CHAPTER SEVEN
Paige had spent plenty of time working inside a secure mental institution, but that was still a far cry from the penitentiary that she and Christopher made their way through, going to see Lars Ingram.
This didn’t pretend to be calming and serene with pastel colors the way the institute had. Instead, the surfaces were institutional gray and harsh white, the bars solid and the guards watching warily as Paige and Christopher made their way into a waiting area that was pretty much empty at the moment. Apparently, they weren’t here for usual visiting hours.
The receptionist was a woman in her fifties, wearing a floral print dress and dark cardigan that seemed slightly at odds with the surroundings.
“Yes?” she said. “What can I do for you?”
Paige saw Christopher take out his ID to show to the receptionist.
“Agent Marriott with the FBI. I called ahead. My associate and I are here to see Lars Ingram.”
“I’ll just check the system,” the receptionist said, and typed something quickly into a computer in front of her. “Ah, yes. It’s all here. Looks like you’re just in time.”
“What does that mean?” Paige asked, not quite understanding.
The receptionist looked at her strangely, as if surprised that she didn’t know already. “Lars Ingram’s execution is scheduled for tomorrow night.”
Paige had known that he was due to die soon in general terms, but the closeness of the date took her a little by surprise. It meant that the pressure on this meeting was suddenly increased a hundred times over. They would probably only have one chance to get anything out of Ingram, and if they blew it, there would never be another opportunity, because he would be dead.
“If you’ll take a seat, a guard will be here to escort you soon.”
Paige sat down with Christopher just a seat away, far too aware of how close he was. To distract herself, she asked about Ingram.
“Do you think he’ll actually be able to give us the other killer?” Paige asked. She was hoping for a lead, but would Ingram be able to go further and just give them a name?
“I hope so. Like you said, this new killer seems to know too much about his methods. That suggests that maybe they’ve had some contact. The only question is how we get that information out of him.”
Christopher didn’t sound entirely hopeful when it came to that.
“You think it will be a problem?” Paige said.
She saw the FBI agent shrug. “Ingram doesn’t have anything to gain here. He’s on death row, he knows that there’s nothing we can do for him. Nothing that will make his life easier, no chance of commuting his sentence. We can’t even pretend that we can, when his death is already scheduled. We’ll need to think of something else if we’re going to get him to talk.”
Paige tried to imagine what that might be. What did a serial killer like Ingram want? The truth was that the answer to a question like that was always complex and would probably have taken her several sessions as a psychologist to even begin to figure out. Now, she had to guess it in just one, and successfully find a way to leverage it. Did he want fame? Control? Was there some kind of deep reason behind all of it relating to his past? Paige didn’t know.
“Do you think it’s significant that the killings have taken place so close to Ingram’s execution?” Paige asked. The timing of it all seemed far too specific to be a coincidence.
Christopher nodded. “It’s hard to see how they couldn’t be linked. Maybe the copycat heard about Ingram because he’s scheduled for execution, and that’s what prompted him to start killing?”
It was possible. Copycats sometimes came out of the most sensational coverage, so maybe the coverage of Ingram leading up to his execution had sparked something in the wrong person. Yet it was also possible that this was an existing copycat who was escalating around the date of the execution as some kind of tribute to the serial killer, or that it was a coincidence, brought about by some outside influence that Paige and Christopher didn’t know about.
That was the problem with all of this: there was no way to narrow down the possibilities. Right then, the important point was to find the copycat, and that meant trying to get answers out of Lars Ingram as quickly as possible.
A guard came to collect them, a woman in her twenties, solidly built with her blonde hair hacked short. She offered them a smile.
“Are you two the FBI agents here to see Lars Ingram?”
Paige was about to point out that she wasn’t an FBI agent yet, but Christopher got there first.
“Yes, that’s us. I’m Agent Marriott, and this is Paige King.”
Paige felt strangely grateful that Christopher didn’t spend time spelling out that she was just a trainee, that she didn’t really deserve to be there. He didn’t make her feel like she was an outsider.
“I’m Nadia. Follow me.”
The guard led the way out of the waiting area, through a security checkpoint and then deeper into the prison.