CHAPTER ELEVEN
Paige found herself eager to get answers out of Isaac Coleridge as they took him back to the FBI to question him, putting him in a clean, modern interrogation room and leaving him there watched by cameras while they tried to work out the best strategy to get him to talk.
“We’ll leave him to sweat a little longer,” Christopher said, with a nod towards the screen that held the feeds from the cameras. “You can see that he’s nervous, so maybe that will encourage him to talk.”
He did look nervous to Paige, face flushed, obviously sweating with the stress of being in there. He hadn’t asked for a lawyer yet, but Paige had no doubt that he would, soon enough.
She found it interesting, though, that he was so nervous. Serial killers were usually better at hiding their emotions than that, if they even felt them the same way. Some of the more recent research suggested that for psychopaths, there was typically less development in the amygdala than for most people, resulting not just in a lack of empathy, but also in lower feelings of fear or anxiety.
Sitting there scared in an interview room didn’t fit with that. Of course, it was possible that Isaac wasn’t a psychopath. It wasn’t strictly necessary to be a serial killer, although most were. It was possible that his obsession with Lars Ingram was simply great enough to push him over the barrier to killing someone.
Even so, Paige found the fact that he was so nervous… odd. There was definitely more to be asked there.
“I want to learn everything possible about his life before we go in there,” Christopher said.
That was another standard tactic, and one that Paige had learned about at the academy. The more it was possible to show a suspect that you already had information, the less likely they were to lie, because they tended to assume that you already knew the truth.
Paige was willing to go along with it, getting out her computer and researching what she could on Isaac Coleridge. There wasn’t much that she and Christopher hadn’t already looked up. No criminal record. Graduated from a community college. His social media didn’t show many signs of past girlfriends but did show that he’d gone from job to job at a pace that suggested he didn’t really fit in anywhere.
“How long do you want to leave him?” Paige asked. She trusted Christopher’s judgement in this, but she was eager to get in there and talk to Isaac. If they were lucky, he was their guy, and they would be able to get a confession out of him before the end of the day. The victims would have the justice they deserved, and a killer would be off the streets for good.
“I think he’s waited long enough,” Christopher said. He led the way into the interrogation room, and Paige followed close behind. Neither of them said anything for now. Instead, they both sat down in silence opposite Isaac, letting the tension there build.
“Why did you run when you saw us, Isaac?” Christopher asked at last. He was obviously trying to drive home just how guilty that made Isaac seem, cutting through any hope he had of just denying everything.
“Wouldn’t you run if you saw the cops?” Isaac shot back.
“FBI, Isaac, not cops,” Christopher corrected him. Again, Paige had the feeling that it was designed to ramp up the pressure on him.
Looking at him, though, Paige wasn’t sure that he needed more pressure. She could see the way his hands were shaking, and the way he was sweating. This was someone who was obviously terrified.
She might have had more sympathy for him if she didn’t suspect that he’d murdered two women.
She could see Christopher looking over at her, obviously looking for a way that would let them open up Isaac Coleridge, getting him to talk. She suspected that challenging him with the crimes wouldn’t work, not yet. He would only deny them. She had to think of a more oblique way to approach it.
“Tell us about Lars Ingram,” she said.
He looked at her, obviously nonplussed. “What?”
“You’re his biggest fan, aren’t you? You sent him letters to tell him that. You even went to visit him in prison.”
He stared at her then, eyes widening. “How… how do you know that?”
“We checked the prison records,” Christopher said. “After someone killed two women using Lars Ingram’s MO.”
It was more direct than Paige would have preferred, but she could see the point of the question, obviously seeking to let Isaac know just how much trouble he was in, not giving him any room in which to squirm out.
“What?” Isaac said, looking around in something close to panic. “You think that I…”
“We think that you killed them,” Paige said. “You’re obviously obsessed with Ingram. We think obsessed enough to copy him.”
“No!” Isaac insisted. He held his hands up as if to ward off the accusation. “I didn’t do anything like that.”
“No?” Paige said. She shifted tack quickly, because sometimes the surprise of doing so could catch a suspect off guard enough to get them to give up information before they intended to. “Tell us about why you were fired, Isaac. Tell us about the women you were harassing.”
“That was all a misunderstanding,” Isaac said.
“Was it?” Christopher asked. “Is that what the women will say when they’re called as witnesses at your trial?”