The trouble was that the victims didn’t seem to have that much in common beyond their age and their choice of profession. If those were really the only ways the killer was choosing his victims, then there was no real link back to him, no thread that they could follow that might end at his doorstep.
Then a thought hit Paige.
“Wait, it’s not about why he’s selecting his victims; it’s about how. His motives don’t matter right now, but it does matter where he’s going to spot his victims.”
Any point of connection between Marta, Zoe and Amelie might show where the killer had first spotted the three of them. Once they had that, then they had somewhere they could start looking for answers.
The difficulty lay in finding that point of connection, because the three of them didn’t seem to have very much in common, based on a combination of what Paige could find in the files and what was available to look up about the women. Marta Huarez had been a part of a big, bustling family, while Zoe Wells didn’t really have anyone, and Amelie Pichou’s family was back in France. Their workplaces were entirely separate, and they didn’t seem to have any friends in common on social media. As for socializing, Paige wasn’t sure that they even got any time to do that, but the few references she could find to it in Marta and Zoe’s profiles didn’t have any obvious locations in common. It wasn’t as if all the overnight caretakers went to drink in one bar together.
Paige felt certain that there had to be something, though. It seemed that Christopher did too.
“You’re looking for a connection between them?” he asked.
“If we find that, we might find where the killer first picked them out as potential targets,” Paige said.
“Ok,” Christopher said. “I’m going to make a couple of calls to try to see if anyone close to them heard one of them mention the others. Sometimes, with something like this, it can be that simple.”
Paige nodded, and watched as he flicked through a notebook, obviously looking for the relevant phone numbers. It meant that she didn’t have to do it, and that she could keep her focus on the information in front of her, trying to make some sense of all of it.
“Hello, is that Marta Huarez’s sister? This is Agent Christopher Marriott, with the FBI. I’m looking into your sister’s death… Yes, that’s right. I know this must be very hard for you. I had a question about your sister that I hoped you might be able to answer for me. Did she ever mention women named Zoe Wells or Amelie Pichou to you? In any context? I’m trying to establish if she knew them. Please, take your time. You’re sure? Well, thank you for your time.”
Paige knew without asking that Christopher hadn’t had any luck with the first call, but her attention was firmly on trying to think of other ways that the three women might have some kind of connection. It occurred to her then that, if the killer was trying to target women working in caring professions, then the point of connection for the three of them was likely to be something to do with their work. Paige tried to think. How did people get jobs like that? She guessed that some applied to vacancies directly, but it was much more likely that they applied through an agency.
Paige looked through the files on the first couple of victims, searching for any reference to the agencies that had gotten them the job. She found what she was looking for in Zoe Wells’s financial details: she got paid through something called the Sunshine Care Agency.
“Are you about to call the von Ryans?” Paige asked Christopher.
He nodded.
“Can you ask them if they found Amelie through an agency?”
“You think you’ve found something?”
“Not yet, but people working in their field often work through agencies, right? And if I wanted to find details about a lot of women doing that kind of work as a killer, then maybe an agency would be the place to start.”
She could see how that caught Christopher’s interest. “I’ll check.”
While he was doing that, Paige decided that she wanted to check up on Lars Ingram’s victims. They were two separate cases, but was it possible that the copycat had copied, not just Ingram’s method of killing, but also his approach to finding victims?
Paige didn’t know, but she was determined to find out. She called up the files on the Ingram case, looking back through the financial details of the victims, which seemed to have been included in the files as a matter of course. With most of them, there was nothing direct, but in two more cases, Paige saw references to the Sunshine Care Agency.
By the time she was done, Christopher was getting off the phone. Paige looked over at him expectantly.
“Yes, they used an agency to hire her, one based here in D.C.”
“Did you get a name for it?” Paige asked.
“The Sunshine Care Agency.”
Suddenly, Paige could feel excitement building in her. “That’s also the name of the agency Zoe Wells was hired through, and a couple of Lars Ingram’s victims.”
She searched for the agency, and pulled up a glossy web page, promising to find highly trained care staff For All Your Care Needs.
“That might not mean anything. I mean, Ingram’s cases are separate.”
“Not if this killer learned about how he found some of his victims and decided to copy that part too,” Paige said.
Christopher was starting to look a little more convinced, but it still obviously wasn’t absolute.
“Was Marta Huarez hired through them?” he asked.
Paige shook her head. “But that might not mean anything. With a lot of these places, people go on the books of several agencies. Maybe Marta sent them her resume but got her job a different way before they found her anything. There are a lot of ways for an employment agency to be aware of people without actually finding them a job.”
Resumes, connections to other agencies, lists of potential workers built up through contacts to maybe poach away later for different jobs. An agency might have plenty of people on its books who didn’t get their current job through them directly.
“It’s possible,” Christopher conceded, “and we don’t have much else to go on right now until the forensic reports come back.”
“They have an address in D.C.,” Paige said, looking over the website. “It’s not that far.”
“Then we’ll go there,” Christopher replied. “And maybe we’ll be able to find out how our killer is finding his victims once we’re there.”