“Is it possible to tell anything about someone from their home?” Christopher asked, as they approached the house.
Paige guessed that, since he was with the BAU, he already knew the answer to that. It was just a question to get her thinking about the crime scene, rather than about the enormity of everything that was happening. Paige appreciated the effort on his part to make her feel like she belonged there.
Paige tried to look at the house again. “Maybe. People sometimes choose houses just because it’s what they can afford at the time, but the general type of place they choose reflects something about their priorities at the time. This place seems like Eloise Harper was looking for something simple and normal.”
Then she spotted the cameras, dotted around the edge of it, pointing out at the world and watching it carefully for any sense of danger.
“But it wasn’t normal for her,” Paige said, as she realized the implications of them. “All those cameras. She was living her life in fear. She was afraid that Adam would come back for her.”
She’d had a small taste of what it was like to live with that kind of fear, both when she was younger, and last night, worrying about what would happen if Adam came for her. She could imagine only too well what it must have been like for Eloise.
“And he did,” Christopher said, the happiness that had been there when he’d first seen her vanishing behind a mask of serious professionalism. “Are you ready to go inside, now? You don’t have to if you don’t want to. I could bring you photographs, or even just describe the scene.”
“You don’t need to do that,” Paige said, even though she wasn’t sure that it was true. She wasn’t sure that she would ever be quite ready. She knew, though, that she would have the best chance of helping if she saw this for herself.
She followed Christopher towards the front door of the house, taking a breath as she stepped inside.
The smell of death hit her, and Paige knew that smell all too well. In an instant, she was back standing over her father’s body, staring down at it in the kind of horror that had made her run as a small child. Paige had to hold herself in place then. She wasn’t a girl anymore. She understood what was going on, and she wasn’t about to give into the fear.
“Are you all right, Paige?” Christopher asked.
“I’m fine,” Paige lied, and forced herself to move through the house after him.
The house was probably busier than it had ever been, with police and forensics officers seeming to fill every corner of it as they worked. Paige wasn’t sure what they were looking for, when they already knew who had committed this crime.
Even so, it felt strangely empty and quiet. Maybe that was just because Paige knew what had happened there, or maybe it was because she knew what the normal sounds of a home were.
The result was a sense of wrongness that seemed to fill the house the same way the scent of death did. That scent hung in the air, impossible to mistake for anything else. It lingered in Paige’s nose, and some part of her knew that it would still be with her even once she was well clear of the house. It would stay in her memories, and probably invade her dreams.
Paige tried to focus on the contents of the house, tried to do what Christopher wanted her to and learn something about Eloise Harper from its contents. That meant that she spotted something else was wrong almost instantly as she made her way through the house: a series of picture hooks that didn’t have anything on them, most of them with faint shadows of fading around them to show that there definitely had been something there, rather than hooks waiting to be filled.
“Where are all the pictures?” she asked as Christopher led her upstairs.
“You spotted that?” the agent sounded slightly impressed. “They’re… well, you should see it for yourself.”
They reached a bedroom, where there were a couple more forensics people working, looking almost alien in their plastic evidence suits. Paige saw a bed tilted on its side, the cut remains of ropes hanging from it. Around the bed were pictures set out as if the whole thing were some kind of shrine. Paige could see blood stains on the floor.
“I need the room,” Christopher said, with a note of authority, and the forensics people hurried to get out of the room.
That left Paige in there with him, and Christopher looking at her expectantly.
“Is it all right for us to be in here?” Paige asked. “I’m not disturbing evidence, or anything?”
“We know who did this,” Christopher replied. “What matters now is catching him. Tell me what you see, Paige.”
Paige felt as if this were some kind of audition, but she already knew what she was looking at. She was standing in the spot where a woman was killed, looking at the aftermath of that death. This felt a lot more involved than sitting opposite a serial killer, talking to him, had been. That felt almost safe by comparison.
“This is Adam,” Paige said. “He strung her up, and he tortured her. My guess is the pictures were a part of that. He would have told her all about the people she would never see again. He… he likes to get a reaction out of people. He likes to try to show them that he can control everything they do. He wants to torment them psychologically as well as physically.”
She saw Christopher nod. “That’s consistent with what you told me back at your supervisor’s house, but I need more than that. We know who this is, Paige.”
Paige nodded. This wasn’t about proving Adam’s guilt, but about catching him. She needed to give Christopher something more than that, something that might actually help him to get closer to Adam.
Paige tried to think. Maybe if she could help him work out Adam’s motivations, it might help?
“I think this is about Adam tying up loose ends,” Paige said. “This was the one person he tried to kill that he failed to kill.”
“But now he has,” Christopher pointed out. “Does he have any other loose ends?”