“Hello?” she said.
Christopher held out his ID. “I’m Agent Marriott, with the FBI. This is my associate, Dr. Paige King. Mrs. Trenton?”
Paige saw the woman’s expression go from harassed to worried, but there was also a note of understanding there.
“This is about Nikki, isn’t it? The FBI coming all the way out here, it can only be about one thing. Have you found her?”
Paige shook her head. “We haven’t. We were hoping that we could ask you what happened that night.”
Mrs. Trenton’s expression took on a pained look.
“I hoped that you might be able to tell me,” she said. “Arthur and I were going out to dinner in the city. We got her to look after the children, the way she did a dozen times before. Then, when we got back, she was simply… gone. No note, no explanation. The children were asleep, so they couldn’t tell us what had happened, either.”
All of that fit with the report, and Paige didn’t think that they were going to get much more out of this woman or her family.
“Did Nikki ever talk about wanting to leave?” Christopher asked, obviously trying to establish if there were any reasons to think that this might just be a missing persons case. “About having a new boyfriend, maybe, or about having dreams that would mean going somewhere else?”
“No, not at all,” Mrs. Trenton said. “That was a part of what made it all so strange. She was happy here. She didn’t have any reason to leave, in spite of what the local police thought.”
That was very different from the reports at the time. Those had assumed that this was just a missing young woman. Paige was increasingly suspicious that it was more than that.
“Thank you for your time,” she said. “Is it all right if we take a look around the area?”
“Yes, of course,” Mrs. Trenton said. “You’re welcome to come in and look around too. Although I don’t know what you’ll find now that all this time has passed.”
Paige wasn’t sure either, but she felt that she and Christopher had to try. She tried to put herself into the head of the missing young woman; tried to work out what might have happened.
She looked over to Christopher and stepped away a little so that the two of them could talk. “Assume for a moment that she didn’t run away, because there’s no reason to think that she did.”
Christopher nodded. “That seems a reasonable enough assumption.”
“Ok, so what if it was our copycat? We know he likes to break into houses.”
“But he leaves the bodies there,” Christopher pointed out.
“But what if Nikki heard him? What if she spotted him trying to ambush her? What would she do then?”
“Call the cops, probably,” Christopher said. He didn’t have to say that there was no record of such a call in the file.
“Only if she had enough time,” Paige said. “The cops are great if you can hide in a room somewhere and wait for them, but what if he was too close for that?”
“She might have tried to fight, or run,” Christopher said. His voice said that he understood where this was going.
“I think that she would have run,” Paige said. “She saw a strange man in the house, and she would have thought about the danger the children were in. She would have tried to lead him away. She could have tried to run for one of the other houses, but since no one saw anything, my guess is that she went the other way.”
Paige looked towards the woods.
“I guess she could have tried to lose him in there,” Christopher said. “Although I’m pretty sure the local cops would have at least walked through that woodland to check for her before they wrote the whole thing off.”
“I still want to look,” Paige said. “If they weren’t really looking, they may have missed something.”
Christopher looked a little doubtful. “After so much time, it’s possible we won’t find anything.”
“It’s our best shot.”
“True.”
Together, they walked over to the patch of woodland. By day, it had a pleasant feel to it, the warmth of the sun cut through the shade of the trees and wildflowers there around their bases. At night, though? With someone chasing? Paige guessed that it would have been a terrifying place.