CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
To Paige, Ben Astor’s home looked more suited to a small family than to a single recruitment consultant. It stood in the suburbs, amid rows of other houses that had the same square, identically built look to them. It had a small patch of lawn out front, a driveway with enough room for a couple of cars, and a neatly trimmed hedge dividing it from its neighbors. There was no car in the driveway, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.
It seemed quiet, peaceful, and not at all the kind of place where a serial killer might live. Yet the more Paige thought about Ben Astor, the stronger a possibility he appeared to be the copycat killer.
He had access to the files for Zoe Wells and Amelie Pichou. It seemed entirely possible that he might have been able to find details for Marta Huarez somewhere else, perhaps from a resume sent in to him but not logged into the system, perhaps from an online job board somewhere.
He was undoubtedly a creep as well, just based on the reasons he’d been fired from the recruitment agency. There was no doubt that he’d used the information he had in inappropriate ways.
Maybe being rejected and fired had been what pushed him into killing. Maybe he’d gotten angry, looked around, and seen Lars Ingram’s work. Maybe he’d decided that copying it was exactly what he needed right then.
It was a lot of maybes, but as they got ready to walk up to the house, Paige felt confident that they would be able to find answers here, one way or another.
She and Christopher walked up to the front door. Christopher hammered on it, the two of them waiting there in silence, listening to see if there was any response from inside the house.
It was silent. There was certainly no sign of anyone coming to the door. Did that mean that Astor was out, or that he was hiding, having worked out that they were law enforcement? No one watching them walk up would have mistaken Paige and Christopher for anything other than FBI.
“I’m going to check around the back,” Christopher said. He didn’t add ‘in case he makes a run for it,’ but Paige knew that was what it had to be. Paige watched Christopher go and realized that she was basically guarding the front door now. If Astor suddenly came bursting out, she was the one who was going to have to slow him down or stop him.
Christopher was trusting her to do that, and Paige just hoped that she would be able to remember enough of her training to deal with it if necessary. She wasn’t a helpless grad student anymore. She was most of the way, well, some of the way, to being a trained FBI agent.
Paige was still waiting out there when she saw a man come out of the house next door. He was in his fifties, balding, wearing slacks and a cardigan.
“Excuse me,” he said. “What exactly do you and your friend think you’re doing, wandering around someone else’s property? I’ll call the police.”
It occurred to Paige that maybe it wasn’t obvious to everyone that she and Christopher were with the FBI. It seemed that, to Ben Astor’s neighbor, they looked like they were casing the property, getting ready to burgle it. She guessed that she should just be grateful that this was the kind of quiet suburban place where people came out and threatened to call the police, rather than rushing out guns blazing to deal with the threat.
“We’re with the FBI,” Paige said. “My partner is an agent, and I’m…” What was she now? A trainee? Certainly not a full-blown profiler yet. “…consulting with him on a case. We need to speak to Ben Astor urgently.”
It seemed that Paige managed to inject the right note of authority into her voice to be believed, because the neighbor’s expression changed almost instantly from one of stern confrontation to something far more helpful.
“You won’t find him here. He didn’t come home last night.”
“You’re certain of that?” Paige asked.
“I keep a very close eye on the neighborhood, looking out for my neighbors, making sure that there isn’t any trouble.”
He made being a nosy neighbor sound practically like a public service. In this case, though, it was potentially useful.
“So Mr. Astor didn’t come home last night,” Paige repeated.
“Not for several nights, in fact,” his neighbor said. “Oh, has something happened to him? Is that why you’re here? Do you think he’s in some kind of danger?”
“No, we don’t have any reason to believe that right now,” Paige said. But right then, she did have plenty of reasons to think that Ben Astor might be their guy. Mysteriously gone at night, right on the nights when the murders had been taking place?
Christopher came around the corner. “There’s no sign of him at home.”
“He isn’t here,” Paige said. “His neighbor here was just explaining to me how he hasn’t come home at night for the last few nights.”
She could see that Christopher understood the importance of that instantly.
“Thank you for your assistance, sir,” he said to the neighbor, and gestured for Paige to head back to the car with him. “We need to find him, now.”
Paige nodded. “The only question is how. If he’s not at home, and he’s been fired from work… wait, I have an idea. We have a phone number for him, right? Could we trace that to find his location?”
“Potentially,” Christopher said. “Although to be completely precise, it’s better if we have him on the phone for a while.”
“I can keep him talking,” Paige promised. She already knew how to play this. “Just set up the trace.”