“I know that a prisoner, Adam Riker, escaped. That’s bad enough, but what’s worse is that he made a mockery of our security precautions. He managed to break out even after he came out and told a member of my staff that he was going to.”
Christopher tried to make some kind of sense of that. “He actually told one of your people that he was planning to escape? And this person reported it?”
He saw the doctor nod and saw the embarrassment there in the man’s expression. “Paige came straight to my office to do so after her session with Riker.”
“Session? What session?” Christopher tried to wind things back a little. He needed to catch up with what was going on. “Who is this ‘Paige,’ and why was she meeting with Adam Riker?”
Dr. Neil took a second or two before answering. He was obviously nervous, and had the sense that Christopher was making some kind of criticism of the way he ran his facility.
“Paige King is a resident here, or was. Today was her last day. She has been doing a PhD on criminal psychology.”
“A grad student?” Christopher asked. “Is that usual?”
“We had her perform evaluations here, and she also undertook psychological interviews with many of the patients. She had regular sessions with Adam Riker. I understand that his case had started to form one of the main case studies for her thesis.”
“So she knew Riker well?”
“If you think that she played any role in all of this, I should remind you that she was the one who told me about his threat to escape. I doubled the number of guards on that wing because of that threat.”
Christopher hadn’t been thinking that, although it would be easy to get suspicious. The presence of increased numbers of guards seemed to have helped Riker’s escape, not hindered it. He’d also escaped right on the day when this ‘Paige King’ had finished her work.
Yet somehow, those suspicions didn’t add up to her being a suspect in Christopher’s mind.
A grad student psychologist didn’t represent a way out to an inmate like Riker. She couldn’t walk him out of the building. That was obviously why he’d used a guard instead. And he didn’t need to bring her in on any kind of plot to get her to increase the number of guards. He just needed to make his threat.
The fact that he’d done it today was more interesting, though. He’d picked the day when this woman had left and wouldn’t be speaking to him anymore. To Christopher, that said that Riker perceived some kind of connection between himself and this woman. When it came to a serial killer, that was anything but a good thing.
She might even be a target for him. He might be heading there right now.
At the same time, she was someone out there who had spent time interviewing Riker, studying him. Someone who probably knew the way his mind worked better than anyone else. In other words, exactly the kind of person Christopher needed if he was going to find Riker.
“Where can I find Paige King?” Christopher asked. “I need to talk to her.”
“She isn’t here,” Dr. Neil said. “As I said, she finished her residency today. I think she said she was planning to go visit her thesis supervisor for dinner.”
Christopher could have done this in the morning, but with a man on the run, and with the possibility that Riker might choose her as his next target, there was no time to spare.
Yes, there were other things that he could do, but most of those things were ones that the marshals or the local police could do easily without his help. He was there from the BAU, and as far as Christopher was concerned, knowing more about how Adam Riker was thinking was the best way to catch him.
“I need to know her supervisor’s name, right now.”
*
Paige took the time to get changed when she got home, so that she now wore a green sweater and jeans rather than her work clothes. Prof. Thornton might be her doctoral supervisor, but he wasn’t one for formality. He would probably think that something was strange if she showed up in her suit. She dug around in her refrigerator until she found an unopened bottle of wine of indeterminate quality, then called an Uber to take her over to the Thorntons’ place.
It took Paige up towards the suburbs, into the kind of quiet neighborhood that Paige had really only seen on TV until she’d gotten here. The town she’d grown up in was much more… bucolic than the big city, both tiny and far more sprawling than these ordered rows of identically built family properties, with their white picket fences and their driveways for the two-family cars.
“Are you off to a party?” the driver asked her as she got in.
“To dinner. Celebrating the end of my PhD.” Even as she said it, Paige knew what the next question was going to be.
“A PhD? Impressive. What’s it about?”
That was the same question everyone asked Paige at this point, and she’d learned a long time ago that trying to go into the full details of it all just met with blank looks. Even people in the same general field didn’t quite get it, most of the time. Instead, she’d come up with the elevator pitch version of it.
“I study psychopaths, specifically serial killers, trying to work out what makes them who they are.”
“Why would you want to know that?” the driver asked.