CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
Paige was anxious as she returned to her apartment, but also driven. She wasn’t going there to sit on the couch and wallow in despair, the way she might have before talking to Professor Thornton.
The killer was still out there, so she only had a short amount of time. She needed somewhere that she could work.
Until she had this figured out, Paige suspected that the FBI offices were out. She didn’t want to go back there only to find Christopher still trying to pressure Cal Sanders to confess. She wouldn’t be free there to work on the things that she wanted. Either she would have to help with trying to find proof that Sanders was a murderer when she didn’t believe that he was, or she was going to face the potential of another argument with Christopher about why she wasn’t helping.
Maybe the news of the first argument had already gotten around. Maybe it was working its way back to her superiors at the academy even as Paige thought about it. It was possible that at any moment, she might receive a call telling her that she had to return, if only so that they could tell her formally that she would never be an FBI agent.
Paige just hoped that she could come up with something before that point.
Her apartment felt strange as she settled down in it with her laptop. She hadn’t been there in weeks now, since she started at the academy, so everything felt strangely still and untouched there, more of a repository of memories than a place currently lived in. This had been where Paige had finished her thesis, where she’d made the decision to join the FBI, where she’d decided the whole course of her life to come.
Now, it was where she needed to learn more about a killer.
Paige didn’t have the board with her timeline on it; that was back in Christopher’s office in the FBI building. Still, she had enough notes and files on her computer to recreate it now, sticking a large piece of paper to her refrigerator with fridge magnets and drawing on it with a set of multi-colored markers she found half buried in a kitchen drawer.
Paige wrote the three most recent murders in blue, for cases that were definitely the work of the copycat killer. She added in Nikki Ashenko’s death in the same color. The other murder on the same day went in red, to show that it was definitely Lars Ingram’s work.
Those were the only certainties, so the other murders went on there in yellow, for the moment, ready to be underlined in one color or the other as Paige made progress.
Her next avenue of investigation was to go through what she could find of the case against Lars Ingram. The murder he’d been tied to with DNA seemed as though it could be confidently underlined in red.
There were some where he appeared to have admitted to them after his conviction. That caught Paige’s interest. Why those, and not others? She marked the ones he’d admitted to in red, with the others.
Where did that leave her? Not far enough along, not yet. Paige found herself remembering Ingram’s words to her: “You don’t know half of what I’ve done.” Assuming as before that he meant that he’d committed far more murders than people thought, she added in the missing persons cases that she and Christopher had managed to identify before as possibly linked to the case.
Ok, so she had a timeline. Now what?
This was the point where Paige had gotten distracted by the Nikki Ashenko murder before. Now, though, she stared at the timeline, hoping that it would unlock its secrets. She kept staring at it, trying to think of all the ways that she might be able to differentiate between cases that were Lars Ingram’s work and those that were the work of the other killer; it seemed almost wrong to call him just a copycat by now. He was a colleague, an equal. A… rival?
That thought made Paige take another look at the timeline. Did it do anything to help her find patterns there in the data she had? Finding that kind of pattern was something she was supposedly good at, thanks to her PhD. So where were the patterns here?
Paige kept looking, walked away, and came back to stare at the timeline once again. One thing stood out to her: There was a point, shortly before the Nikki Ashenko murder, when the volume of potential kills suddenly went up. In theory, that kind of escalation could happen with one killer, but since Paige already knew that there were two, it seemed reasonable to her to assume that it might have been then that the second killer began his own, parallel spree.
That still didn’t solve the problem of attributing kills to either Ingram or the copycat, except that it gave all the kills before that point definitively to Ingram. Paige underlined them in red, although honestly, it only gave her three more cases that were absolutely Ingram’s.
What about the rest? How was she meant to go about dividing those, when there seemed to be no real pattern to the data? When the kills seemed not to take place at regular intervals, but in lumps and clusters, with a couple of murders maybe happening close together and then a gap?
Paige tried looking for a pattern in the data by trying to draw waveforms over the timeline, trying to see if each killer had his own rhythm, and if the presence of the other’s work was only obscuring that. There was nothing as regular as that, though.
Paige went and sat down on the couch. It was impossible not to feel a little dejected. She wasn’t solving this the way she’d hoped. She’d thought that the patterns would be there in the data, obvious to see. She’d thought that it would make it easy to come to a conclusion.
What did the copycat want?
That was the problem: there could be plenty of different things he might want. He might want to continue what he saw as Ingram’s glorious work. He might want to just keep killing as many people as possible before he was caught. He might want to transition to another method of killing now that the figure he was copying was dead. He might be doing this for the fame, for a sense of power, for the challenge, or simply because some voice in his head told him that he had to.
It was even possible, although Paige doubted it, that he might see his work as complete and just stop, at least for now.
When her takeout order came, Paige found that she wasn’t hungry after all. She couldn’t settle, and went downstairs to walk around the block, hoping that the physical activity would make it easier to think. Some of her best ideas for her thesis had come while walking in one of the local parks, or sitting on a bench, trying to think of anything else other than work.
Paige left her phone behind as she walked. She suspected that, at some point, Christopher would come out of his interrogation of Cal Sanders for long enough to see that she was gone, and at that point, he would start to message her to try to get her to come back.
Or maybe he wouldn’t, and that would be worse.
Paige walked, and as she walked, she looked around herself at the streets of D.C. The local park wasn’t far now, just across the next street. Paige could feel herself relaxing a little as she walked, but that relaxation wasn’t absolute. There was still a part of her that was working on the case, trying to understand the copycat killer better, trying to find a way into his personality and motivation that might allow her to predict what he was going to do next. He was out there somewhere, might be stalking his next victim even now.
She was still thinking about it when her eyes fell on a couple of public tennis courts set in the park, there for anyone who wanted to play for fun or exercise. Currently a couple of kids in their teens were running back and forth, hitting the ball to one another, sustaining a long rally until finally the ball thudded into the chain link fence around the court and one of them whooped in triumph.