CHAPTER NINETEEN
As soon as Paige walked back into Christopher’s office, she could see that he didn’t have anything that was going to blow the case wide open. He was pacing too much, looking too intently through the files, and there wasn’t the expression of triumph on his face that there might have been if he’d managed to find something that would actually lead to the killer.
Paige was surprised that she’d learned to read his expressions so well. Had she really spent that much time looking his way? She knew that she must have, and even though she tried to tell herself that it was just because Christopher was someone she’d been in life-or-death situations with, she knew that it was more than that.
Except that it couldn’t be; Paige had to remind herself very firmly of that.
“How did things go at the prison?” Christopher asked, as he turned and saw her entering the room. “Are you ok?”
Paige shook her head. “I’m fine, but I didn’t get anything out of Ingram. I got the feeling that he just wanted to play games and boast about how we didn’t know half of what he’d done. He said that if I came to his execution, he might tell me something then, but that’s just him playing another game.”
Christopher seemed to think for a moment or two. “I agree. I don’t think we’re going to get anything out of following the Ingram lead further. Are you sure you’re ok? I realized when you were gone that this would be your first time talking to a killer alone since…”
“Since Adam,” Paige said. “I know. And yes, it brought up some stuff, but it didn’t stop me from doing my job.”
“I never thought it would,” Christopher said. “I was just worried.”
Paige shrugged. “I’m ok. Or I will be, once we actually catch this copycat killer. How did things go at the recruitment agency?”
The fact that Christopher hadn’t come out and shouted about some further lead that he’d found supported the idea that there wasn’t anything, but Paige still asked, hoping that she was wrong, and that he’d at least found something that they might be able to turn into more with further work.
“I looked at everyone who works there,” Christopher said. “None of them seem like suspects. They all have alibis for at least one of the last three nights, and there’s nothing in their pasts to suggest that they might be the kind of person who would do this. I also checked to see if Marta Huarez had so much as sent in a resume, even if it was rejected. As far as I can tell, she didn’t.”
Which made it unlikely that the killer was finding his victims through the recruitment agency. It meant that the connection Paige had thought she’d found was just coincidence after all. The idea that they’d spent most of a day running around after leads that had turned out not to be relevant was a frustrating one. It meant that the killer just had that much more time in which to plan his next murder.
“Is there anything on the forensics?” Paige asked. She knew that she was there to help with the profiling side of things, but she found herself hoping then that some fragment of forensic evidence would give her the spark she needed to help Christopher find this killer.
“I’m reading through the preliminary reports now,” Christopher said. “Although some things will take longer in the labs to confirm. At the moment, it looks as though there aren’t any unexpected prints at any of the crime scenes, and no DNA that we picked up at the Amelie Pichou scene matches any that we have on file.”
Meaning that they weren’t going to catch the killer with a convenient strand of hair or ungloved hand at the scene. Paige could feel Christopher’s frustration at the lack of physical evidence, or maybe it was just her own frustration at the answer not being simple, when this killer was likely to strike again soon.
“The lack of evidence tells us that he’s careful,” Paige said. “There’s also maybe something to the part where he’s targeted victims in a couple of wealthy homes.”
“He didn’t take anything, though,” Christopher pointed out, “so I doubt that this is about the money. And Zoe Wells was killed in a retirement home. An upscale one, sure, but still not a fancy house.”
“I don’t think it’s about the money,” Paige said. “But maybe there’s a part of it that’s about the challenge? Wealthier homes are more likely to have high tech alarm systems, and the retirement home had cameras he had to avoid.”
Of course, that was all just conjecture, and Christopher seemed to know that too.
“We have no real way of knowing for sure,” he said. “And even if we did, then I’m not sure that it would help us to find him. At most, it helps us to narrow down his list of future targets.”
The worst part was that, at the moment, that seemed to be all they were left with: trying to narrow down the list of future targets in the hope that they could keep them safe. That gave Paige another potential piece of the puzzle.
“Maybe that’s a part of it too,” she said. “This isn’t a group where we can give them all protection, or even ask them to stay home for a few days while we solve this. We can’t ask them to leave town for a while like we did with some of the people that we thought Adam Riker was going to target, because then other lives would be at risk.”
Paige realized that insight wasn’t any more helpful than the last one had been.
“Sorry. I should be able to give you more than this.”
“Can you tell me something about the kind of person this is likely to be?” Christopher asked. “That might help us get closer to working out who he is.”
Paige nodded. That much, she could do. “I can give you a few basics, and maybe a few general guesses based on what we’ve seen of the crimes so far.”
She watched Christopher sit down behind his desk, opening up his computer, and Paige realized that he was actually preparing to take notes. It felt so strange, with her observations being taken that seriously by someone in the middle of catching a killer. Yes, she’d done assessments on criminals at the institute, and she’d helped out with the first case, so it wasn’t as if she was entirely unused to being listened to, but it still made for a big change from writing a PhD thesis that was destined to be read by maybe a dozen people if she was lucky.
Paige took a seat opposite Christopher, trying to gather her thoughts.
“We used to think that the most likely profile for a serial killer was a white male in his mid to late twenties, possibly of above average intelligence,” she said. “Some of the more recent analyses of people who have killed more than once suggests that almost none of that is necessarily true for the US. Yes, serial killers are overwhelmingly male, but only 52% are white, and a mere 27% fall into that mid to late twenties age range.” Paige realized the way she was setting it out. “Sorry, I’m lecturing.”