“Or maybe I think that you’re worth my full attention,” Paige suggested. “Maybe I don’t want us to be distracted while we talk.”
“I’ve got nothing to talk about with you,” Ingram said.
The guard moved to stand in the corner of the room, but Paige waved him away. “Wait outside, please.”
It took all of her nerve to say that. Once, back at the institute, she might have insisted upon it as a matter of course, wanting to get results that weren’t influenced by the observer effect of having a guard there watching every interaction she had with a patient. Now, after Adam Riker had escaped, threatening Paige and her mother, it was much harder to do.
She had to do it, though, if she was going to get answers.
The guard went reluctantly, shutting the door behind himself.
“Determined to show me how brave you are?” Ingram asked.
“Do you prefer women to be scared around you, Lars?” Paige shot back. She wasn’t just going to come out and ask him for help this time. That obviously wasn’t the way to get anything out of him.
He shrugged. “I prefer them to die.”
It was terrifying, the nonchalant way he said that: a reminder that this was a genuine psychopath, one who truly didn’t care when it came to others, maybe even didn’t view them as real.
“But only ones who are taking care of someone else?” Paige asked. It was important to build up to the real questions slowly, working their way around to them, trying to build trust. “Why them, Lars. Who hurt you to make you want to hurt them?”
“You think you can understand me that easily?” he snapped back. “You think I killed them because… what? Some babysitter abused me when I was a kid?”
“Did they?” Paige asked.
“You want to know the real reason?” Ingram said. “Because they’re weak. They spend their time following around after old people who should be left to die. They spend their time pretending that they care, taking the money.”
“So it’s a sense of justice that motivates you?” Paige asked.
Ingram smiled at her across the table. “Is this where you ask me to help you to catch the killer you’re chasing out of a sense of justice?”
His tone made it clear that he wasn’t going to give her an answer just because of that, so Paige backed away from that approach.
“No. I’m interested in you.”
There was no doubt that Lars Ingram would only be interested in himself. It was just a question of finding a bridge to the things that Paige actually wanted to know.
“Are you?” he said. “What, are you planning to write a book about me?”
“My PhD was on serial killers,” Paige said. “Maybe I will write about you. But for that, I’d need information.”
“All about what made me into me?” Lars Ingram said. He gave her a look of almost snarling hatred, lunging forward to the limits of the cuffs that held him in place so that Paige jumped back in spite of herself. Ingram laughed then, long and loud, obviously enjoying her discomfort. “You don’t know half of what I’ve done.”
“There’s a pretty well documented list of the people you killed,” Paige pointed out.
“That? They didn’t get close to the reality. You’re still trying to work out why I did it? Maybe I just discovered that I liked doing it. Maybe I just found that I was good at violence, that I enjoyed it. Have you ever killed anyone, Miss FBI?”
Paige found herself thinking back to the moment when she’d been standing over Adam Riker, holding Christopher’s gun. When he’d been taunting her, trying to get her to finish him. She could remember the part of her that had held back, and the freedom that had come from knowing that she didn’t have to be as bad as him, just out of some sense of revenge.
“No,” Paige admitted, “I haven’t.”
“What was that look?” Ingram asked, and Paige could see that she’d caught his interest.
She knew that she should tell him, then, tell him exactly what had happened with Adam. But hadn’t that been exactly the mistake she’d made with Adam? She’d given up information, thinking that it couldn’t hurt, and it had, more than she could have imagined.
“I haven’t killed anyone,” she repeated.
“Ah, but you’ve wanted to, or you came close. You should have. Maybe then you’d understand what it’s like.” There was a note of contempt in Lars Ingram’s voice. “You can’t understand the pure satisfaction at the moment of the kill, the knowledge that you’re just better than someone.”