CHAPTER NINE
Paige sat in an uncomfortable chair in the precinct of the Las Vegas PD, waiting while Detective Sanchez processed Lucas Francisco. She and Christopher had managed to borrow an office, and Paige’s eyes followed him as he worked on the other side of it, going over the files there.
It was hard not to watch him while he worked, in spite of her best efforts. It was obvious that there was something wrong between the two of them, because he was barely looking Paige’s way, and the atmosphere between them was awkwardly professional, where before it had been friendly and jokey.
Did he feel the same way that she did? It was hard to imagine that he could, when he was so obviously a happily married man. Paige had met his wife, and she seemed perfect. Yet he was acting the way she had before, keeping his distance as if he couldn’t trust himself to be any closer.
Paige had to distract herself from those thoughts, and the best way to do that was to go back to the case files for the investigation, trying to lose herself in the details and the hunt for information. She found herself looking over the crime scene photographs again, trying to find anything that the police on the scene might have missed. She went through the evidence lists, looking for anything that had been noted too casually that might be relevant, anything that might point her in a new direction that the police hadn’t considered so far.
The police looked like they’d done a good job, though. They’d been thorough when it came to the scenes of the murder, making notes of every scrap of evidence, testing everything for the possibility of DNA or fingerprints. The killer had been more careful than that, though. He hadn’t left any obvious physical traces that could be used to find him.
Paige felt certain that wasn’t the way they were going to catch him. If it were that straightforward, the Las Vegas PD would have done it by now. No, she needed to get back to the question of motive, and trying to understand the killer. His methods made his obsession with magic obvious. There had to be something that they could latch onto with that, something that they could use in order to get to whoever was doing this.
A killer who used magic as part of his MO. Why did that thought pull at the edges of Paige’s mind? Obviously, the whole of this case was about it, but there was something else, something that Paige half remembered from her wider research for her Ph.D. Something in the past, well before this current spree.
She went looking for it on her computer, typing in the words “magician serial killer” into her search engine. Inevitably, the most recent results were all news or comments relating to the most recent murders. It meant having to trawl deeper, past all of that, putting in filters specifically to exclude anything too recent and allowing her to look for older material.
Soon, Paige found what she was looking for, and it made her simply stare at the screen for several seconds.
“Christopher, listen to this. There was a killer thirty years ago in Las Vegas, by the name of Ruben Wendel, another magician. He used to specialize in making his victims vanish.”
“You think this could be linked to him?” Christopher asked. “He’s resurfaced, or a copycat?”
“I don’t know,” Paige admitted. “He can’t be involved in this directly, when he’s currently thirty years into a life sentence. Mostly, I just think that, if we’re chasing a magician who kills, then one way to get insights might be to talk to another one.”
Christopher nodded. “That might get us something. You’re planning to go see him?”
“I think it might help.”
“I want to keep going working through the crime scene reports and running down everyone linked to the theater. Meet me back here after you’ve done it?”
He wasn’t going with her? Paige swallowed with sudden nerves at that thought, and had to remind herself that she’d talked to plenty of killers in the past, and that splitting up was probably the best way for them to cover the most ground at once. In any case, Paige was an FBI agent now. She should be able to do this without Christopher there to hold her hand.
It might even make things simpler if she wasn’t spending all her time glancing over at him to check on him; but at the same time, could she really do this alone? She had to try.
“I’ll let you know what I find out.”
*
Paige sat in a room of the Nevada State penitentiary, really wishing at this point that Christopher were there with her. She tried to tell herself that she was more than capable of doing this alone now that she was an agent, that she had done this kind of thing alone in the past, but it didn’t make a lot of difference to her then. In spite of her thoughts about getting away from him for a while, Paige found that she wanted him there, and not just because he was her partner. There was something comforting about his presence, something that made her feel safe.
Paige didn’t feel safe here, not in a gray walled room, sitting at a metal table, where a metal chair opposite her had hooks to fasten shackles and a single camera stared down at her. Those measures should have felt as though they protected her from the possibility of harm, but instead, they mostly served to remind Paige of the dangerous man she was about to meet.
Paige tried to remind herself as she sat there that she wasn’t just a frightened academic now, waiting in a mental institution to speak to serial killers, the way she had been before. She was a trained FBI agent, more than capable of defending herself. Telling herself that didn’t make sitting here waiting for a serial killer any less creepy, though.
The door to the interview room opened and Ruben Wendel came in, flanked by a pair of guards. He was a black man in his sixties, stooped and spindly, with long fingered hands and gray hair. His wrists and ankles were contained by manacles, which the guards fastened to the table before stepping back outside.
“We’ll be right out here if he gives you any trouble, Agent,” one of them said as the two of them left.
Paige nodded, wanting to try to convey that she was sure she would be fine, and that she could handle anything this man threw at her. First, though, she would need to find a way to convince herself of that.
“You’re scared of me,” Ruben said, fixing Paige with a cold expression. There was a familiar note there, or rather, a familiar absence where something else should have been. The absence of warmth or genuine feeling. This was the all too familiar look of a psychopath who wasn’t making the effort to even pretend to be normal.
“Do you want people to be scared of you, Ruben?” Paige asked. “I had time to read your files while I waited for you. It strikes me that fear wasn’t what you were looking for when you killed.”
Ruben snorted then. “And what do you think you know about me, lady?”
“I know that you could have killed a bunch of different ways,” Paige said. “But you went for something that would draw attention. People just disappearing like magic? That made the police think from the start that it was more than just the kind of normal murders that might happen in the big city.”