say yes to any gray-haired man you put behind that glass." She pressed her lips together. "I'm sorry. I won't pretend to be sure of a thing I'm not. Not when it could be a man's life."

It was, Isla thought, almost exactly what she herself would have said, and would have respected anyone for saying, and it left them precisely where they'd been. She thanked her, and meant it, and had the car take her home, and stood a moment alone in the dim watching Kern adjust his glasses and look around the empty room with that same interest — a man entirely at his ease, or a man performing ease so well it came to the same thing from the outside.

They took his fingerprints. He gave them willingly, pressing each enormous scarred finger onto the pad with the cooperative gravity he'd brought to everything, and the tech ran them against what little the scenes had yielded, and it came back the way Isla had known in her gut it would. Nothing. No match at Consolidated, no match at the furnace, no match on the rolling mill. Which proved nothing in either direction, and she made James say it out loud with her so neither of them could pretend otherwise: the killer had worn gloves at every scene. Henley had been certain of it from the first. A man careful enough to carry a corpse so it wouldn't scuff a floor was a man who wore gloves. The absence of Kern's prints didn't clear him any more than their presence would have damned him. It was a null, and the whole case was turning into a long row of nulls.

"Walk me through what we actually have," James said. They were back in the conference room, the notebook bagged now and sitting on the table between them like a question neither would answer. "Not what we feel. What we've got."

"A man who matches a silhouette three witnesses gave us, and not one of them can put a face to it. Twenty-seven years at Consolidated, which ties him to the dead industry but not to a single victim by name. Two trespassing stops, years old, warnings, nothing taken or broken. A signature on a petition — on the preservation side, the wrong side by my own grammar. No alibi, which is the most natural thing in the world for a widower who lives alone and means nothing. No prints, because there are no prints to have." She looked at the notebook in its plastic. "And a book his lawyer is going to call the lifelong project of a harmless old historian, which I can't prove is anything else."

"You believed his grief," James said. It wasn't an accusation.

"I believed his grief," she agreed. "And that's the part that won't sit still for me. I've watched a lot of men perform a lot of feelings across a lot of tables, and that wasn't performed. He's genuinely sick at what was done in those buildings. He thinks it's desecration." She turned her coffee cup in her hands. "And so would the killer. That's what makes it useless. The man we're hunting doesn't think he's desecrating anything — in his head he's the only one who isn't. He's feeding them. Returning the apostates to the iron. Doing the one holy thing in a city full of vandals. He'd sit across that table and grieve the murders sincerely, because in his mind they aren't murders. They're offerings. Kern's grief doesn't clear him. It's exactly what our man would feel and exactly what he'd say."

"Or," James said quietly, "he's a sad old man who keeps maps of dead buildings, and we've spent the afternoon scaring the hell out of him because he's the right shape."

"Or that." She didn't flinch from it. "I've been wrong about a man across a table before, and Alicia Mendez paid for it. I'm not going to be sure of Walter Kern to make myself feel better about a week with three bodies in it."

The knock at the doorframe was crisp and unfamiliar, and they both looked up to find a man in a good suit — not the rumpled civic kind the east end ran on, but a real one, pressed, a leather folio under his arm — standing in the door with the settled confidence of someone who has spent his career walking into rooms exactly like this one and is never in them by accident.

"Agents." He produced a card and set it on the table without being invited to. "I represent Walter Kern. I'd like to know on what basis you're holding my client, and I'd like to know it now."

His name was Halloran and he was, Isla understood within ninety seconds, very good — which was its own interesting fact about a sixty-seven-year-old former steelworker who lived alone off Piedmont and could not, on his face, have afforded a lawyer like this. Somebody had made a call for Walter Kern. She filed it, and set it aside, because Halloran was already laying out the thing she'd just laid out to James, only from the other side and with no doubt in it at all.

"You have a physical description that matches a substantial fraction of the male population over sixty in this city," he said, ticking it off on long fingers, "uncorroborated by any positive identification — I'm aware you brought a witness in within the hour and I'm aware she could not identify him, because my client could see the observation room door from where he sat and watched a shaken woman be walked out of it. You have two trespassing contacts, neither charged, both resolved with warnings, both predating the deaths by years. You have an absence of an alibi, which is not evidence of anything and you know it. You have an absence of his fingerprints at any scene. And you have a notebook full of historical documentation that I will happily enter into the record as evidence of my client's civic devotion the moment you'd like to make it about that." He spread his hands. "What you do not have is one fact that places Walter Kern at one murder, or connects him to one victim beyond the fact that they all grew old in the same town. You have a theory and a body type. Charge him on that and I'll have him out before the ink dries, and I'll have your supervisor's name in the filing."

"We can hold him twenty-four hours without charge," Isla said. "You know that as well as I do."

"You can," Halloran agreed, unbothered. "And you can spend those twenty-four hours not finding the thing you haven't found in the last four days. Or you can let an old man who came in voluntarily, answered every question, and handed you his life's work go home, and spend them looking for the person who actually did this — who, I'd gently point out, is not in your building. Which means he's still out there. Which means the clock you'd be burning on my client is the same clock another man might be living the last day of."

It sat, because the bastard was right, and Isla felt the truth of it settle cold in her chest.

"We'll hold him the twenty-four," she said. "It's our right and I'm going to use it." She met his eyes and didn't give him the inch he wanted, which was for her to admit out loud what they both knew. "But you can sit with him while we do."

Halloran inclined his head, perfectly pleasant, a man who'd gotten exactly the outcome he expected. "Twenty-four hours. And then he walks, unless you find something. Which —" a small, not unkind, entirely certain smile "— you won't, because there's nothing to find on that man. I'd start looking elsewhere if I were you."

He left the card on the table. Isla looked at it, and at the bagged notebook, and at the dark window where the lake lay invisible at the bottom of the hill, and felt the twenty-four hours begin to run out from under her the moment they'd started.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The budget proposal ran to forty-one pages, and Diane Hooper had read all of them twice, which was forty-one pages and two readings more than any of her colleagues would manage before the vote. That was the difference between her and the rest of the council, and it was the only difference that had ever mattered: she did the reading. At ten o'clock on a Thursday night, with city hall gone to its bones around her and the cleaning crew long finished on her floor, she was the only light still burning, and she found a sour satisfaction in that, the way she always had.

Line 290. There it was, where Finance had buried it, three lines of anodyne language that did what eleven o'clock speeches and three years of public comment had failed to do. Heritage Preservation Initiative — Erlandson Site. Allocation: zero. Recommend sunset. No museum. No grant match. No plaque, no schoolchildren, no industrial heritage corridor. Just a number that was no number at all, and the quiet administrative verb that killed a thing without anyone having to stand up and say they'd killed it.

She had wanted this. She made herself sit with that, the way she made herself sit with everything. She had argued from the start that the city could not afford to be sentimental about its own corpse — that you did not feed the living by spending them on monuments to the dead — and she had said so in public, on the record, in language the Tribune had found quotable. Teresa Mack had never forgiven her for it. Half the east end had never forgiven her for it. But Diane Hooper had not gotten where she was by needing to be forgiven, and tomorrow the proposal would clear committee and the Erlandson works would go back to being what they were, which was a hazard and an eyesore and a line item the city could finally stop pretending it owed something.

She should have felt better than she did.

It was the warnings, she knew. The detective — young, earnest, with a way of saying we'd just ask you to vary your routine that made it sound like a courtesy rather than what it was — had come to her office on Tuesday and laid it out plainly enough that she'd stopped parking in the side lot, stopped working past nine, stopped being the last car in any structure after dark. Two men dead. Three, now. All of them people who'd stood up at the meetings. She had stood up at the meetings. She had stood up against the thing the dead men had also stood up against, which the detective had not said aloud but which had sat in her office like a third person. For three days she had gone home before the streetlights came fully on and double-checked the deadbolt and slept the thin, listening sleep of a woman who had finally been made to believe a thing she'd spent her career refusing to believe — that the danger was real, and it might have her name on it.

Which was why the knock at her doorframe at ten o'clock should have frightened her, and didn't.

"You're still here." Marcus, her aide, hung in the doorway with his coat already on and his phone in his hand, and the look on his face was the wrong look for the hour — not the careful, glancing-over-the-shoulder caution they'd all worn for days, but something loosened, almost glad. "I was about to text you. You haven't seen."

"Seen what?"

"They've got him." He came in and turned the phone to her, though she couldn't read it from across the desk and didn't need to. "Picked him up this afternoon. An old plant man. They're not releasing the name yet, but it's all over the scanner traffic — Renata heard it from her brother at the PD. He's in custody downtown, and the word is they're building to charge him. Tomorrow, maybe the day after. It's coming. They got him, Diane."

She set down her pen.

She would examine the feeling later, the great loosening that went through her chest, and she would not be proud of all of it. There was relief in it that was simple and animal and beneath the dignity she liked to keep, the relief of a hunted thing told the hunt is called off. But there was a cleaner thing under that. For three days she had carried the small ugly arithmetic: that she had said the plants should die, and men who said the plants should die were dying, and she had lain awake doing the subtraction. Now someone sat in a room downtown with the answer, and the arithmetic was finished, and it had nothing to do with her after all. It never had. She had let a detective and a bad week convince her the world was arranged around her one vote, and the world, as ever, was not.

"They're sure?"

"Sure enough to hold him. Sure enough that it's all anyone's talking about." Marcus smiled, the first real one she'd seen on him in days. "I think you can go home. I think we all can."

She looked at the proposal a moment longer — line 290, the zero, the small clean verb — then closed the folder and squared it against the desk and felt, for the first time in days, no particular urgency about any of it. It would keep until morning. So would she.

"Go on," she told him. "Lock up behind you. I'll be two minutes."

She gathered her things slowly, savoring the slowness, the luxury of not glancing at the dark window, of not listening past the hum of the building for a sound that didn't belong. Her coat. Her satchel, heavy with the proposal she would not need to fear over tonight. The keys she had taken to holding splayed between her fingers in the parking structure, and which she now dropped, ordinary and unweaponized, into her pocket.

She switched off the desk lamp. The office went to the soft gray of the city coming through the blinds, and it looked, for once, like nothing more than an office.

A good night's sleep, she thought, going down the dark hall toward the elevators. Her first in a week. She was already imagining it — the deadbolt thrown out of habit rather than fear, the listening silence gone back to being only silence — and she did not think, not once, about the fact that she had heard a name was coming and had not heard the name; that sure enough to hold him and sure enough to charge him were not the same sentence; that somewhere across the city a careful man who loved cold iron more than he loved anything that breathed had all the time in the world, and was in no hurry, and had never once been the kind to come at the front.

The elevator doors opened on an empty car. She stepped in.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The twenty-four hours ran out at one o'clock on Friday afternoon, the thirteenth of September, and Isla released Walter Kern into them.

She did it herself, because she would not make James do a thing she'd argued for, and because some hard private accounting required her to stand in the room while a man she could not clear and could not hold walked out of her building a free citizen. Halloran was already there, pressed and rested, the folio under his arm, the small certain smile in place. Kern came out of holding in the same clean flannel he'd worn in, his reading glasses tucked into the breast pocket, and he looked at Isla across the duty desk with an expression that was not triumph and was not relief but something closer to the sorrow he'd carried the whole way through — a man who'd been somewhere he didn't belong and was being allowed to go home, and who took no pleasure in it that she could find.

"They're giving me back the book." It wasn't a question. The notebook sat in its evidence bag on the counter between them, and the property clerk slid the release form across, and Kern signed it in that careful old-fashioned hand, the same hand that had signed the petition three times across two years, the same hand that had drawn every machine in every dead plant in the county floor by floor.

"You're free to go, Mr. Kern. Thank you for your cooperation."

"I meant what I said in there." He tucked the notebook into the deep inside pocket with the same care he'd brought to everything. "About whoever's doing it. I hope you catch him before he does it to another of those places. A man can mourn a building, Agent. I didn't think I'd ever have to mourn what somebody was making of them on top of it." He settled his cap on his head. "You were only doing your job. I don't hold it against you. A man my size, my age, who walks where I walk — I'd have looked at me, too."

And then he went out through the glass doors into the gray Friday afternoon, Halloran a pressed shadow at his shoulder, and Isla watched him go and could not tell whether she'd just released a harmless grieving old man or the most careful killer she had ever hunted.

"Surveillance," she said to James, who'd come up beside her without a sound, his coffee steaming, the rib still holding his shoulder a degree higher than the other. "I want eyes on him from the curb. He doesn't get into a car alone today."

"Already arranged." He didn't look pleased about it; he looked like a man doing the only thing left. "Duluth PD's putting a unit on his street. A uniform's following him home right now and the car sits on Piedmont when he's there. It's not a tail he won't notice. I told them I didn't care if he noticed. If he's our man, the noticing is half the point."

"If he's our man and he knows there's a car on his street, he doesn't move."

"And if he doesn't move, nobody else dies, which is the only outcome I can defend to Kate at the moment." James turned his father's watch once around his wrist, the old tell. "I know what you're going to say. A man who's been at this in his head for years doesn't get rattled by a patrol car. He waits. He outlasts the surveillance the way he's outlasted everything else, and the second we pull the car for some other emergency he goes back to the list." He drank his coffee. "Say it anyway. I'd rather we both said it out loud than either of us pretend the car solves anything."

"The car doesn't solve anything," Isla said. "The car buys days. Maybe a week. Whatever the chief will give us before he wants his people back." She watched the empty glass doors a moment longer. "If it's Kern, the only way it helps is if he can't stand the waiting and we catch him in the act. And every instinct I've got tells me the waiting is the one thing this man has never once failed at."

She drove out to Lakeside herself, again, alone, again, while James ran the coordination from the office, because there was a thing she had learned about delivering news to frightened people that did not survive being done by phone or by proxy. You had to be in the room. You had to let them put the dread on a face that would carry it back to them.

And the question Teresa Mack had, when she opened the door before Isla had finished the steps — watching the street again, always watching the street now — was the one Isla had driven out specifically to be the one to answer.

"You let him go." She said it flatly, the war-room clutter behind her, the maps with the dead facilities ringed in marker. She had not made coffee this time. She stood in her own doorway with her arms wrapped around herself the way she'd stood at the two-way glass. "It's on the news. They said a man was released without charge an hour ago. That's him. That's the man you brought me down to look at."

"We didn't have enough to hold him," Isla said. "I won't lie to you about that, because you'd know if I did. We had a description and a notebook and no fact that put him at any scene. I held him every hour the law allowed and then I had to let him walk, and I'd be lying if I told you it sat easy."

"He's the right size." Teresa's voice climbed and she made it come back down, the discipline of a woman who'd spent eleven years in public rooms. "The right size and the right age and the right — he's the man in the parking lots, Agent Rivers. I couldn't say it through the glass because I'm honest and I couldn't swear to a face I never saw, and I still can't. But he's out there now. He was in a cell and now he's out there, and I'm the one he stood across two parking lots and watched."

"There's a car on his street. Around the clock. He doesn't move without us seeing it."

"And me?" Her eyes were bright and afraid and entirely without shame about it. "You put a car on my street yesterday and it was gone before dark. I stood at that window and watched it pull away and told myself it was over, they've got him. And then the radio, an hour ago." She gathered herself the way she'd gathered herself every time. "I want it back. The detail. I want the car back on my street, and I don't care how it sounds, I don't care if you think I'm a frightened woman jumping at a man cutting through a lot. I've had four nights of sleeping with the lights on and one night of sleeping at all, because for one night I thought you had him."

"You'll have it," Isla said, and meant it, and felt the cost of it land somewhere she'd account for later. "I'll arrange it before I leave your steps."

What she did not say, standing on the deep porch with the storm windows already up against a winter still weeks off, was the thing that had sat in her cold and heavy since the first parking lot: that by every line of grammar she'd written on the whiteboard, Teresa was the one person in this story the killer should have no reason to touch. The high priestess of the saving. The woman who'd fought three years to keep the iron standing. And a man had stood in two lots and waited for her to come out into the dark, unhurried, dissolving the instant of being seen. Either it was nothing, or the rule was about to change under her, the way the staging had changed and gotten surer and more ambitious. Being careful was most of this job, and being careful sometimes meant not handing a frightened woman a fear you couldn't yet justify.

She made the call from the car in the driveway. It did not go well.

"I gave you six cars yesterday." The watch commander at Duluth PD was not unkind, but he was a man doing subtraction in his head while he talked. "Six. For a list of eight men plus the councilwoman plus a unit on your suspect's street, which is ten cars I do not have, Agent Rivers, in a department that runs eleven on a good shift and nine on this one. I've got men on doubles. I pulled two off the harbor to cover your east-end people and the harbor's screaming about it. And I'll tell you what my chief said to me at seven this morning, because you'll hear it from him by noon anyway." A pause, the sound of a man choosing the honest version. "He gave me a week. A week of my cars parked on streets where nothing happens while my regular calls back up. And now your one suspect's released and you want the detail you stood down put back up, plus the suspect's own street, plus the eight. I can't make the math work. Somebody comes off."

"Nobody comes off." Isla heard her own voice go flat and certain the way it went when a thing was too large to argue gently. "If you pull a car and that's the night he moves, you'll be doing this subtraction for the rest of your career."

"And if I don't pull a car and he never moves, I'm explaining to the city why a third of my shift spent September parked." He blew out a breath. "I'm not the enemy. I want him caught more than you do — he's putting bodies in my city. But you've given me a body type and a theory. Get me something. A name that holds, a face, anything I can point at. Until then I'm robbing one street to watch another, and the moment something louder happens — a kid goes missing, a bad wreck on the Skyway — your detail's the first thing I cash in. I'm telling you so it's not a surprise."

"Give me the councilwoman and the suspect's street," Isla said. "If you can't give me the eight, give me those two and I'll find a way to live with the rest."

"Those two I can hold. For now." The honesty again, almost gentle. "Find me something, Agent. I'm stretched to the rivet. I can't watch the whole east end on a feeling."

She sat in the driveway a moment after he'd gone and let the truth of it settle. They were out of cars and out of suspects and very nearly out of the patience of the only department that could give them either. Kern was loose with a unit on his street that he was patient enough to outwait. The eight names on James's list were covered by a coverage already being counted toward its own undoing. And the careful man who walked the dead plants like graves was somewhere in the city she was looking at through a windshield, in no hurry, having never once been the kind to come at the front.

So they would do the only thing left. They would start the investigation over from nothing and work it cleaner and harder than they'd worked it the first time, and if the killer was Walter Kern, they would pray the patrol car drove him to a mistake before it got cashed in for something louder. It was not a plan she'd have signed her name to in Quantico. It was the plan a week of nulls had left her.

She drove back to the field office and pulled everything.

By four o'clock the conference room had gone back to the close used air of a space holding two people too long, and the table was no longer holding records in folders. It was holding the case itself, laid out flat, because James had cleared it to the wood and they'd built the whole thing across it end to end. Three scenes. Three dead men. Everything Henley had given them and everything Gallo had given them and everything the silhouette and the notebook and the eight names had given them, arranged in the order it had happened, so that for the first time since the rolling mill they were looking at the shape of the thing instead of the pieces of it.

"From the top," Isla said. "Not the man this time. The places. We've been so deep in who that we never sat with where." She set her hand flat on the first cluster of pages, four fingers and the smooth absence of the fifth. "Walk the facilities with me. Just the facilities. What were they."

James pulled his chair around to her side, careful of the rib. "Consolidated Ore," he said, and laid a finger on the first scene, Hendricks in the crusher's open jaws, palms up. "First body. It's an ore plant. Raw rock comes in off the boats and the trains, and the first thing you do to rock is break it. That's the primary crusher, the size of a delivery truck. It's the front of the whole process. The mouth everything goes into."

"And the second."

"Superior Iron Works. Marsh, folded into the dark arched throat of the blast furnace, at peace, in state. It's a works, not a single shed — blast stoves, the casting hall. That's where you take the crushed ore and melt it. The furnace. You put it in the throat and the heat takes it apart and what comes out the bottom is iron." He'd gone still in the particular way he went when a thing was turning real under him. "Smelting. You smelt the ore in the furnace."

"And the third." She did not need him to say it. She wanted to hear it in order, twice, the way she made herself do everything now.

"Erlandson." Slattery, fed into the gap of the rolling mill, arms reaching ahead of him into the dark, through, and not caught. "The mill takes the iron and works it. The rollers squeeze it thinner and longer, pass after pass, a slab into a sheet. Rolling." He lifted his finger off the third scene and looked up, and she watched the thing arrive on his face the half-second before it finished arriving on her own. "Crushing. Smelting. Rolling."

The cold finger settled on the back of her neck and stayed.

"That's not three plants he likes," she said slowly. "That's not three buildings that happened to mean something to him. He didn't pick them because they were convenient or because that's the order the dead men spoke at meetings." She heard her own voice flatten into the place it went when a thing was too large to feel in real time, and let it. "He's working through the process. The actual sequence. The way ore becomes steel. You crush it, then you smelt it, then you roll it. He put Hendricks in the crusher and Marsh in the furnace and Slattery in the mill, in that order, because that's the order the iron goes. He's walking the men through the same stages the rock walks through. He's making them into the steel they wouldn't honor."

James didn't speak. He went to the whiteboard and wrote it across the top in three words — CRUSH SMELT ROLL — and stood looking at them, and she could feel the temperature of him from across the room, the refusal to be moved by a pattern simply because it was beautiful. It was the discipline she'd taught him without meaning to. So she did it to herself first, before he had to.

"Argue against it," she said. "Maybe I'm drawing the line because a line is more bearable than three coincidences. Three dead plants in a region full of dead plants. Of course they're an ore plant and a furnace and a mill — that's what the industry was, that's all there is out here to be the corpse of. Maybe I'm putting the stages in his head when they were only ever in the geology."

"You're not." James said it quietly, and turned from the board, and she saw that the discipline had run its course in him and come out the far side the way it had in her. "Because the bodies weren't dumped. They were posed for the machine every time. Hendricks with his palms up in the jaws — offered to the thing that breaks. Marsh folded at peace in the throat — given to the thing that melts. Slattery reaching through the rollers, through them, not caught in them — fed to the thing that works the metal. He didn't just use three machines. He posed each man for what that specific machine does. That's not geology. That's a man telling you, three times, in three buildings, exactly what he thinks he's doing." He set the marker down. "He's running them through the process."

"Then there's a fourth," Isla said.

The room held still. Down the hall the copier cleared its throat, the ordinary machine sound of an ordinary building, and it sat strangely against the thing she'd just said, the way the wound had said accident and the staging had said look at me.

"Crush, smelt, roll. Three stages, three bodies. But that's not the whole process. That's not steel yet. After you roll it you've still got to —" She stopped, because she didn't have the word, and James did.

"Finish it." He said it like a man setting down something heavy. "You finish the steel. After the mill — the finishing line. Annealing, coating, cutting to length, whatever the product needed. It's the last stage. It's where the raw thing finally becomes the thing it was always going to be." His eyes had gone flat and far. "Kern talked about a finishing line. In the interview. Said he stands at the annealing line at Erlandson in the dark just to see it still standing."

"And it's in the notebook." Isla was already moving around the table, pulling the photographs they'd taken of the maps before Halloran got them released. "Annealing line east, bearings seized but housing sound. He drew finishing equipment. Where, James. Which plant. Consolidated's an ore plant, crushing, that's the front end — no finishing there. The Superior works is a furnace operation. Erlandson had the mill." She was turning the photographs, the dense schoolroom hand, the dead plants rendered floor by floor, places further up the shore she hadn't known existed. "Where in this whole dead county is there a finishing line. A real one. The last stage. Because that's where the fourth one goes, and it's the only place it can go, and he's already standing at it in the dark."

James had gone back to the laptop, the records portal grinding through its query, and Isla made herself not lean on the hope of it. He crossed the regional facilities against process type the way he'd crossed trespassing against the union rolls, the columns narrowing on the screen — ore plants falling away, furnace operations falling away, the mills — until what was left was a single line.

"There's one," James said, his voice gone careful. "Only one in the whole district that housed a true finishing line. Plate finishing — annealing, leveling, cut-to-length. The full last stage under one roof." He turned the screen the last few degrees, and she read the name a half-second before he said it, and felt the floor of the case shift under her the way it had shifted across Walter Kern's notebook.

"Gunderson Ironworks. East edge of the city, out past where the road gives up. It's the oldest of all of them — older than Consolidated, older than the Superior works. And the biggest. And by a mile the worst gone; the structural surveys won't certify a man to walk in it, the roof's down across three bays, Henley's office flagged it years ago as a place they expected to pull a body out of one winter." He looked up at her. "And it's the one, Isla. Look at the file. When Teresa Mack started the preservation fight three years ago — before Erlandson, before any of it — Gunderson was the site. It was the centerpiece. They only narrowed it to Erlandson later because Gunderson was too far gone to save and the engineers said so and the money said so. Marsh said so; he'd walked it for the city and written it off." He sat back, careful of the rib, and the two of them looked at the name on the screen and at the three words on the whiteboard above it. "The plant at the heart of the whole fight. The cathedral of the thing. The last stage of the iron."

"That's where he finishes," Isla said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The thing nobody told you about a stakeout, Deputy Cattrell had decided somewhere in the third hour, was that it was just sitting. That was the whole of it. You sat in a cooling car on a residential street with a gas-station coffee gone to room temperature in the cupholder, and you watched a house in which nothing happened, and you did it because somebody upstream of you had decided the house mattered and you were not high enough on the ladder to be told why.

He knew the broad strokes. Everybody at the department knew them by now — three dead men in the dead plants, the federal agents working it, the old plant man they'd hauled in and turned loose because they couldn't make anything stick. That old man was the house. Walter Kern, sixty-seven, the modest little place off Piedmont with the sagging gutter and the dark windows, and Cattrell's job, six to six, was to sit on Piedmont Avenue and make sure Walter Kern did not get into a car and drive off to do whatever the feds thought he might do.

The trouble was that Cattrell did not think Walter Kern was going to do anything. He'd watched a uniform walk the man to his own front door at the top of the shift, and Kern had gone in slow and tired the way old men went in, and turned on a lamp in the front room, and that had been the entirety of the excitement. Cattrell had watched the lamp through the gauzy curtain for hours now. A shape crossing it now and again. The blue stutter of a television. The ordinary evening of an ordinary old man who, Cattrell was willing to bet two weeks' pay, had never killed anybody in his life — let alone three people, let alone arranged them inside machinery like some kind of — he didn't have the word for it. He'd heard posed on the scanner and it had stuck in him sideways. You didn't pose a body unless something was deeply, structurally wrong with you, and whatever was wrong with the man who'd done that, Cattrell could not square it with the tired shape that had gone in through that door and turned on that one sad lamp.

It was a waste of him, was what it was. There were two FBI agents in this city hunting a real monster, and the department had cars sitting on the homes of the people that monster might come for — protective details, the watch commander called them, and Cattrell had put in for one and not gotten it. Those were the postings worth having. You sat on a potential victim's house, and at least there was a version of the night where something happened, where the killer came up the walk in the dark, and you were the one who got to stand up out of the car and end it. That was police work. That was the thing you signed up for. Instead he had drawn the suspect they'd already more or less cleared, which meant he had drawn the one house in the whole arrangement where the most exciting possible outcome was an old man going to bed.

He shifted in the seat. His back had gone to the ache it went to after the fourth hour, and he arched against it and rolled the window down two inches for the cold and the noise of something other than his own breathing. The street smelled of the lake, the way the whole east end smelled of the lake, that mineral cold-water smell that got into everything. A dog barked somewhere and quit. Ten o'clock, give or take. Eight hours still to run.

That was when the joggers came.

Two of them, a man and a woman in reflective gear, headlamps bobbing, coming up the far sidewalk at the unhurried pace of people who did this every night and would do it whether or not it was forty degrees and black as the inside of a boot. Cattrell watched them the way you watched anything that moved on a street where nothing moved — not because they mattered but because they were there, because his eyes were starved for something to do. The woman said something. The man laughed, a short bark of breath that fogged in the beam. They had a dog with them, Cattrell saw now, some low quick terrier straining at the end of a lead, and the woman kept having to check her stride for it. The dog wanted to investigate a hedge. The woman did not have time for the hedge. They negotiated. They came on up the block past the parked cars, and Cattrell tracked them the length of the street the way he'd have tracked a fly across a ceiling, just for the motion of it, just to feel his attention land on something.

By the time they'd jogged out of sight around the corner onto Twenty-Fourth, three or four minutes had gone by. Maybe five.

He turned back to the house.

And something was wrong, and it took him a long bad second to find what.

The curtains. The front-room curtains, that he had watched the lamp burn through and the television flicker behind for four hours — they were dark. Not just the front room. He swept his eyes across the whole modest face of the house and every window was the same flat lightless nothing, the gauze drawn full across, where before there had been the one warm square at the front and a second dimmer glow he'd taken for a hall light somewhere deeper in. Dark now. All of it. As if the house had closed its eyes while his back was turned.

His pulse came up. He told himself a man went to bed. That was all. A man turned off his lamp and his television and his hall light and pulled his curtains and went to bed, the way people did at ten o'clock, the way Cattrell himself would be doing if he weren't sitting on a cold street watching them do it. That was the boring true thing, and he reached for it the way you reached for a railing.

But he was already opening the car door.

He crossed the street with his hand not on his weapon but near it, and came up the short cracked walk to the front step, and the closer he got the more the wrongness in him refused to settle into the boring true thing. The house had a held quality. He didn't know how else to put it, even to himself, and he'd think later that he should have called it in right then, on the held quality alone, except that you did not get on the radio and tell the watch commander that a house felt held. He knocked. Three solid knocks, the cop knock, the one that carried.

Nothing.

"Mr. Kern." He pitched it loud and level. "Sheriff's department. I'd just like to confirm you're home, sir."

Nothing. No shape crossing behind the curtain. No lamp coming back on, no irritated old man's voice, no shuffle of slippers. Just the held silence and the cold coming off the lake at his back and his own heart starting, now, to knock harder than his hand had.

He tried the knob. Locked. Of course locked; a careful man locked his door, that meant nothing — but Cattrell was already moving off the step and around the side of the house through grass gone stiff with the first frosts, his flashlight out and cutting across the dark siding, the dead garden, the empty driveway where no car had ever been because Kern's old truck sat in the detached garage and Cattrell had watched it go in there and not come out. The back door was up three wooden steps onto a small enclosed porch. He went up them and the boards gave under him with a sound that seemed enormous in all that quiet, and he put the beam against the glass and looked into a kitchen that was perfectly tidy and perfectly empty and perfectly dark. A kettle on the stove. A single cup upended in a drying rack. No Walter Kern. He tried the door. Locked, this one too, the deadbolt thrown, the curtain over its window drawn the same as all the others.

The lights were out. The doors were locked from the inside. The truck was in the garage. And every instinct Cattrell owned — the same instincts he'd spent four hours insulting as he sat bored half to death insisting this tired old man was nobody — told him with cold and total certainty that the house was empty. That it had been empty for minutes. That somewhere in the small slack window while he'd watched two strangers laugh at a terrier, Walter Kern had turned off his lamp and his television and his hall light, drawn every curtain, locked his doors behind him, and walked out into the dark of his own city as quietly as a man stepping off the edge of the world — gone, slipped clean, while the deputy posted to keep him in place sat thirty feet away and watched a dog want a hedge.

Cattrell stood on the cold back porch with the flashlight shaking very slightly in his hand and reached for his radio.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

"In broad daylight he doesn't move," Isla said, for what was probably the third time, and James didn't argue, because they had stopped arguing an hour ago and started planning around it. "He's never moved in daylight. Every scene Henley can time puts the staging deep in the night — Hendricks past eleven, the others later. Whatever he is, he's a man of the dark. He needs the buildings empty and black and he needs hours, because the work takes hours." She had the photographs of Kern's hand-drawn maps spread across the conference table, the Gunderson schematic on top, the dense schoolroom hand crawling along the margins. Plate finishing line, north bay. Annealing furnace cold but intact. Crane gantry unsafe, do not transit. "So we go tomorrow. We're set up at Gunderson before dark and we sit on the finishing line and wait for him to come finish it."

"We sit on a building the structural engineers won't certify a man to stand in," James said, but it was assent, not refusal; he was already pulling the facility plans up on the laptop. "Three bays down. A gantry his own notebook says won't hold. If we're in there in the dark, Isla, we're in there with the same hazards he is, and we don't know them the way he knows them."

"Then we learn them before dark." She put her finger on the north bay. "We walk it in the light, we mark the floor we can trust, and we're in position and quiet before the sun's off the lake. He comes to the finishing line because the finishing line is the last stage, and the fourth man is the one he finishes the process with. We know where the altar is. For once we don't have to find him. We just have to be there when he—"

Her phone rang.

She saw the caller and something in her went still before she'd consciously read it, the way the body knows a stair is missing before the mind does. Cattrell. The deputy on Kern's street. There was no version of that call at ten o'clock at night that was good news, and she answered it already standing, already reaching for her jacket off the back of the chair.

"Rivers."

She listened. James watched her face and she watched him read what was on it, and she did not have to say a word; he was up and pulling his coat on before she'd ended the call, the rib forgotten, keys already in his hand.

"How long," she said into the phone, and then, "No. No, that's — listen to me, that's not on you. You did everything right. You stay on that house and you do not go in alone. Backup's coming to you." She was moving for the door. "Lights, doors, the truck. Got it. I've got to make a call." She killed it.

"Kern's gone," James said. Not a question.

"Curtains, lights, doors locked from inside, truck still in the garage. He walked out the back while Cattrell's eyes were off the house for five minutes." She was already scrolling, already dialing, the cold thing climbing her spine hand over hand. "He waited out the day. Long enough for everybody to stand down and exhale and decide the car on his street meant he was contained, and then he picked his five minutes and he was gone. Patient. God, he's patient." The line connected and started to ring, and she pressed it hard to her ear. "I'm calling Mack."

"You think he doubles back for—"

"I don't know what I think. I think I want to hear her voice." It rang twice, three times, and Isla's chest did the thing it had learned to do in the bad seconds of the bad cases, the slow clench — and then the line picked up and Teresa Mack's voice came through guarded and awake and entirely, blessedly alive.

"Agent Rivers?"

"Teresa." Isla closed her eyes one second against the relief. "Are you home? Is the car still on your street?"

"It's right out front. I can see it from the window." A beat, the fear coming up under it. "Why. What's happened. You don't call at ten at night to ask about the—"

"I need you to stay inside, keep the doors locked, and I need the officer in that car to come up onto your porch and stay there. Can you do that for me?" She was already gesturing at James — call the unit on Mack's street, get him on the door — and James was already on his own phone doing it. "You're not in any danger I know of. I'm being careful. Walter Kern is no longer at his home and I want everyone I've been worried about accounted for. You're the first call I made."

And it was while she was saying that — you're the first call I made, you're the one I was worried about — standing in the conference room with the maps spread under the cold fluorescent light and Teresa Mack's frightened breathing in her ear, that the thing finally turned over in Isla's head and showed her its other face.

She had been worried about Teresa Mack from the first parking lot. She had carried it cold and heavy since the beginning, the wrongness of it: that a man had stood across two lots in the dark and watched the high priestess of the saving, the woman who'd fought three years to keep the iron standing, and that by every line of grammar Isla had written on the whiteboard there was no reason on earth for the killer to want Teresa Mack. She'd thought it in those words on Teresa's porch and filed it as a contradiction, a thing that didn't fit, the rule about to change under her.

It hadn't been a contradiction. She'd had it upside down the entire time.

He hadn't watched Teresa Mack because she was a target. He'd watched her because she wasn't. He had let himself be seen — twice, unhurried, dissolving the instant she looked, a man who could vanish out of his own locked house in five minutes letting a frightened woman get a long careful look at his silhouette across a parking lot — because Teresa Mack was the one person in this story he did not intend to harm, and some part of him, the part that kept the watch, the part that grieved the desecration, had wanted her, of all people, to see him. Not as a threat. As a kindred thing. As the only other person in the city who loved the buildings the way he loved them, who'd given years to keeping them standing while everyone else voted them into the ground. He'd stood across the dark and watched the one human being he thought might understand him, the way you stand at the edge of a thing you can't have, and then he'd walked away.

He sees her as an ally. The cold finger settled on the back of Isla's neck and stayed. He'd never been hunting Teresa Mack. He'd been — almost — courting her notice, and Isla had spent hours burning a protective detail on a woman who had been, in the killer's own grammar, on his side the whole time.

"Teresa," Isla said, and heard her own voice change, go careful and quick the way it went when a thing was rearranging itself live, "I need you to think clearly for me. The fight over the plants. Who's your opposition? Who's pushing hardest to tear them down — the loudest voice on the other side, the one you've gone up against the most?"

A small silence, the question landing somewhere Teresa hadn't expected. "That's — Diane Hooper. Councilwoman Hooper. She's led the demolition side from the start. She's the one who buried our funding in the budget, and she'll have it killed at committee — line item, no museum, no nothing." Bitterness, even now, even afraid. "We've fought across that chamber for three years. If you want the person who most wants those buildings gone, it's Diane Hooper, and it isn't close."

"Stay inside. Officer's coming to your door. I'll call you back." Isla hung up and was already dialing again, her thumb finding the office number. "James. Hooper. Diane Hooper, councilwoman, the anti-preservation side — she's the one he'd want. She's an apostate by everything we've built. She wants the iron in the ground." The line began to ring. "Nobody put a car on her, did they. She took the knock on the door and the speech about varying her routine and that was all we ever gave her—"

A young man's voice answered, an aide's voice, smooth and a little too quick. Councilwoman Hooper's office. Isla identified herself and asked for Hooper, and there was a pause that lasted a half-second too long.

"She's — she stepped out, I'm sorry, she's out to lunch." The aide seemed to hear it the same instant Isla did, and faltered. "I mean — she's not at her desk right now. Can I take a—"

"It's ten o'clock at night," Isla said. "Where is she?"

"I — she said she was running out. I assumed—" The smoothness was gone now, the kid's voice climbing. "Her coat's gone. Her car's still in the lot, though, I can see it from the — that's strange, actually, her car's still — should I—"

"Don't move. Lock the office, call building security, and stay where there are people." Isla was already snapping her fingers at James for the keys, already moving for the door, the maps left spread and glowing on the table behind her. She killed the office line and tried Hooper's cell, and it rang and rang into the flat nothing of a phone going to voicemail in a place where no one could reach it. She tried again walking. Again in the stairwell. Diane Hooper, this is the office of — the recorded voice, the dead end.

Her car was still in the lot. Her coat was gone. She had walked out of city hall into the dark some time tonight and not driven anywhere, and a man who could empty himself out of a locked house in five minutes was loose in the same city with one stage of his process left to finish and the one true apostate on the council unaccounted for.

"Gunderson," Isla said, hitting the cold air of the lot at a run, James a stride behind her with the keys. "He's not waiting for tomorrow's dark, James, he's already in tonight's — he's been in it for hours. He gave Cattrell the slip before ten and Hooper walked out before that. He's got her and he's taking her to the finishing line." She wrenched the passenger door open. "Drive. I'll call it in on the way."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

James drove the way he did everything, without drama and without mercy, the big sedan eating the dark length of the shore road past the place where the streetlights gave up, and the city's last buildings fell away into the black industrial nothing of the far east edge. Isla had the phone against her ear and her voice flat and fast, feeding it to the dispatcher in the clipped grammar of a thing that could not afford to be misunderstood: federal agents en route to Gunderson Ironworks, possible abduction in progress, request all available units and tactical, subject armed and known to be dangerous, do not approach the interior without — and then she said the rest of it to James instead of the radio, because the rest of it was an argument she was going to win whether dispatch liked it or not.

"We're not waiting on the stack." She said it before he could. "Backup's twenty minutes out at best and tac is longer, and you know it as well as I do — they've got to muster, they've got to roll, they've got to stage outside a building three bays collapsed that nobody'll let them breach until an engineer signs off, and by the time all that happens it's morning and we're pulling a fourth body off the finishing line." The lake opened on their left, vast and lightless and patient at the bottom of everything, and she did not look at it. "If Hooper's alive, she's alive right now, and right now is the only window there is. The work takes him hours. If we're early enough into the hours, she's still breathing. We go in. You and me."

James's jaw worked once in the dashboard light, the cop's correct caution running its whole course through him in the space of a quarter mile, and then coming out the far side where it always came out with her, because he'd long since learned that the place she went on the bad nights turned out, more often than not, to be right.

"We go in slow and we go in together," he said. "No splitting up until we've got the lay of it. I gave six months to underestimating one of these men in the dark, and I'm not doing it twice." He took the last turn, the headlights swinging across a chain-link gate hanging open on a broken hasp, a faded sign — GUNDERSON IRONWORKS, NO TRESPASSING, the rest of it rusted illegible — and the building beyond came up out of the dark like a thing that had been waiting a hundred years to be looked at. "There. God, look at the size of it."

It was the size of a cathedral and then more than that — the oldest of the dead plants and the biggest and by a mile the worst gone, looming against the marginally-less-black sky in a long jagged silhouette of fallen roofline and standing stacks, three bays down so that whole sections of it stood open to the night, the rest a deeper darkness within the dark. James killed the headlights twenty yards out, and they coasted the last of it and stepped into a cold that had teeth, the lake-cold, the mineral smell of the whole east end concentrated here at its dead heart.

They went in through a man-door beside the great rolling bay doors, and the building swallowed them whole.

It was vast in a way the eye couldn't hold. Isla's flashlight, and James's a few feet to her right, cut narrow channels through a darkness that drank the beams and gave nothing back — and what they found in the channels was machinery, towering and rusted, the long bones of the finishing line marching away into a black the lights could not reach the end of. Annealing furnaces the size of houses. The skeletal reach of crane gantries overhead, the ones the notebook said would not hold, hanging in the dark like the ribs of something dead and enormous. Catwalks. Coiling drums gone to rust the color of dried blood. Everywhere the groan of metal — the building settling in the cold, the long slow complaint of a structure giving itself up by inches, a creak high in the gantries and an answering tick deep in the line, so that the whole place seemed to breathe and shift around them, alive the way only very large dead things were alive.

The cold finger settled on the back of Isla's neck and this time it did not leave.

They moved along what the maps called the main aisle, slow, the two beams sweeping in coordination, and a hundred feet in they came to the place where the line forked and a fallen roof bay had brought down a curtain of debris across the right-hand path, and James stopped.

"It splits here." He kept his voice low; in all that vaulted black even a low voice carried. "Finishing line runs north — that's the altar, that's where he takes her. But there's a whole upper floor the notebook had as intact, the cut-to-length and the shear floor, and if he's not at the furnaces he's up there." He looked at her, and she watched him weigh it against the thing he'd said in the car, and watched him lose the weighing to the same arithmetic she'd already done — that the building was too big, that every minute they spent clearing it shoulder to shoulder was a minute of Diane Hooper's window closing.

"Two minutes," Isla said. "We cover twice the ground in half the time. You take the upper floor; I take the line north to the furnaces. Anything — anything at all — you key the radio twice, and you do not engage him alone. Twice on the radio and you wait for me. Promise me that, James."

"Twice and I wait." He didn't like it. He said it anyway, and reached out in the dark and put his hand once, briefly, hard, against her shoulder — the calloused palm, the whole of the thing they did not say out loud — and then he was gone, his beam swinging away to the right and climbing a stair, the light shrinking until it was only a moving smear in the enormous black, and then nothing.

Isla went north, alone, into the line.

She moved the way the job had taught her to move, low and quiet, the flashlight held out and away from her body so that if a thing came at the light it would not come at her, the beam cutting its narrow channel through machinery that rose and rose on either side until she was walking the floor of a metal canyon. Her own breath. The groan of the gantries. The tick and settle of the line. Somewhere far off and high up the wind found a gap in the fallen roof and made a low hollow note of it, a sound almost like a voice, almost like water moving under ice in a place where there was no ice at all, and she made herself not hear it as anything but wind, because she knew exactly what that sound did to her and she could not afford what it did.

The annealing furnaces came up out of the dark ahead, their great cold throats open and black, and she swept the light across them one by one — the altar, the place the maps said, the last stage where the raw thing becomes the thing it was always going to be — and she opened her mouth in all that breathing dark and made herself call out, because if Diane Hooper was alive and conscious and able to make a sound, a sound was the only thread Isla had to find her by before the building's groan swallowed everything.

"Diane Hooper!" Her voice went out into the canyon of iron and came back thinned and strange. "FBI! Diane, if you can hear me, make any sound you can!"

The wind answered in the gantries. The metal settled and ticked. And from somewhere ahead of her — deep in the line, past the furthest reach of her light, low and deliberate and unhurried — came a sound that was not the building.

A scrape. The kind metal made when something pressed against it. Or the kind a foot made, shifting its weight, in a place where a patient man had all the time in the world.

Isla stopped, and steadied the light, and went toward it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The voices reached Walter Kern the way water reaches a man standing in a dry dock — slow, then all at once, finding the low places first.

He had been crouched at the head of the finishing line for the better part of an hour, working by the small cold cone of a battery lantern turned down to almost nothing, and in all that time he had heard nothing but the building. The building he could read the way other men read faces. The settle and tick of the great cooled beds. The long complaint high in the gantries where the wind worked at the place the roof had gone. The deep occasional groan, far down the line, that was only the cold tightening its grip on iron that had stood since before his father was born. He had spent twenty-seven years inside sounds like these. They did not startle him. They were the breathing of the only thing he had ever loved without reservation, and he moved through them the way a man moves through his own house in the dark, knowing where the floor dipped, knowing which step would give.

Then, threaded under the wind, the other thing. A voice. And then — he went very still, the way the animal in a man goes still before the man himself has finished hearing — a second voice, lower, answering. Two of them. Far down the main aisle, past the fork where the fallen bay had brought the roof across the right-hand path. Not kids; kids came loud and left fast and never came this far into a building this gone. Not the rough sleepers, who kept to the office block and the near bays and would no more walk the line in the dark than they would walk into the lake. These were careful voices, spaced, the cadence of people clearing ground.

The agents, then. The ones from the table.

He had wondered if they would find him here. He had decided, sitting in his locked dark house with the federal car idling on his street, that it did not finally matter if they did. He had been seen at Erlandson. He had been seen at the Superior works. He had signed his name three times to the petition in a hand any half-awake clerk could match, and he had let the woman with the steady amber eyes look at him across a table for two hours, and he had felt, the whole time, the particular attention of a person who was not going to stop. He had known then that the table was the beginning of the end of his time, and he had not been afraid of it, exactly. He had only been sorry. There was so little left undone, and there would have been so much more, if the city had been a city that deserved him.

Walter Kern set the lantern down on the cold steel and looked at his work.

It was not finished. That was the whole of the trouble, sitting plain in the small light. The woman lay where he had laid her, on the long flat bed of the leveling table at the head of the line, bound at the wrists and ankles with the good marine line he favored, a folded square of canvas under her head because there was no reason for unkindness. She had gone under easily and was only now beginning to surface — he could hear it in the change of her breathing, and he knew almost to the minute how long he had, because that was a thing the hands learned and never forgot. She was placed, but she was not composed. The hands were wrong. The angle of the head against the canvas was wrong.

Diane Hooper. Councilwoman. The loudest voice on the side of the ground. The one who had buried the funding in the budget, who would have killed it at committee, line item, no museum, no nothing, who had stood up in the bright chamber under the bright lights and said the word eyesore about a cathedral, said the word liability, said the words public safety hazard about the most honest building in the county. He had sat in the back of that chamber more than once and listened to her do it. He had watched her file out afterward into her warm car and her warm life, and he had understood, with the calm that had been on him for years now, that she was not a person at all in the way that mattered. She was an obstacle. A thing standing between the iron and what the iron was owed. And the line — the finishing line, the last stage, where the raw and the wrong and the soft were made into what they were always meant to be — the line knew what to do with obstacles. The line had always known. That was the mercy of it that no one understood. He was not destroying these people. He was completing them. The forge made everything stronger. Even the men. Even the woman who hated him without knowing he existed. He was giving her the only dignity left in the whole rotten compromised city: the dignity of being made into something hard and finished and true.

And it was not done. And they were here.

He should run. He knew it the way he knew the building. There was the loading dock at the north end, past the furthest furnace, and the great dock door the cold had frozen shut years ago, but there was the smaller man-door beside it that he had worked loose himself on an earlier night with a bar and a can of oil, and beyond it the broken ground and the fence with the hole and the dark of the whole east end, where a man who knew it could walk out of the world. He had the time. The agents were a hundred yards off and clearing slow, and there were two of them and one cathedral of dark, and he had years of these floors in his feet, and they had a flashlight and a map. He could be gone before they reached the fork. He could be a shape in the broken yard and then nothing, the way he had been nothing on his own back porch while the deputy watched the front. He had done it before. He was good at it. It was, he thought without vanity, the thing he was second-best at in all the world.

But the work was not finished.

The thought of leaving it — of walking out the loosened door and leaving Diane Hooper half-placed on the cold leveling bed with her hands wrong and her head at the wrong angle, leaving her raw, leaving the last stage unworked, leaving the line hungry and the offering incomplete — was not a thing he could think and stay standing. It came up in him as something close to physical, a pressure behind the sternum, a wrongness in the body like a tooth the tongue cannot leave alone. He had never in his life left a thing half-made. He had worked the iron for twenty-seven years and not once sent a piece on unfinished, and the careless ones, the clock-watchers, he had despised with a purity he had never managed to feel about anything else. To leave now would be to become one of them. To leave now would be to say that the agents mattered more than the work, that his own thin remaining freedom mattered more than what was owed, and that was a lie, and he did not tell lies, not even to himself, not even at the end.

He had time. That was the thing the careful part of him offered up, and the rest of him seized on it gratefully. The work did not take as long as it looked. The placing was the slow part, and the placing was nearly done. The composition wanted only the hands and the head and the small last truths, and then it would be finished and he would be finished, and they could come and find him standing over it and it would not matter, because it would be done, because it would be true, because no badge and no flashlight and no woman with steady amber eyes could ever again make it not-done once it was done. They could take the rest of his nights. He had stopped counting them as his. They could not take this one if he was quick.

So Walter Kern did not run.

He turned the lantern down to nothing, so that the small cone went out and the dark came in and took everything, and the dark did not frighten him, because he had never needed the light; the light had only been a kindness to the work, and the work could be finished by feel. He let his eyes give up on seeing and let his hands take over the remembering. And then he moved — quickly, purposefully, without haste, because haste was waste and waste was the sin he hated — a big patient man moving through a black cathedral of iron he had walked for years, knowing where the floor dipped, knowing which step would give, going back to the cold bed and the unfinished woman and the long last necessary work, while a hundred yards down the line two flashlights cut their narrow channels through the dark and came on.

He had time. He was almost sure he had time.

He bent to his work.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

James had cleared the upper floor and found nothing, and was coming down the iron stair at its north end to rejoin the main line when he heard it — not the wind, not the building, but the small unmistakable human sound of someone trying to make a sound through a gag and failing. A muffled animal labor of breath, off to his left, behind a half-collapsed partition wall the maps had marked as a side room. A foreman's office once, or a tool crib.

He keyed the radio twice and did not wait the way he'd promised, because the sound was right there and a person making it was a person still alive, and he went around the partition with his light up and his weapon up behind it and found Diane Hooper.

Not on the line. On the floor of the crib, in the corner — and for one cold disorienting second James's whole understanding of the night tilted, because they had built the case on the finishing line, on the altar, on the furnaces at the north end, and here the woman was shoved into a tool crib like an afterthought. Like something set aside. Then he understood, and the understanding was worse: set aside was exactly the word. Kern had brought her here, and Kern had begun, and Kern had stopped — interrupted, set her down out of the way, meaning to come back. Which meant Kern knew they were in the building. Which meant Kern was close.

But Diane Hooper was alive.

She was bound at the wrists and ankles with marine line, a strip of canvas tied across her mouth, and she was conscious — that was the labor he'd heard, her trying to warn him, her eyes huge and wet above the gag, her whole body shuddering in long uncontrolled waves that James knew on sight, because he was a Duluth man and had pulled people off the ice and out of the November lake and knew cold when he saw it riding a body. Hypothermic. She had been in the unheated dark of the dead plant in a councilwoman's good wool coat that was nowhere near enough, and she was shaking with it and terrified beyond shaking, and when his light found her face she flinched from it and then, recognizing a living man, a face, help, made a sound that broke something in him.

"FBI. Diane. I've got you." He went down on one knee, the weapon holstered now because his hands were the thing she needed, and got the canvas off her mouth first, working the knot with his big calloused fingers, and the second it came free she did not scream — she was past screaming — she said, in a cracked exhausted whisper, the only thing that mattered.

"He's here. He's still — he went out, he's coming back, he's —"

"I know." James had the radio at his mouth. "Isla. I've got Hooper. Side room at the north end, foot of the stair — she's alive, she's hypothermic but she's conscious, and Kern's in the building and close. Repeat, he's in the building. He set her aside and he's coming back. Watch your—"

He had her wrists half-freed, the marine line stubborn and salt-stiff under his fingers, his head down over the knot and his light propped on the floor throwing everything into long leaping shadow, and that was the posture he was in — bent, both hands occupied, his back to the gap in the partition — when Diane Hooper's ruined eyes went past his shoulder and flared, and her whisper climbed into something with no words in it at all, and James understood in the half-second he had that he had broken the only promise that mattered.

He started to turn.

He did not finish the motion. The blow came out of the black behind him and took him across the back of the skull and the shoulder — not the killing line of it, but enough — a length of pipe swung by a big man with a lifetime of iron in his arms, and the floor came up and hit James across the ribs, the bad ones from the ice, six months mended and still some nights aware of themselves, and the light spun away across the concrete and the world went to white sparks and ringing.

He did not pass out. He had been hit before. He knew the difference between the blow that ends a man and the blow that only tries, and he made himself move through the ringing, made himself roll, and the second blow came down where his head had been and rang off the concrete with a sound like a bell in a drowned church, and then James was up — not all the way, a wrestler's scramble — and into the man, inside the arc of the bar, the only safe place to be when a man has a length of steel and the room to swing it.

They went into the dark together.

It was not a fight that had any shape to it. It was crashing and grappling in a black room full of fallen iron, a big old man far stronger than he had any business being and a younger one with a rib that screamed every time he loaded it, the two of them slamming into the partition and off a steel cabinet that came down in an avalanche of rusted tools, the pipe between them, James with both hands on it and Kern's grip on it like something welded, the old man breathing in great patient bellows and saying nothing, nothing at all, which was the worst of it — the silence of him, the way he fought like a man finishing a chore. James got a knee up and drove it and heard the breath go out of the old man and felt the grip loosen and not break, and somewhere underneath them Diane Hooper was crying out into the dark, words now, here, over here, throwing her voice down the line like a rope to a drowning man.

"Isla!" James got it out between his teeth, all the air he had, slammed back against the cabinet, the pipe grinding across his chest. "North end — foot of the stair — he's on me, he's—"

The bar tore loose. Kern had it. James saw it come up in the leaping half-light of the fallen flashlight, the silhouette of the big man rearing back, patient even in this, and James did the only thing left, which was to throw himself sideways and take the woman with him, rolling his body between Diane Hooper and the swing, and the bar came down and missed and rang off the floor a third time — and from somewhere down the great black aisle of the line, closing fast, came the sound of running. Boots on concrete at a flat sprint, a beam swinging wild across the towering machinery, Isla's voice flung ahead of her into the dark, calling his name, calling it like a thing she would not let the building have.

James got his hand on the fallen flashlight and swung the beam up into the old man's face, and Walter Kern flinched from the light — the first human thing he'd done, the only crack in him — and turned, and was gone through the gap in the partition into the deeper dark of the line, the pipe still in his hand, a shape dissolving into the black the way he'd dissolved off his own back porch, the way he'd dissolved across two parking lots, here and then not. And James was left on the cold floor with his ribs on fire and his head ringing and a hypothermic woman shaking against him, shouting after the running light the thing Isla needed most to hear before she reached him.

"He went for the dock — Isla, he's got the bar — do not lose him in the—"

And then her light found the gap, and found him, and found Diane Hooper, and Isla came through the partition at a dead run.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

She had heard the whole of it as she ran — the radio, the crash and ring of metal, James's voice going from words to grunts to words again, the woman crying out — and she had run through the labyrinth of the line with the part of her mind that was no use in a fight screaming the thing it always screamed, the thing it had screamed across the ice six months ago and across a Miami parking lot four years before that. Not him. Not this one. Not while I'm standing right here. She came through the gap with her light up and her weapon up and her whole body braced for the worst version, and got instead the second-worst, which her body recognized as something close to mercy.

James was down but James was moving. He was on the floor against a fallen cabinet with one arm around a shuddering woman in a wool coat, and his face in her light was gray and cut and furious and entirely, blessedly awake, and he was already pointing — not at himself, not at his own hurt, but past her, north, into the dark Kern had gone.

"I'm all right." He said it before she could ask, because he knew exactly what was in her face and exactly what it would cost them if she stopped. "Rib and the head. I've had worse on a good day — Isla, Hooper's hypothermic but she's alive, she's the priority, she needs—" He stopped himself, because that was the trap and they both saw it, the choice the night was trying to make her make: stay and save the woman and let the man walk out into the world, or go after the man and leave the partner she — leave James — bleeding on a cold floor with a freezing woman in his arms.

It was not, in the end, a choice at all, because James was conscious and breathing and holding her, and a conscious man could keep a woman alive for the few minutes backup needed; and a man like Kern, once out the loosened door into the dark of the east end, would be a shape and then nothing. Gone. Free. Waiting somewhere to begin again.

She put her hand flat against the side of James's face for exactly one second — four fingers and a smooth absence against the cut and the cold of him — and said, "Backup's two minutes out, I called it in from the road. Keep her talking, keep her warm, do not move." His hand came up and caught her wrist once, hard, the whole of the thing they did not say, and then she let him go and went after Walter Kern alone.

North, into the line.

He had the building and she did not. She knew it within twenty strides and it frightened her more than the dark did. He moved through the machinery ahead of her not as a man fleeing but as a man walking a path worn smooth by his own feet — she would catch the scrape and shift of him off to one side and swing her light and find nothing, only the towering rusted shapes of the finishing line, the annealing furnaces coming up like houses, the coiling drums, the catwalks overhead, and then the sound of him would be somewhere else, ahead, lower, slipping between two pieces of machinery through a gap she could not see and would not have known was there. He knew every corner. He knew which catwalk would bear weight and which would not, which gap a body could fit and which only looked it, where the floor dropped a foot without warning into a casting pit. She nearly went into one and caught herself on the cold lip of a furnace, her light skidding down into a black square her beam could not find the bottom of, and somewhere ahead in the dark she heard the big patient breathing pause — as if he had stopped to see whether the pit had taken her — and then move on, unhurried, when it had not.

He nearly got away. She would tell it that way afterward and it would be the plain truth. He was thirty feet ahead and then forty, and then she lost him entirely for the length of a held breath, the line gone silent around her, only the wind in the gantries and her own heart, and she stood in the dark of a cathedral of iron and understood that she was about to lose him into the night the way the city had lost him off his own porch.

And then the building gave him to her.

Because she knew one thing he had perhaps forgotten she might know. She had stood over the maps. She had read his own schoolroom hand crawling along the margins of the Gunderson schematic — plate finishing line, north bay, annealing furnace cold but intact — and at the very top of the north end, where the line ended because the iron's journey ended, the maps had marked the loading dock, the place the finished thing went out into the world. The dock had one great rolling door, and James had said it and Kern's own notebook had said it: the cold had frozen that door shut years ago. There was a smaller door beside it. Kern had loosened it himself, she would learn later, on an earlier night, with a bar and a can of oil. Isla did not know that yet and did not need to, because she was closer to it than he was — she had cut across, blind and lucky and right, between the last two furnaces while he ran the long honest length of the line — and she came out into the open bay of the loading dock a half-second ahead of him and put herself between Walter Kern and the only way out.

For a moment they simply stood there in the dark.

She had her light on him and held it low, not in his eyes, because a man you have cornered fights worse when he is blinded, and she wanted to talk before she wanted to fight. He stood ten feet from her, big and gray and breathing hard, the length of pipe loose in one hand, his back to the frozen dock door and the man-door beside it that she did not yet know was loose. His face in the low spill of her light was not the face of a man at the end of anything. It was calm. It was almost kind. It was the face from across the table, the grieving face she had believed and had been right to believe, and looking at it she understood that everything she and James had reasoned out at two in the morning over a cold pot of coffee had been exactly, precisely true.

"You don't understand what I was doing." His voice was low and steady and held no fear in it at all, only a kind of sorrow, a teacher disappointed in a bright student. "None of you do. The woman in there." A small movement of the head, back down the line, toward the side room and the hypothermic councilwoman and the bleeding man holding her. "She called it an eyesore. She stood up in the light and called this—" the pipe lifted an inch, took in the whole black cathedral, the furnaces, the gantries, the patient enormous bones of the thing "—a liability. A hazard. She was going to put it in the ground. Her and the rest of them. They were all going to put it in the ground, the most honest thing this county ever made, and pour a parking lot over it." His breath went in and out, the bellows of him. "They were obstacles. That's all. Obstacles to something sacred. You think I hate them. I don't hate them. I never hated a single one." The sorrow in his voice was real; that was the unbearable thing; it was entirely real. "The forge makes everything stronger. That's the whole truth of it, the truth nobody will let me say. It makes everything stronger, Agent Rivers. Even the people who pass through it. I was going to make her into something true. The only true thing she would ever be. And you — all of you — you call that the crime."

Isla kept her voice level, kept it open, kept the door of him from closing, because every second he talked was a second she used. She moved as she spoke — small shifts, weight onto the balls of her feet, the angle of her body turning a few degrees so that the heavy bulk of a finishing press came up at her shoulder, cold iron at her back where nothing could reach her — her stance settling without ever looking like settling. "Tell me about the first one," she said, low, almost gentle, the way you spoke to draw a thing all the way out into the open. "Hendricks. Tell me what he was an obstacle to."

And Walter Kern opened his mouth to tell her, because more than anything in the world the man wanted to be understood, and that wanting was the crack she had been widening since the table — and then some older animal part of him read the angle of her body and the cold press at her back and understood, a half-second too late, that she had not been listening at all, that she had been positioning. The sorrow went out of his face, and the patience went out of it, and he came at her with the pipe.

He was strong. God, he was strong. The first swing would have ended it if it had landed, but she had set herself for exactly this and went inside it, the way James had gone inside it, into the dead space where the swing had no power, and took the blow across her forearm instead of her skull and felt the bone sing with it and did not let go of him. It was vicious and desperate and had no more shape than James's fight had had, two people slamming among the rusted machinery in a cone of light from a flashlight dropped and rolling. She got a hand on the pipe and could not tear it loose. She drove her shoulder into his sternum and bounced off him like off a wall, took a knee that buckled her, came up under his arm and felt the pipe rake down her back. He was bigger and stronger, and on a long enough clock he would win, and she knew it — and so she did not give him the long clock. She stopped trying to take the pipe. She gave it to him instead, let her grip go suddenly slack so that his own great strength, hauling against resistance that vanished, pitched him forward off his balance, and in the half-step where his weight ran ahead of his feet she pivoted on the cold concrete and drove the heel of her hand up under his jaw and put every pound she had behind her shoulder and ran him, stumbling, the last six feet into the side of the finishing press.

He hit the iron with his whole length and the breath went out of him in a single great gust, and the pipe rang loose across the floor and rolled away into the dark, and Walter Kern went down the cold flank of the press to the concrete and stayed there, conscious but emptied, sixty-seven years old and finally, wholly finished, a man laid out on the floor of the cathedral he loved.

Isla put a knee in his back and brought his wrists together and got the cuffs on him, and her hands were shaking — they always shook, after; it was the only time they shook, the body spending all at once everything it had refused to spend during — and the steel rattled twice against itself before the ratchet caught. She knelt on him in the dark with her forearm screaming and her breath sawing in and out, and keyed the radio with a hand she had to steady against her own knee.

"Rivers. I've got Kern. North loading dock — he's down, he's cuffed, he's secure." She had to stop and breathe. The press was cold against her shoulder. Far down the line she could hear it now, finally, the backup, doors and boots and the swing of real lights coming through the enormous dark toward them. "I need medical at the side room at the north end, foot of the stair. Two patients — agent down, conscious, and the victim, hypothermic, conscious. And a transport for one in custody." Under her knee Walter Kern had begun, very quietly, to weep, and it was not for himself, she understood; it was for the work; it was for the thing left undone on the cold leveling bed. She felt the old complicated nothing settle over her where another person might have felt triumph. "We're done here," she said into the radio, and let her forehead rest one second against the cold iron of the press. "It's done."

CHAPTER THIRTY

They brought it all in, and the dead cathedral filled with the living for the first time in years.

Diane Hooper went out first, on a stretcher, wrapped in the silver crinkle of a warming blanket with a heated line running under it, an EMT walking alongside reading numbers off a meter clipped to her finger in the steady reassuring patter that meant they were numbers he liked. She was awake and crying, and she gripped Isla's wrist hard with one cold hand as they carried her past — the wrong wrist, the four-fingered one, and Isla let her hold it and did not mind the gap any more than James ever minded it — and tried to say something through the shaking that did not come out as words. "You don't have to," Isla said. "You're all right. You held on. That's the whole job and you did it." The woman nodded and let go and was carried out into the night and the waiting ambulance. A mild concussion — he had not struck her the way he had struck the men — and the early stages of hypothermia, caught well short of the dangerous line: that was what the hospital would say by morning. She would keep all her fingers and most of her composure and she would recover fully, and six weeks later, to the surprise of the entire east end, she would stand up in the bright chamber under the bright lights and vote to save the buildings. But that was later, and that was hers, and Isla only heard about it secondhand.

James would not go on a stretcher, and Isla did not make him, because some fights were not worth winning. But he let her get a shoulder under his arm and take some of his weight on the long walk down the line and out through the man-door into the cold, which was its own kind of news — the James of six months ago would have argued her off and walked it alone and paid for the pride with a week of being unable to lift his own coffee. This James leaned on her, carefully, his arm heavy across her shoulders and his breath short with the rib, and let her steer him through the dark to the open doors of the second ambulance, and submitted to the light in his eyes and the questions and the cold stethoscope with a patience she recognized, with a small private ache, as a gift to her. Cracked rib, the medic said, the same one most likely, cracked and not broken, and a concussion, mild — watch him tonight, wake him every few hours — the litany she could have recited herself. He sat on the tail of the ambulance with a blanket around his shoulders and found her hand in the dark and did not say any of the words, and neither did she, and the not-saying was, as it had been all summer, entirely full.

And then they brought Walter Kern out.

They walked him down the line between two uniformed officers, cuffed, upright, unhurried even now, and Isla stood near the great doors and watched him come. He did not look at her. He did not look at the ambulances or the lights or the gathering of people in tactical black who had arrived a little too late. At the threshold — at the line where the dark of the dead plant gave way to the lesser dark of the broken yard, the place where the finished iron had passed out into the world — he stopped.

The officers let him. There was nowhere for him to go, and something in the stillness of him asked for the moment, and they gave it.

Walter Kern turned his head and looked back, once, down the long black aisle of the finishing line — at the furnaces the size of houses, at the gantries hanging in the dark like the ribs of something enormous and dead, at the bones of the only thing he had ever loved without reservation, the cathedral of the iron going away into a black his eyes could no longer reach the end of. He looked at it the way a man looks at a thing he is leaving for the last time and knows it. And his face, in the swing and stutter of the emergency lights, was not the face of a beaten man, not the face of a man being marched to the rest of his life in a cell. It was something quieter and stranger and harder to look at. It was the face of a man saying goodbye — grave, complete, almost peaceful, the look of a priest turning at the door of a church he will not enter again — and then the officer's hand was at his elbow and the moment closed, and they walked him out across the threshold into the cold, and Walter Kern did not look back a second time.

Isla watched him go until the dark of the yard took him and the door of a transport van closed on him and the engine turned over and pulled away.

She stood in the broken doorway of the Gunderson Ironworks with her forearm aching where the bar had caught it and her hands finally still, and felt the thing she always felt at the end of one, the thing she had stopped expecting to feel anything else: the familiar complicated exhaustion of a closed case, relief and emptiness poured into the same vessel in exactly equal measure, so that one could not be told from the other. The woman was alive. James was alive. The man who had folded human beings into machinery and called it mercy was in the back of a van going to a place he would not come out of, and a city that had spent a week with three bodies in it could exhale. That was the relief, and it was real, and she let herself have it.

And under it, the other thing, the thing that came every time and that she had stopped apologizing to herself for. Because closing one never gave anything back. It only stopped the taking. Ray Hendricks was still dead, and Owen Marsh was still dead, and Gary Slattery was still dead, and Alicia Mendez, four years and two thousand miles away, was still dead, and no van pulling away into the dark had ever once returned a single one of them. You did not win these. You ended them. There was a difference, and she had learned it the hard way, and she carried it now the way she carried the absence of a finger — a thing healed clean that the body still reached for, checking, in the quiet, whether the loss were still true.

Behind her, in the lesser dark, James said her name. Just that. Just her name, low, from the tail of the ambulance, an old man's silver blanket around the shoulders of a man who was not old, his father's watch on his wrist and his hand held out toward her across the cold air.

Isla turned her back on the great black mouth of the building, and on the long aisle of the iron going away into the dark, and on the empty leveling bed at the head of the line where a thing had almost been finished and would now never be finished at all. She went to him. She sat down on the cold steel beside him and let him put the half of the blanket she would take around her shoulders, and they sat together in the swing of the red and blue light while the engineers argued at the doors about whether anyone should be allowed back inside, and she let her four-fingered hand rest over his, and neither of them said any words.

EPILOGUE

The cold came early that year. By the end of September the evenings had a blade in them, and the light went off the lake by seven, and Isla had taken to walking down to the water after.

She did not call it a habit. A habit was a thing you decided. This was only her feet carrying her down the slope from the apartment the way they carried her to the coffee maker in the morning, before the deciding part of her had a vote. Down past the dark storefronts, down the worn stairs to the shore, out onto the cold shingle where the lake came up gray and enormous and lay against the land breathing its long breath in and out, the way it had on the night she stood on its ice, the way it had on every night before her and would on every night after.

She told herself it was the air. There was something in the open water that scoured a person clean, that took the day's wreckage off you and gave nothing back, and after a case a person needed that. After Kern, with the three folded men and the long black aisle of the iron and the look on his face at the threshold like a priest leaving a church — after that, a person was owed a little scouring. So she stood with her hands in her pockets and her collar half up and let the wind work on her, and watched the water go dark, and told herself she was not looking for anything.

But she was doing the math. She was always, now, somewhere in the back of her, doing the math.

It went like this, and she could not make it stop going like this. Thirty pounds of anchor and a length of chain. Cold water just above freezing, a man of sixty-five in winter clothes that would have taken the water in and turned to lead. The undertow off the point that the old hands all warned about. The depth out past the ice, which was not a depth a person came back from. She had felt the chain go taut. She had stood on that ice with her thumb pulled from its socket and her ankles free and watched the black water close over the place where Robert Brune had been, and she had felt, through the soles of her boots, through the whole frozen skin of the world, the lake take him instead of her. That was not a thing she had reasoned her way to. That was a thing she had felt, the way you feel a door close in another room.

And the math always came out the same. No man survived that. No body went down into that and found its way back up. The lake kept what it took. It had kept Gerald Pichette eleven years; it had kept, she now believed, more men than her task force would ever name; and it had kept Brune, who of all of them belonged to it most, who had spent forty years feeding it and had, in the end, become the meal. He was down there in the dark with the others. The lake had its Shipwrecker. The accounts were closed.

She knew that. She had always known that. Every rational thing in her, the part trained over two decades to read a scene and trust the reading, knew that Robert Brune was at the bottom of Lake Superior and would not be coming up.

Her thumb found the smooth place where her finger used to be. She let it, once, the way she always let it once, because the reaching was older than she was and there was no use fighting a thing that lived below the deciding part. The stub was healed clean. The loss was still true. She checked, and it was still true, and something in her settled the way it settled every time — badly, temporarily, enough.

Out past the last gray light the water moved, dark on dark, swelling and falling, patient, giving nothing up. She watched it a while longer. She did not say his name. She had stopped saying his name down here, because saying it felt too much like calling, and a person did not want to find out what answered.

The wind came harder off the water and found the gap at her throat. James would have texted by now. Home? He always asked it like a question and meant it as one, leaving her the room to say not yet, and lately she had been taking less of that room, which was its own quiet kind of news.

Isla turned up her collar against the wind. She turned her back on the lake — on the dark water and the math and the door closed in the other room — and walked up the stairs and into the lit streets, toward the warm rooms where the living were, and she did not look back, and behind her the lake went on breathing in the cold, indifferent, keeping what it had, the way it always had and always would.

NOW AVAILABLE!

OUTSIDE THE NIGHT

(An Isla Rivers FBI Suspense Thriller—Book Fourteen)

“A masterpiece of thriller and mystery.”

—Books and Movie Reviews, Roberto Mattos (re Once Gone)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

When Duluth's artists are found dead in their own studios — their final masterpieces chillingly completed by someone else's hand — FBI Agent Isla Rivers uncovers a killer who doesn't just take lives, they steal legacies. Isla must think like an artist to catch someone who believes murder is the ultimate collaboration.

OUTSIDE THE NIGHT is the fourteenth book in a long-anticipated new series by #1 bestseller and USA Today bestselling author Blake Pierce, whose bestseller Once Gone (a free download) has received over 7,000 five star ratings and reviews. The series begins with OUTSIDE THE ROOM (book #1).

The Isla Rivers series is a riveting mystery series brimming with suspenseful cat-and-mouse dynamics and unexpected turns that will send shivers down your spine. Its enthralling female lead will capture your affections and keep you engrossed in the pages long after you turn out the lights. Fans of Lisa Regan, Lee Child, and Mary Burton are sure to fall in love.

Future books in the series are also available!

“An edge of your seat thriller in a new series that keeps you turning pages! ...So many twists, turns and red herrings… I can't wait to see what happens next.”

—Reader review (Her Last Wish)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“A strong, complex story about two FBI agents trying to stop a serial killer. If you want an author to capture your attention and have you guessing, yet trying to put the pieces together, Pierce is your author!”

—Reader review (Her Last Wish)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“A typical Blake Pierce twisting, turning, roller coaster ride suspense thriller. Will have you turning the pages to the last sentence of the last chapter!!!”

—Reader review (City of Prey)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“Right from the start we have an unusual protagonist that I haven't seen done in this genre before. The action is nonstop… A very atmospheric novel that will keep you turning pages well into the wee hours.”

—Reader review (City of Prey)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“Everything that I look for in a book… a great plot, interesting characters, and grabs your interest right away. The book moves along at a breakneck pace and stays that way until the end. Now on go I to book two!”

—Reader review (Girl, Alone)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“Exciting, heart pounding, edge of your seat book… a must read for mystery and suspense readers!”

—Reader review (Girl, Alone)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

OUTSIDE THE NIGHT

(An Isla Rivers FBI Suspense Thriller—Book Fourteen)

Blake Pierce

USA Today and #1 bestselling author Blake Pierce is the author of numerous series in the mystery and thriller genres, spanning 10 years of work, including the Jessie Hunt, Ella Dark, Rylie Page, Faith Bold and Rachel Gift series. Blake's most recent latest releases are the Alison Payne, Isla Rivers Kari Blackhorse, Kate Valentine, and Miles Sterling series.

Many of Blake’s titles are available for free. Please visit Blake’s author page to find out more.

Please visit blakepierceauthor.com to learn more, join the email list, receive free books, and stay in touch.

SERIES BY BLAKE PIERCE

MILES STERLING

KATE VALENTINE

KARI BLACKHORSE

ISLA RIVERS

ALISON PAYNE

JENNA GRAVES

THE GOVERNESS

RACHEL BLACKWOOD

SHEILA STONE

FINN WRIGHT

MORGAN CROSS

JULIETTE HART

FAITH BOLD

FIONA RED

DAISY FORTUNE

AMBER YOUNG

CAMI LARK

NICKY LYONS

CORA SHIELDS

MAY MOORE

PAIGE KING

VALERIE LAW

RACHEL GIFT

AVA GOLD

A YEAR IN EUROPE

ELLA DARK

LAURA FROST

EUROPEAN VOYAGE

ADELE SHARP

THE AU PAIR

ZOE PRIME

JESSIE HUNT

CHLOE FINE

KATE WISE

THE MAKING OF RILEY PAIGE

RILEY PAIGE

MACKENZIE WHITE

AVERY BLACK

KERI LOCKE