CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Paige found her thoughts lingering on Lars Ingram’s last moments as she and Christopher drove back towards the FBI headquarters. She knew that there should be a kind of grim satisfaction in knowing that the serial killer could never hurt anyone else, but her focus was on how little she’d managed to get from him.
One word. All that effort, all that time, all the horror of watching a man die in front of her, and Paige had only gotten a single word from Lars Ingram before he died. She didn’t even know what it meant, if it meant anything at all.
It certainly didn’t do anything to stop the copycat. He was still out there somewhere, and Paige was sure now that he’d killed far more people than the three that they knew about.
“I want to go back via the coroner’s office,” Christopher said. “Lamar is going to rush through his examination on the bones, and I want to be there when he does.”
Paige nodded. That made sense to her. Any evidence they could get now might help them. Any scrap might be enough to point them in the right direction to stop the copycat killer before he struck again.
“Do you think there’s any chance the killer might stop now?” Christopher asked.
Paige looked over to him. She hadn’t really considered that possibility. “Why do you ask?”
“It looks like the killings were about the build up to the execution, right?” Christopher said.
Paige nodded. “That definitely looks like it was the spark for the last few killings. Certainly for them being so close together.”
“So, now that it has happened, is it possible that the killer will decide that he has completed his ‘tribute’ to Ingram, or whatever it is he’s doing, and he’ll decide that there’s no point in keeping going?”
Paige wished that it were that simple. “It’s possible, but it doesn’t seem likely. It’s very rare that serial killers just stop. This one might take a break after the execution, but my guess is that he will feel the need again eventually, and act on it. Honestly, though, if he’s been killing for three years now, my guess is that he will just keep going, trying to get in as many murders as possible without being caught.”
That was a terrifying thought: that a serial killer might kill at a rate of one a day until they caught up to him. How many young women would lose their lives before he was finally apprehended?
“So not even a moment of breathing space,” Christopher said. Perhaps he’d been hoping for a day or two in which to work the evidence without worrying about the lives that might be lost in the meantime.
Sadly, Paige had to disappoint him. “Maybe this killer will pause, but my guess is that he will keep going at his current rate now that he has realized that he can. It’s like a drug fix for him. Now that he has ramped up, coming down from it and trying not to kill will feel almost physically painful.”
Serial killers escalated and accelerated. Yes, some had gaps between their kills, but those were the ones who did so for reasons of ritual or because they tried to fight against the urge to kill for as long as possible. Now that this killer was killing rapidly, Paige doubted that he would go back to having gaps between his kills again. Either she and Christopher would catch him, or many more women were going to die. That was a terrifying thought, when they had so little to go on.
They arrived at the mortuary, heading through into a space that was cold enough to make Paige shiver, or maybe that was just down to the knowledge that there were bodies waiting for autopsies. The whole space had a very clean, very medical look to it, with even the waiting room looking like that of an expensive doctor’s office.
Christopher nodded to the young woman at the reception desk. “Hey Janice. How are you?”
She was probably in her mid-twenties, with dark hair and heavy black makeup, plenty of tattoos showing on forearms left bare by the scrubs she wore.
“I’m fine thanks, Agent Marriott. You’re here to see Dr. Neilson?”
Paige saw Christopher nod.
“Go straight through. He’s expecting you.”
They went through into an autopsy room where fleshless white bones were laid out on a table so that the coroner from the Nikki Ashenko murder scene could look at them. Several lamps shone down to provide almost painfully bright light for the examination, while a box held evidence bags with even the tiniest particulates labeled.
“Lamar,” Christopher said. “How are things going with the autopsy for the body in the stream?”
“Slowly,” Lamar replied. “How did you even find the body, Agent Marriott?”
“Paige here worked out what must have happened the night Nikki Ashenko went missing, and that allowed us to find her.”
Lamar held up a warning finger.
“Assuming it is her,” Christopher said, sounding as though the two of them had been through that conversation before.
“Better,” Lamar said. “Although in this case, I have yet to find anything that isn’t consistent with the hypothesis that this might be that young woman. Certainly, these are the bones of a woman in her early twenties, and given the location where you found them, it’s enough for a tentative identification. I will have to wait for DNA results to provide something more substantial.”
“Cause of death?” Christopher said.