“As I understand it, you’ve spent months having counseling sessions with him,” Agent Marriott said. “That you’re doing a big part of your doctoral thesis on him?”
Paige nodded. “That’s right.”
She could see where this was going.
“So you probably know Adam Riker about as well as anyone does right now. You’re probably better placed to guess what he might do next than anyone else.”
A few hours ago, and Paige might have agreed with him. She might have happily declared herself to be the world’s biggest expert on Adam Riker. Now, though, after Adam had revealed just how much he’d learned about her in return, and after he’d used her to make his escape easier, she wasn’t sure.
“I’ll tell you anything I know,” Paige said, hearing the uncertainty in her own voice. “But after all of this…”
Agent Marriott smiled her way. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. Yes, he tricked you, but anyone can fall for a trick. You still know more than anyone else about all of this.”
“He’s right, Paige,” Prof. Thornton said. “Remember, I’ve seen the drafts of your thesis. I don’t believe that anyone could have fabricated the contents of those sessions for so long. You have a wealth of information on Adam Riker that no one else does.”
It was good to hear her mentor’s confidence like that, but Paige found herself just as comforted by Agent Marriott’s words. This was a man who presumably faced up to the most dangerous of men every day, yet he was asking for her help.
“What do you need to know?” Paige asked, composing herself.
Agent Marriott leaned forward slightly. “Can you start by giving me a sense of what Adam Riker is like. I’ve seen the files on his crimes, but I want to know about the man.”
Paige nodded. She could do that. Providing that kind of basic assessment was a part of what she’d done at the institute, after all.
“The first thing you have to understand is that he’s highly intelligent,” Paige said.
“But a psychopath.”
Paige tried to work out the best way to explain it to the agent. “The two aren’t mutually exclusive. If anything, the people we would call psychopaths are often highly intelligent. And… well, ‘psychopath’ is a difficult term.”
“Because of the lack of an official diagnosis from the APA,” Agent Marriott said.
Paige was impressed that he knew that, but then remembered that he was with the BAU. Of course, this would be exactly the kind of thing that he knew all about.
“That’s right,” Paige said. “But yes, on most common scales, Adam scores highly in terms of psychopathic traits. He has a lack of empathy, a lot of superficial charm, he’s manipulative, tends to do extreme things to see what the reaction will be.”
She saw Agent Marriott nod again. “All of that sounds pretty standard. But I’m not interested in standard. What is there about Adam Riker that makes him unique?”
That was the important part for something like this, Paige guessed. Agent Marriott would have hunted serial killers before, but this was about what made Adam Riker who he was.
Paige tried to think. She knew about Adam, but it was a question of trying to boil it all down to something coherent. It was the same thing she had to do with her thesis, but here, it mattered much, much more. She had to get this right.
“The big thing for Adam is control and manipulation,” Paige said. “Even the way he kills his victims is about that. He restrains them in positions that lead to positional asphyxia, often after rendering them unconscious, but other times after threatening them, or even tricking them into allowing it.”
“Tricking them?”
That was one of the scariest parts of all of this. “There are at least a couple of cases where he set it up as some kind of sex game with his victim, and then killed them once they were helpless.”
“So this is about sex for him?” Agent Marriott asked.
“No.” That wasn’t what Paige meant at all, and it was important that Agent Marriott understood the difference. “I’m pretty sure that sex doesn’t matter much to Adam. It’s all about power and control for him. He gets off just as much on manipulating someone into a trap where he can subdue them and restrain them. He literally strings his victims up like puppets.”
“And then he tortures them,” Agent Marriott said. He’d obviously read Adam’s files.
“Sometimes,” Paige explained. “We… I discussed this with him, and he listed the things he did to his victims so coldly and calmly. I didn’t get any sense that he got any enjoyment out of that side of things directly. It was just another way for him to demonstrate how helpless they were and how much control he had. Sometimes, he said that he would just sit there and watch. I got the impression that he viewed the torture almost as a form of mercy, making them struggle and waste their strength more quickly.”
Agent Marriott was silent for several seconds as he thought about that.
“If he’s so deeply about control, there’s a good chance that he might be hiding out with someone he has manipulated into helping him?” Agent Marriott asked.