Paige froze, looking across to Christopher. It was hard to miss the significance of something like that. A man who admired the likes of Lars Ingram might find that being fired recently was exactly the spark he needed to push him over into murder. The more she heard about Isaac Coleridge, the more he sounded like exactly the kind of guy who might be committing these copycat murders.
The only problem now was finding him. The two of them walked out onto the sidewalk, the problem obvious.
“So Coleridge isn’t at home, and he isn’t at work,” Paige said.
“We need to work out where he is,” Christopher said, as they headed back out to the car. “If he is our guy, he might be stalking another victim already.”
That was a worrying thought. Paige had assumed that the murders now had something to do with Lars Ingram’s upcoming execution, but what if it was just one man embarking on a spree after being fired? He would try to kill quickly, targeting victims one after another, until he was caught.
They had to find him. The only question was where. Where would a man like Isaac Coleridge go when he had nowhere to go? When his work had fired him, but he wasn’t at home, where did he have left to go?
One possibility was that he was out stalking another victim. That wasn’t a helpful thought, though, because it meant that he could be anywhere in the city. Instead, Paige found her mind drawn to another possibility. Where would a man completely obsessed with Lars Ingram go? Where was the one place he’d mentioned wanting to go, in his letters?
“Coleridge mentioned a bar called O’Kelly’s in his correspondence with Ingram,” Paige said. “One Ingram supposedly frequented. It’s possible that he might have gone there to feel closer to his ‘hero.’”
Christopher seemed to weigh it up. “It’s not a lot to go on, but it’s the best we have right now. If he isn’t there, then we’ll have to get the techs to ping his cell phone or try to find him with facial recognition on cameras.”
Both options that suggested he was taking the possibility of Ingram being a suspect very seriously indeed.
*
O’Kelly’s bar turned out to be the owner’s idea of a traditional Irish pub, complete with dirty painted glass in the windows and chalkboard outside proclaiming its selection of craft beers. Inside, it was dim and grimy, with a dartboard in the corner and a bar running most of the length of the far wall. Even at this hour of the day, there was a selection of patrons sitting around the place, some with beers in front of them, but more just hanging out, drinking coffee and eating bacon sandwiches.
Everything about the bar said to Paige that it was a dive, right down to the way the patrons’ eyes tracked her and Christopher as they made their way to the bar, not unfriendly, exactly, but definitely suspicious.
Paige looked around, trying to locate Isaac. He wasn’t at the bar and didn’t appear to be in any of the booths. For a moment or two, she thought that they’d come to the wrong place, but she still wanted to check.
Christopher clearly did too. He stepped up to the bar, setting his ID down on it.
“What can I do for you, Agent?” the bartender asked. He was an older man with thinning hair, wearing a grubby shirt and cleaning a glass with a cloth. He said it loud enough for the various patrons of the bar to hear, as if warning them not to say anything too incriminating.
“We’re looking for someone,” Christopher said. “Isaac Coleridge. We’re told that he drinks here.”
That was obviously a stretch. They didn’t know for sure that Coleridge actually spent time there, but it seemed likely, and Paige knew that sometimes, it was better to sound as if you already knew the answers before you started asking questions.
“Don’t know the name,” the bartender said, but there was something about the flat way he said it that made Paige think that he might have said that if Christopher had asked him about his own mother. This wasn’t the kind of bar where people cooperated with the police.
It was kind of irrelevant at that point, though, because that was when Paige saw Isaac Coleridge step back into the bar from the restrooms at the back. He was a bulky man in a leather jacket and stained t-shirt with the logo of a band Paige didn’t know. He was probably a little under six feet tall and wore a heavy collection of rings on each hand.
“There!” Paige said, touching Christopher on the shoulder and pointing.
Coleridge took one look at them there and ran, heading straight back towards the restrooms.
Paige realized her mistake in an instant. She’d needed to tell Christopher that she’d spotted him, but the way she’d done it had only given him a chance to flee. It meant that she and Christopher had to barrel through the bar, dodging around tables and heading for the back.
They got there in time for Paige to see Coleridge running out of a back door into an alley. She followed, with Christopher a pace or two in front of her, bursting out into a dirty alley behind the bar. Coleridge was already heading for another, moving faster than his overweight frame suggested he should be able to.
One of the tests to get into the FBI Academy had been a timed 300-yard sprint, the distance apparently based on the length a chase might normally go before a suspect ran out of options. Paige had gotten through it but had been a long way from the fastest in her class, and now she found Christopher pulling away from her as he kept up the pursuit down the length of the second alley, dodging around dumpsters as Coleridge kept going.
Paige did her best to keep up. She might not be the best at the physical aspects of the training, but if Christopher was going to tackle this guy, she wanted him to have some kind of backup.
The three of them turned a corner, with Coleridge in front and the two of them following on behind. Paige could see him starting to slow now, obviously not used to this kind of exertion. She was still able to keep going; she hadn’t realized just how much the training had improved her base level of fitness in the time she’d been at the academy.
Coleridge slowed now, and Christopher was almost level with him, lunging forward to tackle him to the ground. Paige was there in a couple of strides, helping to grab one of his arms, wrenching it behind his back so that Christopher could cuff him.
Before, Paige had been suspicious, and now that Coleridge had run, that suspicion had only increased.
“Isaac Coleridge?” Christopher said. “We have some questions we need to ask you about the murders of Marta Huarez and Zoe Wells.”