CHAPTER SEVEN
Paige sat in her tiny electric car with her laptop beside her, a little bit away from the crime scene Agent Marriott had invited her to, trying to resist the urge to just turn around and go home. She couldn’t get mixed up in all of this. She shouldn’t get mixed up in this. She was an academic. She couldn’t go hunting for serial killers alongside the FBI.
Paige could feel the waves of fear underneath that, trying to hold her back. Adam was out there somewhere, and the last thing she should be doing was trying to get closer to him. She should be running, trying to put distance between the two of them. She should take a flight to Thailand, and sit on a beach, safe until all of this was done.
Paige fought back that feeling, because she knew from experience that running away from her fears didn’t make things any better She forced herself to grab her laptop, step out of the car and survey the small suburban house in front of her. She wasn’t going to be ruled by fear. Especially not when sitting at home wouldn’t actually do anything to keep her safe. Not from Adam.
To Paige, the road around the crime scene looked completely crowded, even by the busy standards of D.C. She could see neighbors standing in their gardens, trying to get a view of what was going on. Reporters stood in crowds, held back only by the police tape and the presence of uniformed officers. She spotted TV vans parked wherever they would fit along the sidewalk, barely leaving enough room for her own small car.
The house itself would have seemed quite pretty to Paige if she hadn’t known what had just happened there. It had white painted walls and a slate roof, with bushes ringing the edge of the garden, and a green painted front door. It looked like the kind of place someone might dream of to settle down in, rather than moving from rental apartment to rental apartment, the way she had since leaving Virginia.
Paige started forward towards the house, and she had to push her way through the crowd, because the reporters didn’t seem to want to give way for anyone. They’d found their prime spots, and they weren’t going to give them up for anyone. They were too intent on getting their scoop, their story. She would have thought that in D.C., even the most dramatic news story wouldn’t have kept reporters standing there for long, because there was always another story clamoring for attention, in waves of politics and local events. The reporters here seemed determined, though.
Paige guessed that the story of Adam Riker escaping was too big for them to let go of, even with so many other alternatives available.
With an effort, Paige managed to find enough gaps in the crowd to push her way to the front, flowing through it like a fish cutting its way through a shoal until she pressed up against the police tape, where a large police officer blocked the way.
“Keep back from the tape please,” he said, in a slightly bored tone that suggested he’d been saying it to people for most of the morning. Probably to reporters who hadn’t bothered to listen to him.
“I’m meant to be here,” Paige said, because she wasn’t sure exactly what she was meant to say at a crime scene.
“Sure you are.” There was no shift in the cop’s tone. Obviously he’d heard this before. “What news site are you with, ma’am?”
Paige realized that she had no way of proving that she had been invited to be there, not without Agent Marriott’s help. She got out her phone, ready to call him, and ask him to help her.
“She’s with me.”
Paige felt relief surge through her as she caught sight of Agent Marriott, striding out from the house and coming towards the line of police tape. She realized that for him to come out like this, he must have spotted her through the windows of the house. Perhaps he’d even been looking out for her. Paige kind of hoped that he had. She liked the idea of this tall, handsome FBI agent waiting just for her.
She pushed that thought away. It wasn’t helpful. She was there to help catch a serial killer, after all.
She watched the police officer on duty lift the tape to let her pass, and just like that, she was able to step inside her first crime scene. Paige had seen plenty of pictures of such scenes, in books, and in the course of her work, but actually setting foot in a live scene was something else entirely.
Around her, camera flashes went off as the photographers reacted to the arrival of someone new at the scene. It didn’t matter that the reporters probably didn’t know who she was yet, just that she was there, being walked inside by an FBI agent. Would her picture be on the internet an hour from now, with a story talking about the expert consulting on the case? Would they take the time to work out who she was? Would they look into her past?
Paige didn’t know whether to be proud of that or worried. What if they found out everything that had happened to her as a girl? What if that ended up on the news sites.
She had no doubt that if her picture was out there, Adam would see it. He would know that she was involved. She half suspected that he wanted her to be involved. He must have foreseen this possibility.
“I wasn’t sure if you would come, even after you said you would,” Agent Marriott said, as he started to lead the way back towards the house. Paige followed in his wake, stepping where he stepped, almost irrationally worried that to step anywhere else might lead to her stepping on evidence.
“I want to catch Adam as much as you do, Agent Marriott.”
“Call me Christopher, if we’re going to be working together,” he replied with a smile that Paige had to admit lit up his features.
Paige tried to summon one in return, but the thought of what she was there to do made it hard. She couldn’t smile at the thought of what might be inside the house.
“Nervous?” Christopher asked.
Paige nodded. “I’ve only seen pictures of crime scenes. I’ve never been into one.”
“But you’ve looked at plenty of those for your research, I guess.” He said it as if it were almost the same thing, rather than a world away.
“A few.” Paige tried to explain it, and it was always hard, trying to sum up her research for someone who wasn’t a specialist. “I’m mostly interested in the psychology of the killers, but sometimes that’s reflected in the crime scenes they leave behind. The way they do things can tell us about the way they think, and so what they might do next.”
“I hope that’s the case here,” Christopher said. He kept leading Paige towards the house, past the police controlling the scene. “As far as my superiors are concerned, you’re a consultant. You shouldn’t have any trouble from any of the cops around the crime scene, but if you do, send them my way.”
She saw a couple of forensic specialists working around the edges of the house, conducting what looked like a fingertip search of the exterior. Paige saw one of them put a couple of tiny fragments into plastic bags, the sheer painstaking care of it impressive. She thought that she was thorough in her interviews with the prisoners back at the institute, but even she could never imagine searching an area quite so carefully.