She sat down and typed something in. “There, it should be all set for you.”
Christopher went to the computer, obviously wanting to take that side of things. “I’ll go through the visitor records and call logs, then check the names to see if there’s anyone who visited him who doesn’t fit. Can you go through the letters? I think you’re the best person to try to identify anyone who’s obsessed enough to potentially be our copycat.”
Paige nodded. “I can do that.”
Obsession shouldn’t be too hard to spot, at least not when it came to the kind that might push someone into being a copycat killer.
She started to go through the letters. The first few were legal letters, sent from his attorney, appearing to discuss his attempts to appeal or seek clemency. Paige saw the words “we regret to inform you that your appeal has been denied due to a lack of new evidence” repeated again and again. It seemed that Lars Ingram, or at least his lawyers, had scrambled to try to keep him alive. There were other letters from the ACLU, and from groups protesting more because they opposed the death penalty in principle than because they actually cared about Lars Ingram specifically.
Paige still had to read through them, in case there were any signs of an obsessive fan hidden somewhere within the letters, in case there was anything in the letters from the lawyers that shouldn’t have been there. If there was anything too personal, anything that didn’t fit the work of a lawyer, Paige was determined to pick it out.
There wasn’t anything in the lawyers’ letters, though, just the progress of the legal system towards the inevitability of Lars Ingram’s execution, in spite of their efforts to prevent it.
Paige moved on to the other letters. There weren’t any from Ingram’s family. If he still had any left, then they clearly didn’t want anything to do with him, or with the horrific acts he’d committed. Apparently, even the people who loved him most had accepted the monster he was.
There were letters from people who wanted to say exactly that to Ingram, their letters spelling out all the ways that they thought even execution wasn’t good enough for him. He’d gotten what seemed like plenty of hate mail.
Yet there were also letters there that seemed to go the other way. There were letters from a woman somewhere in Texas expressing her love and admiration for him.
You’re the first thing that I think about in the morning. You don’t deserve to be in prison. I know I could change you, and that we could be happy together. If I were there, I’d…
“Look up a woman named Elaine Williamson,” Paige said to Christopher. “She’s sent Ingram letters expressing her deep love and admiration. Some of them are… well, pretty explicit.”
“Do you think she’s a possibility?” Christopher asked as he started to input her name.
“I’m not sure,” Paige said. “I think she’s probably just one of those people who fall in love with inmates.”
That happened. Paige had read about plenty of cases, and even seen a couple when she was working back at the institute. People saw killers and criminals on the news, and there was something about that exposure that attracted people who were missing something in their lives. People who projected those needs onto others and assumed that the worst kind of killers had everything that they needed.
“But is it possible that she’s gone further?”
That was the key question.
“Maybe,” Paige said. “Generally, these people are more likely to turn out to be additional victims of criminals if they ever get out, but I guess it’s just about possible that this woman might be obsessed enough to want to copy Ingram’s crimes. The one thing I don’t like is that she’s from Texas.”
“And you told me before that copycats don’t usually change their location before they start killing,” Christopher said. Paige was pleased by the fact that he’d listened to what she’d said about copycats.
“There’s no sign of her on the visitor lists, or on the call logs,” Christopher said. “Give me a second. I’m going to try checking her social media accounts.”
Paige waited expectantly, but it was less than a minute before Christopher shook his head.
“Her most recent social media posts have location markers. She’s still in Texas.”
Meaning that there was no way she could have been the one to kill two victims in Washington over the last couple of days. She had an alibi. Paige needed to keep looking.
There were other letters, expressing sympathy, or expressing hatred. None of them seemed like enough to indicate the kind of obsession that Paige and Christopher were looking for, the kind of obsession that might propel someone to kill, and to copy the methods that Ingram had used.
Paige continued to sift through the letters. There were more than she had thought that there might be. She had assumed that a killer locked away on death row wouldn’t get much mail, but the pile was a thick one, taking in correspondence relating to Ingram’s affairs, the progress of his appeals, and what Paige could only describe as fan mail.
It was that collection of letters that Paige delved more deeply into, reading through them one by one, trying to find anything that seemed as if it might be obsessive enough to indicate the work of a fellow killer.
Trying to diagnose that from just letters was a much harder task than Paige could have imagined, though. She was starting to think that it might be impossible.
Then Paige saw a letter that made her pause, reading through it again and again.
I wanted to write to you because I think what you did is amazing. I know people don’t understand. They don’t get that it takes real power to do what you did. That a strong man must make his own morality and do as he pleases.
Those bitches deserved what they got. I wish I could have been there with you when you did it, could have experienced everything you did as they died. What I wouldn’t give for just one drink in O’Kelly’s with you, so you could tell me all about it.