CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Paige was sick of running into dead ends. It seemed as if Adam were a ghost, always there on the edge of her vision, and with a presence she could almost feel, but was never quite there for her and Christopher to reach out and grab.
“How do you do it?” Paige asked, as she watched a local patrol car take away her stepfather.
“How do I do what? Lock up scumbags like that? That part’s pretty easy. I just wish I could promise you that he would actually see any jail time.”
Paige shrugged. “I resigned myself to that a long time ago. But no, I meant, ‘how do you keep going when we’ve been wrong so many times?’”
Christopher put his hands on her shoulders. “That’s just the job. You’re wrong, over and over again, until you’re right. Besides, we don’t even know that you are wrong here. Adam isn’t here right now, but that doesn’t mean that he won’t show up.”
But they wouldn’t be the ones there if he did. Maybe the local PD would keep an eye on her stepfather’s place, but Paige and Christopher couldn’t sit around again waiting for him. Paige could already see how doing that had given Adam time to get ahead of them both, moving on to his next victim each time.
He couldn’t get to her stepfather now, however much Paige might wish he could, so who did that leave?
“You’re saying that we just have to keep trying until we catch him?” Paige said. It sounded too much like the kind of advice a little league coach might have given to a kid from where she was standing.
“Sometimes you catch people through brilliant leaps and strokes of luck,” Christopher said, “but honestly? The biggest advantage the FBI has is that we don’t give up. We have the time and resources to keep grinding down a hunt like this until we find the person we’re looking for.”
“And how many people might Adam kill in the meantime?” Paige asked.
“Which is why we keep working to catch him, so that we find him as soon as it’s possible to do so.”
Paige wasn’t entirely sold on that. For her, it felt as if this wasn’t about just grinding down the evidence until she found Adam. It was about her guessing right or wrong, and so far, she’d been guessing wrong.
“I’m supposed to be the big expert on Adam,” Paige said, “but I can’t even predict what he’s going to do next accurately.”
“You will, it’s just a matter of time,” Christopher said.
They headed back to his car together, and once she was in the passenger seat, Paige got out her laptop, ready to go through her notes yet again, trying to find another angle that might lead the two of them to the serial killer they were hunting.
To her surprise, though, Christopher reached out and closed the laptop.
“What are you doing?” Paige demanded. “I thought you wanted me to take another shot at finding Adam.”
Christopher nodded as he put the car in gear. “I do, but maybe this time, don’t spend all your time looking through your sessions, trying to find that one hint that will lead you to him.”
That didn’t make any sense at all to Paige. “Then how am I even going to begin to find him?”
“I didn’t bring you along with me just because of your notes,” Christopher replied as they started to drive back through the town, heading back along the roads that would take them to D.C. again. “I could have had you copy those over to me so that a team of FBI analysts could go through them. I have people who can do that. What I don’t have is someone who knows Adam. Who has sat in the same room as him and looked him in the eyes.”
“You work with the BAU,” Paige pointed out. “You must know that looking people in the eyes doesn’t actually tell you anything.”
“You know what I mean, Paige,” Christopher insisted. “I don’t just want what’s in your notes. I want your expertise, and the knowledge that you’ve built up. They had you working with people like Adam for a reason. You started studying him for a reason.”
Yes, because of everything that had been taken from her by someone just like him. Someone who didn’t care about anyone else, or anything else, except…
Except her, in Adam’s case. He’d fixated on Paige. He’d sat there and told her about himself.
“You know that he knew exactly what he was telling me,” Paige said. “Anything I remember, he’ll also remember.”
“Then don’t just try to remember,” Christopher replied, as they kept driving. “Tell me about him. Profile him.”
“Adam is…,” Paige tried to find a way to put it into words. All this time working on her PhD, and it still didn’t feel as if she had the essence of him. “He’s controlling, he’s manipulative. He reacts poorly to slights, because he thinks that if he lets anyone get away with even small stuff, it makes him look weaker. He seems to have fixated on me, seems to be trying to do for me what he does with people who have wronged him, but I’m not sure what that gets us. It makes Jeremy the most obvious target, but I’m not sure who else it might be. It isn’t as if I have a long list of enemies.”
Paige kept thinking, trying to focus on Adam, trying to get deeper into his thought processes. He’d killed Eloise Harper because she was unfinished business for him, and Sara Langdon because… well, because he’d shifted his attentions to Paige, and there was no reason for him to keep her alive anymore. He’d killed Angelique because of something that she’d done to Paige, so logically, her stepfather should have been the next victim. So where had she gone wrong?
“At least you got the chance to punch your stepfather,” Christopher said. “Not that I should approve, of course. But you do have a pretty good right cross.”