CHAPTER FIVE
Christopher knew that they needed to find another way to make progress, and quickly. The killer was still out there somewhere.
He was more than glad that he’d been able to persuade Paige to help with this. Yes, he could have gotten one of the profilers from the BAU to do the work, but after everything she’d done on the Adam Riker case, the fact was that Christopher trusted Paige more than all of them.
“Tell me about the other case,” Paige said as they left Mrs. Estrom’s home. “The one from a couple of days ago.”
There was a confidence now when it came to these things that hadn’t been there when they’d been trying to recapture Adam Riker. Was that the result of the FBI training she was undertaking, or was it just that she felt more able to speak out now that she was no longer being targeted by a serial killer?
Either way, it was good, and Christopher was more than happy to fill her in.
“I have a copy of that file in the car,” he said. “I’ll explain it all there.”
He led the way back to his dark sedan, and on looking at the surrounding press corps, he drove them a little way away before he pulled over and got out the file for Paige to look at. He didn’t want them to have a chance to take a picture of it with a long lens.
“Zoe Wells,” Christopher said, giving her the basics as Paige read. “Twenty-seven. Working as an overnight nurse at the Cherry Blossom Retirement Home. An intruder broke in during the night, stabbed her seven times, and then left her for the residents to find in the morning.”
He could see Paige reading, absorbing the information with an intensity that Christopher couldn’t hope to match, and wondered what she was seeing as she did so. Christopher felt certain that the two of them looked at files in two different ways, with him coming from the point of view of an agent looking for small strands of evidence to follow, and her trying more to get to the heart of what the people involved wanted and thought. It was useful to have that other point of view on all of this, and Christopher hoped that it would be enough to allow the two of them to find the killer between them.
“Do we know how the killer got inside?” Paige asked, after a minute or two of reading.
“The doors have a key code lock to let guests in and out. We think the killer found out that code somehow and used it to get inside. It wasn’t exactly a well-guarded secret. It was less to protect the residents and more to prevent those residents with dementia from wandering out of the home.”
Paige winced slightly at that.
“What is it?” Christopher asked.
“Just the thought of how poorly protected they all were.”
“No one thought that there would be a killer coming for them,” Christopher pointed out. That was one thing that was important to remember in this job, that while they saw death and violence on an almost daily basis, ordinary people didn’t. Of course, before Paige had signed up for the FBI academy, she’d already been working with the worst kind of killers, and had seen her own father murdered when she was a teenager.
“But one came anyway,” Paige said. “Did he lure this victim into position the same way he did with Marta Huarez?”
“We think so,” Christopher said. “One of the personal alarms some of the residents wear was activated and found on the floor of the room where she had been killed.”
“So he made her think that one of the people in the home was in trouble and then killed her when she went to help?”
Christopher saw the look of disgust that crossed Paige’s face at that, and he found himself hoping that she would be able to keep this professional. He needed someone who could look at this objectively. Or did he? One of Paige’s strengths was the way that she could get into people’s heads.
“We’ll go and take a look there, try to speak to Ms. Wells’s colleagues,” Christopher said. “I talked to them yesterday, but if we’re lucky, they’ll have remembered something that might help us to make some progress on this.”
He saw Paige nod as he put the car into gear.
“There’s no mention of camera footage in the file,” Paige said. “In a retirement home, wouldn’t there be cameras to try to ensure that the residents are safe?”
“There were a couple,” Christopher said. “But it was a long way from total coverage. We’re going through the footage, but it looks as if the killer was able to avoid them.”
“Does that mean that he scouted it beforehand?” Paige asked.
It was a good question. Someone managing to avoid all of the cameras in a building suggested that they knew where those cameras were ahead of time. Doing that in some buildings might mean access to plans of the layout, but somewhere like this, it probably meant watching the location until he was sure.
“The trouble is that it would be easy for them to do so,” Christopher said. “There are a lot of agency staff, and a lot of visitors. And that’s assuming that they even did case the retirement home before they struck.”
While it was likely, it wasn’t certain. Someone used to breaking into locations might have the expertise to avoid cameras without that kind of preparation.
“I’m going to have a tech check the footage,” Christopher said. “That’s not the reason I have you here.”
“You want me to try to get into the killer’s head,” Paige said.