Page 45 of Outside the Room

"You think I'm being paranoid," Isla said finally.

Sullivan paused in his movements. "I think you're overthinking this. Sometimes, the obvious answer is the right answer." His tone carried a note of disappointment. "We have a confession, Rivers. A detailed one that explains everything."

"Too detailed," Isla muttered, but Sullivan either didn't hear or chose to ignore her.

"I'm going to start processing O'Connor's arrest paperwork," he said, heading toward the door. "You should probably get some rest. It's been a long night."

The dismissal was clear, and it stung. Isla watched him leave, feeling more alone than she had since arriving in Duluth. Sullivan had been her anchor in this unfamiliar place, the one person who seemed to believe in her capabilities. Now, faced with what appeared to be a solved case, he was ready to move on while she clung to doubts that might be nothing more than trauma from her past failure.

But as she stood in O'Connor's empty office, surrounded by the detritus of his apparent guilt, Isla made a decision. She would investigate quietly, on her own time. The timing was too convenient, Thorne's death too neat. If she was wrong, if O'Connor truly was behind the murders, then her private investigation would simply confirm the official conclusion.

And if she was right—if something more complex was happening at Duluth's port—then she might be the only one willing to uncover it.

The storm raged on outside, burying secrets beneath layers of snow and ice. But somewhere in that frozen landscape lay answers that could vindicate her instincts—or destroy what remained of her career if she was wrong again.

This time, she would have to find the truth alone.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

The field office stretched before Isla like a mausoleum of abandoned ambitions. The last of her colleagues had filtered out hours ago, leaving behind the ghostly detritus of a workday that felt simultaneously eternal and rushed—coffee-stained reports scattered across desks, the persistent electronic hum of computers left running, and the acrid scent of burnt coffee from the break room's perpetually overworked machine. Outside the reinforced windows, the wind rattled the glass with increasing intensity, as if the Minnesota winter itself was demanding entry to witness her growing unease.

Isla sat motionless at her desk, cursor blinking mockingly at the end of an arrest report she'd typed and retyped three times but couldn't bring herself to submit. The words looked foreign on the screen, black text against a white background that should have represented closure, justice, and the satisfying conclusion to days of brutal investigation. Instead, they felt like lies dressed up in official Bureau formatting.

Raymond O'Connor was in holding downstairs, probably staring at the institutional green walls of his cell and contemplating how his life had imploded in the span of a single evening. Michael Thorne's confession letter lay sealed in an evidence bag in the file cabinet behind her, each carefully crafted sentence a nail in O'Connor's coffin. Kate Channing was already upstairs, no doubt polishing the press release that would announce the arrest to Duluth's anxious citizens. The "Shipping Container Killer" case was officially solved, tied up with the kind of narrative bow that politicians and administrators loved—a corrupt port official brought down by his own guilt, justice served, public confidence restored.

So why did Isla feel like they'd just arrested the wrong man?

The question gnawed at her with the persistence of a toothache, each pulse of doubt synchronized with the overhead fluorescents that flickered intermittently, casting her workspace in alternating pools of harsh light and shadow. She'd been staring at the screen for twenty minutes now, paralyzed by an instinct that screamed against everything the evidence seemed to suggest. In Miami, she'd learned to distrust her instincts after they'd led her so catastrophically astray. But sitting here, surrounded by the hollow victory of O'Connor's arrest, those same instincts were practically shouting.

Sullivan had left an hour earlier, gathering his files with the methodical satisfaction of a man whose work was done. "Sometimes the obvious answer is the right answer, Rivers," he'd said, not quite meeting her eyes as he straightened his tie and pulled on his winter coat. The words had carried an undercurrent of finality, as if her continued doubts were somehow a personal failing, an inability to accept success when it was handed to her on a bureaucratic platter.

The dismissal in his voice had stung more than Isla cared to admit. For days, they'd been developing what felt like genuine partnership—the kind of professional trust she hadn't experienced since Reggie in Miami. Sullivan's local knowledge balanced her analytical approach; his steady pragmatism grounded her tendency toward overthinking. They'd worked well together, complementing each other's strengths in a way that had made her think maybe she could rebuild her career in this frozen northern outpost.

But tonight, faced with what appeared to be a solved case, Sullivan had been eager to close the book and move on. When she'd raised her concerns about timeline inconsistencies and O'Connor's alibis, he'd looked at her the way doctors looked at hypochondriacs—patient but fundamentally dismissive. The partnership she'd thought they were building had revealed itself to be conditional, dependent on her going along with the prevailing narrative rather than challenging it.

Isla pushed back from her desk with enough force to send her chair rolling into the adjacent workstation. The collision produced a sharp bang that echoed through the empty office like a gunshot, startling her out of her brooding reverie. She needed air, needed space to think without the weight of institutional expectations pressing down on her shoulders like a physical force.

She grabbed her coat from the back of her chair, noting absently how the cheap fabric had already begun to pill after just a few days of Minnesota winter. Everything about her life in Duluth felt temporary, provisional—as if the city itself knew she didn't belong and was trying to wear her down through sheer atmospheric hostility.

Outside, snow was falling with the kind of lazy persistence that suggested it had no intention of stopping anytime soon. Each flake drifted past the streetlights like a tiny ghost, accumulating on sidewalks and parked cars with the patient determination of geological time. The storm blanketed Duluth in pristine white that made everything look clean and innocent—a lie the city told itself every winter, Isla reflected, covering its industrial scars and economic wounds beneath layers of crystalline beauty.

Her feet carried her away from the Federal Building without conscious direction, muscle memory navigating streets she was still learning while her mind churned through the case's inconsistencies. She found herself walking toward the waterfront district, where the working soul of Duluth lived and breathed beneath the tourist-friendly veneer of Canal Park. Here, the buildings were functional rather than picturesque—weathered brick warehouses with painted-over windows, shipping offices that hadn't updated their facades since the 1970s, the kind of no-nonsense architecture that reflected the port's blue-collar heart.

Murphy's Tavern materialized out of the snow like something from a noir film, its neon sign buzzing fitfully against the storm. The bar was tucked between a shuttered seafood processing plant and a marine supply company whose windows displayed faded photographs of ships that might have been scrapped decades ago. This was the kind of place where port workers came to wash the taste of diesel fuel from their mouths and dock supervisors drowned their paperwork in cheap whiskey—a refuge from the relentless practicality of maritime commerce.

The heavy wooden door groaned in protest as Isla pushed it open, releasing a wave of warmth that carried the mingled scents of cigarettes, spilled beer, and the kind of deep-fried food that existed solely to absorb alcohol. The interior was dimly lit by vintage beer signs and a handful of overhead fixtures that seemed to specialize in casting shadows. A jukebox in the corner played a melancholy country ballad about lost love and broken dreams, the kind of song that seemed specifically designed for contemplating life's poor choices.

The bar was nearly empty at this hour, just a handful of regulars hunched over their drinks like penitents at confession. An old man in a faded Duluth Shipping cap nursed a beer while staring at the muted television above the bar, where highlights from a hockey game played to an audience of one. Two women in their fifties occupied a corner booth, their conversation an unintelligible murmur punctuated by occasional bursts of bitter laughter.

Isla chose a stool at the far end of the bar, where shadows pooled thick, and the jukebox's melancholy provided cover for thinking. The wood beneath her elbows was scarred with decades of use, carved with initials and crude drawings that told the abbreviated stories of people who'd sat in this exact spot, nursing their own disappointments and uncertainties.

"What'll it be?" the bartender asked, materializing from the gloom with the practiced silence of someone who'd learned not to startle customers lost in their own thoughts. She was a weathered woman in her sixties, gray hair pulled back in a practical ponytail, her forearms bearing the faded tattoos of someone who'd once worked the docks herself. The ink had blurred with age, transforming what might once have been nautical stars and anchors into abstract blue smudges that spoke of younger days and different dreams.

"Macallan, neat," Isla replied, needing something with enough bite to cut through the fog in her head. The bartender nodded approvingly—apparently, she was the type who respected customers who knew what they wanted.

The whiskey arrived in a heavy glass tumbler, amber liquid that caught the low light like captured sunlight. Isla wrapped her fingers around the glass, feeling the weight of good crystal and better decisions than she'd been making lately. She took a careful sip, feeling the familiar burn trace its way down her throat, leaving behind the smoky sweetness of Highland peat and aged grain. The warmth settled in her chest, radiating outward like a small sun, but it couldn't touch the cold knot of uncertainty that had taken up residence somewhere in the vicinity of her heart.

She pulled out her phone, thumb hovering over Marcus Delgado's contact. Her old mentor would know what to say and how to make sense of the noise in her head. He'd been her anchor during the early years, the one who'd taught her to trust her analytical instincts while remaining skeptical of easy answers. But she didn't make the call. The last thing she needed was another voice telling her to accept the obvious conclusion, to stop chasing shadows and phantom inconsistencies.

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