“Yes, that’s right. I… we have a webcam set up, letting us keep an eye on the property while we’re away. I checked in on it, and I saw… I saw… Amelie was just lying there. I didn’t know what to do. I ended up calling the police here, but of course I don’t speak much French or German, and it took forever to explain to them what was going on.”
“And they contacted us,” Christopher said.
“Ms. von Ryan,” Paige asked. “Amelie was your au pair?”
“Yes, that’s… Oh God, how am I going to break this to the children?”
An au pair definitely fit the serial killer’s pattern, but Paige wanted to know more.
“And when was it decided that she wouldn’t accompany you on vacation? I guess a lot of people might have taken their au pair to look after the children while they skied.”
Ms. von Ryan seemed a little caught by surprise by that question. “We made the decision a few weeks ago. We thought it would be a nice break for Amelie, and since Eddie and I aren’t at work, looking after the children isn’t an issue. If we’d just taken her with us…”
“You couldn’t have known,” Paige said. But the killer had known. He’d planned this in advance. He’d known that last night, Amelie Pichou would be alone in the house. “Tell me, did you talk about your vacation on social media?”
“Well, yes,” Ms. von Ryan said. “I was so excited to take the children away skiing like this, and we weren’t worried about burglars seeing the post because Amelie was staying home. Plus, we have a state-of-the-art security system.”
Which hadn’t been switched on, and so hadn’t slowed the killer down at all.
Christopher took over the questioning again then. “Ms. von Ryan, when you were looking at the camera, did you see anything out of place? Anything that wouldn’t normally have been in your living room?”
“Just Amelie, with her lying there, and the blood…”
It was obvious that Amelie’s employer was in shock after everything she’d seen. Paige doubted that after what she’d seen, she would have picked up any details at all, no matter how unusual they seemed.
Christopher obviously felt the same way.
“Is it possible that we could get access to the footage from the webcam?” he asked.
“We… didn’t set it to record,” Ms. von Ryan said. “I only glanced in out of curiosity. Recording everything would have felt as though we didn’t trust Amelie.”
So they were mistrustful enough to watch her, but not enough to record what was happening? That was frustrating to Paige, because it meant that one potentially crucial piece of evidence simply didn’t exist. The camera could have given them their first real look at the killer, but instead, they had nothing.
“Thank you for your time, Ms. von Ryan,” Christopher said. “You’ve been very helpful. If you remember any details at all, please, don’t hesitate to get in touch.”
Paige couldn’t help feeling a surge of disappointment as he hung up. Maybe they would get some evidence from the crime scene, but the killer’s previous murders suggested that he was more careful than that. Even if they did, it would take time, and this killer seemed to be acting much faster than Lars Ingram ever had. It meant that Paige and Christopher had to come up with another way to find him, and fast.