“Hold on,” Christopher said, and took out his phone, making a call. “Yes, this is Agent Marriott. I’m going to need a trace on a number my associate will be calling. Yes, I’ll wait… right, thank you. I’ll text you her number now.”
Christopher nodded to Paige. “The techs are ready. Make the call and keep him talking so that they have time to narrow it down.”
Paige called the number they’d been given for Ben Astor. It rang a few times, and Paige was worried that it would just go through to voicemail, but then, thankfully, someone picked up.
“Hello?” a male voice said.
“Hello, Mr. Astor. My name is Paige. I was given your number by a friend who said that you helped her to get a job working as an overnight caretaker for an older lady. I hope you don’t mind me calling, but I hoped you might be able to help me to find something similar.”
There was a brief pause on the other end of the line. “I guess that I might be able to help,” Astor said, “but this isn’t the best time. I’m kind of in the middle of something.”
What did that mean? Given everything Paige suspected about him, she was terrified that it might mean that he was getting ready for another murder.
“This won’t take very long though,” Paige said. “I just wanted to tell you about my passion for caring, and maybe about the kind of client that I’m hoping you can find for me.”
“I’ll be happy to discuss it later, but for now, I really do have to hang up,” Astor said. The phone clicked into silence a moment or two later.
Paige looked over at Christopher, worried that she hadn’t managed to do enough. If Astor really was on the verge of killing someone, and they didn’t find him, then another woman might die. All because she hadn’t managed to keep him on the phone long enough.
Christopher smiled, though, as he looked up from his phone. “The techs were able to hack into the GPS signal for the phone. They’ve sent over the address. We have a location for Ben Astor.”
“We need to get over there, now,” Paige said.
They drove over, and as they did, Paige did her best to look up the location they were heading to. She wanted to know where Astor was, and what he was doing there. While Christopher drove, weaving in and out of the traffic at speed, Paige typed the address into her laptop, and found the name of the owner: Lisa Handel.
Paige looked her up as quickly as she could, and even the most basic of searches revealed a fact that made her blood run cold.
“Lisa Handel, the owner of the apartment we tracked the phone to? She works as a private nurse for an older couple. She’s exactly the kind of target our copycat likes. He’s going to kill her, Christopher.”
In that moment, Paige was convinced that they’d found their man, and that worse, he was already getting ready to kill again. If he was in Lisa Handel’s building, then he had to be at least scouting the area, if not actively in the process of trying to kill her. They had no more time to lose.
Thankfully, Christopher seemed to feel the same way, because they were driving along at speed now, lights flashing to keep cars out of the way. They skidded to a halt outside an apartment building, and Paige was already rushing out of the car as it came to a stop.
“It might be safer if you stay here,” Christopher said, getting out.
“No way,” Paige said. “I’m training to be an agent. That means I don’t just sit in the car and let you walk into danger alone.”
Christopher looked as though he might argue, but with so little time, there was nothing he could do but nod. “All right, but you stay behind me.”
They rushed into the apartment building, then up the stairs, heading for the apartment Ben Astor was in. Reaching it, they paused outside the door. Christopher had his gun out now, his expression set.
There was no question of knocking, not when that might spark Astor to finish his kill. Instead, Christopher kicked the door, breaking it open in one movement that sent splinters flying.
They plunged into the apartment together, and Paige saw a woman there, heard her scream in horror. A man who could only be Astor stood across from her. He was tall, in his early thirties, clean shaven, with short blond hair and a silver stud in one ear.
“Get your hands in the air Astor!” Christopher ordered. “Do it now!”
The woman screamed again. She was a little taller than Paige, slender, with dark hair. She was wearing a floral print dress and looked completely terrified.
“What did you do to my door?” she cried out.
As she said that, Paige started to get the feeling that something was very wrong here, and not just because of Lisa Handel’s reaction. There was also the fact that Astor was just standing there, in plain view, with no weapon in his hand. Then there was the way he kept glancing across to Lisa, not like he wanted to kill her; more like he wanted to make sure that she was ok.
“What is all this?” Astor demanded. “Who are you?”
“FBI,” Christopher said. “Don’t move. We know about what you’ve been doing.”
“What I’ve been doing?”