Paige knew that he was right, that Adam was unlikely to be caught by conventional means. He’d only been caught the first time by accident. It would take something special for them to find him now.
“Our best chance of catching him is if someone who knows him can work out where he’s going to be next. And no one knows him better than you do, Paige. You’re our best chance of finding him.”
A day or two ago, Paige might have agreed with that statement. Adam was the topic of her PhD thesis, after all. She had dozens of hours of interview recordings of him. She’d written whole chapters on his possible motivations, and on the ways that he’d chosen to work, specifically in the hope of understanding other serial killers.
Like the one who killed her father.
If Paige discovered that she didn’t know Adam as well as she thought, then what would that say about her attempts to understand, to find, the man who had killed the one person who had meant more in her life than anybody else? What did it say about anything else she thought she knew?
Until Adam broke out, Paige thought that she knew so much. Now, it felt as if she couldn’t be certain about any of it.
“Would you like coffee?” Christopher asked. It seemed like a complete non-sequitur given everything that had gone before.
“Coffee?”
“I’m going to get coffee. If you’re going to take another run at this, then I might as well do that while you’re working.”
“So you just wait for me to give you a direction, then charge off that way after Adam? Is that how FBI agents work?”
“When they have experts that they can rely on, yes,” Christopher said. “Now, coffee?”
Paige nodded. “Coffee would be good.”
Christopher’s attempts to just do something normal helped. It gave Paige some space to think. She was going to take another run at this, and this time, she was determined to do things better. She was going to find an answer that would let her locate Adam and actually finish this.
That meant delving back into her research. Paige opened up her laptop and started to look through the files again, trying to work out where else Adam might go. His first murder since his escape might provide a clue to what he was thinking at the moment, Paige guessed. After all, he’d gone after someone who he’d intended to make his victim previously. Did that tell her anything about what he was trying to do now that he was out, and what he intended to do next?
Paige didn’t think he was just working through a list of escaped victims. As far as Paige knew, Eloise Harper had been the only person to actually get away from Adam once he’d begun his hunt for them. Paige didn’t want to just rely on her memory though, so she started to run word searches through her files, searching for any mention of victims, or people Adam intended to make his victim.
Paige found a passage in her transcripts that intrigued her.
“I suppose you want me to talk about my first victims and what they meant to me. About how those shaped me. Shall I tell you about when I killed my father? About how he deserved it after years of abusing me, trying to beat the evil out of me?”
Something about that struck a note with Paige, and not just because of her own experiences at the hands of her stepfather. Those weren’t the same thing. They weren’t. Paige’s experiences were her own. They had nothing to do with Adam or what he’d been through. The two of them weren’t the same.
But it started her thinking about what he’d told her of his situation. His father was abusive, his mother left, forced out by his father. His uncle had apparently known about it all, and even helped his father with some of the worst of it. Adam had hated him for it, almost as much as the father he’d killed.
At the time, it had all seemed like a vital part of trying to understand why Adam was the way he was, but it hadn’t seemed like a sufficient explanation. After all, Paige had been through as much as Adam, maybe more, but she hadn’t turned out to be a serial killer. She wanted to help people and catch men like him, not kill people herself. She’d taken it as proof that there was some other element involved, something she might be able to get to, if she only put in enough work.
Now, though, thinking about Adam’s uncle made Paige want to go back to those sections of her notes. It didn’t take long to find his name: George Riker. It turned out that Paige hadn’t looked up much more about him than that. She seemed to recall that, briefly, she’d considered the possibility of interviewing him about Adam’s past, but Paige had wanted to keep her work focused on the sessions, not run off interviewing random strangers who had no reason to talk to her. Her work had been about the dynamic between the two of them, not about what other people thought.
In that moment, Paige considered Adam’s motivations for killing Eloise Harper. That had been about completing unfinished business, about gaining, she guessed, a kind of closure about his arrest in his own sick and twisted way.
Adam might not have other victims he’d failed to kill, but this was definitely unfinished business, definitely something that Adam might want to find a kind of closure about.
Christopher came back in carrying two mugs of coffee. He took one look at Paige’s expression and stopped short.
“You’ve found something?”
“I think so,” Paige said. “The first killing seems to have been about a sense of things left incomplete, right?”
She saw Christopher nod in response to that. “I guess so.”
“Well, there’s something else in his life that is definitely incomplete. He killed his father because of the abuse he suffered at his father’s hands.”
“That sounds pretty final to me,” Christopher said, but he hadn’t heard the rest of it yet.
“Except that his father isn’t the only person Adam blames,” Paige explained. “He said in his sessions that his uncle, George Riker, played a part too. That they were both to blame for driving his mother away. As far as I’m aware, George Riker is still alive, and that might make him someone Adam might want to get to, now that he’s free.”