“So this is about the connection to you?” Christopher asked. “Come on, Paige. I know you’re shocked by all this, but I need you to think. I need you to be the expert that I know you are. I need you to help me to understand what has happened here today.”
“I… I can do that,” Paige assured him.
“Good. I need to ask you a difficult question first, though,” Christopher said.
Paige was still getting over her shock, but she was still thinking fast enough to guess what the next question had to be.
“You’re going to ask me if I asked Adam to kill her, right? If I actually did help him to escape so that he could do this for me once he’d tied up his own loose ends. Maybe you even think that I’ve been leading you around to all these different places as a way to keep you from catching up to Adam before he could do this for me.”
Christopher looked a little uncomfortable then.
“I don’t think that, but I need to be able to justify you being here to my superiors when they ask. I need to be able to show that I asked the questions. It’s my job, and I have to do it, even if I don’t want to believe that you could ever do anything like that.”
“I understand,” Paige said, even though it hurt a little that he’d asked. It might be his job, but she wanted him to trust her. “So you need me to prove that I didn’t have any part in this?”
Christopher nodded. “Because you’re working with me, you have privileged access to the case.” He sighed. “I trust you, Paige. I think you have more invested in catching Adam Riker than anyone else. I think you’re the best person to work beside me on this. If I didn’t think that, then I’d be working with someone else.”
“But?”
“But I need to be able to tell anyone else who asks more than just ‘I have a good feeling about her.’”
Paige guessed that she should be flattered that he had any kind of good feelings about her. It was still difficult to have to explain herself like this.
“The only interactions I had with Adam were in my sessions with him. I kept the audio files from every single one. You can hear for yourself that I never plotted anything with him, I never helped him. I just didn’t.”
Christopher spread his hands. “I believe you, Paige. I just needed to hear it. Now, I need to hear your opinion on why Adam has killed Angelique Philips. As the biggest expert on Adam Riker, tell me, why is he doing this?”
Paige didn’t have an answer, which was embarrassing, because Christopher was right: she was meant to be the world’s biggest expert on this one serial killer. She’d even thought that she’d managed to establish some kind of connection with him during their sessions.
What if he felt the same way? That thought crept over Paige, making her feel sick at the thought. What if Adam thought that they’d forged some kind of special connection, and now this was all about her?
“I think he’s fixated on me,” Paige said. She swallowed at the thought of it. “He told me in our last session that he knew all about my life. He told me that he would see me again. I thought it was a threat, but I hadn’t imagined it would be anything like this.”
Christopher nodded gravely. “It’s a big shift in his MO. The first two murders since his escape seemed to be about his past. This shift to a focus on your life is worrying.”
It was more than worrying for Paige. “What if he decides to use all the information he got from me in sessions? What if he decides to use everything he learned about me?”
“How much did he learn about you?” Christopher asked.
Paige wasn’t sure, and that was terrifying in and of itself. “Is it possible that he’s going to start killing people in my life? People I’ve mentioned in the sessions?”
She watched as Christopher nodded. “I wish I could tell you no, Paige. Do you know exactly what you told him?”
Paige wasn’t sure. “I shouldn’t have told him anything. I thought… I thought it was the only way to get him to start talking. It was the only way. I told him what I thought were small things, and he told me all about his life. I thought that it didn’t matter, because he was safely locked away.”
Looked at now, it seemed like a hideous risk, one that she should never have taken.
Christopher reached out, putting a hand over hers. Paige was grateful for that moment of physical contact, feeling an almost electric heat there between them.
“You couldn’t have known what was going to happen. You tried to stop him from escaping. You tried to understand him. You aren’t responsible for the actions of a psychopath, Paige.”
“Except that in his head, I might be,” Paige said. “If this has shifted to being about me, then I’ve put anyone around me in danger.”
“He’s the one doing that,” Christopher reminded her. “Look, I need to go tell the local police about the potential new situation and check to see if there are any potential ways this crime scene can help us to find Riker before he does anything else. If we can catch him, then this is over.”
“But you don’t think it will be that simple,” Paige said.
Christopher shook his head. “Which is why I need you to go through your notes again. I need you to work out exactly what you told him in your sessions, and who in your life he knows about. Once we know that, we can try to narrow it down, and know who we need to warn or protect.”
Paige nodded. She could do that. She started to look through her notes. She couldn’t listen to the recordings now, not here, not like this, but the transcripts were enough. Paige started to enter the names of the people close to her into the search bar, trying to find out which of them she’d talked about. Had she mentioned her mother, Prof. Thornton? Yes, they were both there, and just that fact was enough to make Paige feel sick all over again.
There were other places he might go too, but Paige knew that they needed to go to Prof. Thornton’s house first, because of all the people she might have mentioned in her sessions, he was the nearest, and because he represented one of the best ways to get to Paige. She’d talked about him probably more than anyone in the sessions. He wasn’t just her thesis supervisor; he was her mentor, her friend.
If Adam was targeting the people close to her, then Prof. Thornton could be in serious danger.