He sounded genuinely confused.
“Christopher,” Paige said, starting to understand. “Look at them. Ms. Handel, are you safe? Did this man try to harm you?”
She looked both confused and frightened then. “No, of course not. Why would Ben do anything to hurt me?”
“Ben?” Christopher said. “You know him?”
“Of course I know him,” Lisa said. “He’s my boyfriend.”
Paige felt all the adrenaline that had been coursing through her until that moment run out of her in a rush, leaving her feeling suddenly empty and embarrassed. She’d thought that they were chasing down a killer, but they’d actually only found out that Astor’s tactic of reaching out to young women on his company’s books had finally worked for him.
“Where have you been for the last three nights?” Paige asked him. “Your neighbor says that you weren’t at home.”
“I was here, of course,” he said.
Paige looked over at Lisa Handel, who nodded.
“He was with me. Look, will one of you tell us what’s going on?”
What was going on was that they’d gotten it wrong. Paige had gotten it wrong. She’d leapt to the conclusion that Ben Astor might be their killer, and the moment there had been a fragment of evidence that supported that, she and Christopher had gone blundering in to try to capture him. Yes, they’d done it because they thought that a woman’s life was in danger, but they’d still smashed their way into her apartment and pointed a gun at her boyfriend.
Ben Astor wasn’t their killer. They were back to the start on this case, again.