CHAPTER TWO
Exsanguination Killer Claims Another Victim
Those were the words on the news that had made Paige call Agent Sauer of the BAU last night, blurting out that she was accepting the job he’d offered her within his department of the FBI. He’d told Paige to call him back in the morning, obviously not wanting to trust in a decision made in the middle of the night.
Well, it was morning now in Washington. Time for Paige to either follow through or admit to herself that she had to be somewhere else, time for her to make up her mind.
She was staring into the bathroom mirror of her small apartment, trying to talk herself into making the call, one way or another. It was proving harder than she thought.
In the mirror, Paige could see the signs of stress contorting rounded features that were normally so youthful looking people had a hard time believing that she was twenty-five and a Ph.D. graduate. Her red hair was tangled because of all the times she’d unconsciously run her fingers through it, and the deep green of her eyes only seemed to reflect the worry Paige felt right then.
Should Paige just call Agent Sauer back and tell him that she’d made a mistake? Should she tell him that it was better to assign her to a field office, and for her to stay well clear of the BAU?
Not that Paige wanted to be anywhere else but D.C. It wasn’t just her home; it was also the place where she had the best chances of finding answers in the one case that mattered most to her: her father’s murder.
It was just that the whole situation with Christopher, Agent Marriott, made everything potentially far too complicated. Maybe too complicated to truly let her work alongside him. Paige couldn’t deny that she felt a wave of attraction every time she looked at him. The kind of deep attraction that made her want to be near him, to say something, to do something about it.
Except that she couldn’t, because Christopher was a married man. Paige had misread the signs. If he’d been friendly to her, and helped her, then it was just because he was working with her, not because of anything else. If he’d called her out of her FBI training to work alongside him, it was just because he respected her skills as a psychologist. Could Paige really work alongside Christopher now that she’d finished her training, torturing herself with his presence? She’d met his wife. Wouldn’t she see Jennifer’s face every time she looked over at Christopher and felt a hint of attraction?
Paige paced her small D.C. apartment, among the ornaments that she’d picked up in her time as a Ph.D. student, trying to make up her mind about something for which she thought she’d already made a decision last night.
The reasons for not working with Christopher were pretty compelling. It was just that there was at least one huge reason for doing it, and being a part of the BAU here.
Paige turned on the news, trying to find the story again. While the D.C. news cycle had pushed other stories about political wrangling and the economy to the top, the story that had caught Paige’s attention was still there, with the news anchor looking grave as he started to read it.
“In other news, no new information has been released by the FBI on the so called ‘Exsanguination Killer’ case in Virginia, but they have confirmed that they will be working with local police to investigate the death of a young man who was found yesterday. Locally, the dead man has been tentatively identified as Terrence Williams, a senior at Virginia Tech, who was studying engineering.”
Paige went over to her laptop and searched for the young man, trying to find out any details that might help her to add to her store of knowledge on the killer. She felt sure that if she could only find enough fragments of information, eventually it would lead to him. Inevitably, her search for his name brought wave after wave of news stories related to the murder, but since those were all basically saying that the FBI wasn’t giving any information right now, it didn’t help her much.
She found another story that made her hands clench into fists as she saw it: an explanatory piece on the Exsanguination Killer, one that talked about his previous crimes, setting out each one in turn. Paige couldn’t stop herself from skimming it once she saw that it was there, even though she knew the details of the killer’s crimes far better than the writer who had produced this online summary.
Twenty murders that people knew of, possibly more, in groups of three. A killer who ambushed his victims, drugged and bound them to stop them from fighting back, and then cut major veins, leaving them to bleed out slowly. The writer went through all of those details one by one with the kind of relish that made it hard for Paige to hold her anger in check. People’s deaths shouldn’t be entertainment.
Then she got to the profiles the site had produced on the killer’s victims, each one set there with a photograph obviously scraped from social media, each one speculating on exactly what it was that had made them a target for the Exsanguination Killer. As someone who studied serial killers, Paige knew that was an important question. Often, it was possible to learn a lot about a killer by understanding why he chose one set of victims rather than another. She also understood that the wide variety of this serial killer’s victims, men and women, younger and older, made him unusual.
Intellectually, Paige understood all of that, but seeing a picture of her father there among the others, seeing the article speculating about what he’d done to bring his own death down on him as if any of it were his fault… that was too much for her to handle.
In that moment, Paige was fourteen years old again, in the woods not far from the Virginia house she’d grown up in. She was looking down at her father’s body again, seeing the blood, the strange pallor that had come over her father in death. Paige could feel the horror of that moment once more, as if she were experiencing it for the first time.
Bile rose up in her throat, and Paige ran for the bathroom; just the memory of that moment was enough to make her throw up. So much for being a tough, trained FBI agent now. It didn’t matter that she’d had years of therapy. It didn’t matter that she was a fully qualified psychologist. She didn’t have control over that side of herself.
Paige went back to her computer, moving away from the sensationalist reports, and opening up her own files. She’d kept them since back before starting her Ph.D. on the minds of serial killers, adding small fragments to her notes every time she heard something that might relate to the man who had taken her father from her. Paige forced back her anger and horror now, forcing herself to add to those notes.
Feeling as though she was doing something that might eventually lead to finding the Exsanguination Killer was the closest thing to a coping mechanism Paige had managed to find for all of this. Her mother had relied on blotting things out, trying to move on and act as if it hadn’t happened, ignoring the whole thing in the hope that eventually the pain would scab over, but Paige had never been able to do that. She’d never been able to understand her mother doing it, either.
Which meant that now, as with last night, there was no real choice to be made when it came to the offer that Agent Sauer had put in front of her. Yes, it would keep her away from Christopher. Yes, Paige could do good work in a field office somewhere. She could help to bring plenty of bad guys to justice. But it wouldn’t be this bad guy, and this was the one who mattered to her more than any other. This was the reason she’d gone on to study serial killers. This was the reason she’d become an FBI agent.
Out in a field office, Paige wouldn’t have any reason to work on this case as a part of her job. If she started accessing files, it would raise questions, and maybe even cost Paige her job for trying to pursue a personal agenda. She wouldn’t have the full resources of the FBI behind her in her search.
As a member of the BAU, though, it would be her job to hunt for serial killers, and with this one having just struck, Paige would have every reason to look into the case. She had to be there, even if she knew that it was going to make things awkward between her and Christopher.
Paige was a grown woman; she could control herself around an attractive man. Even one who had saved her life at least once and who managed to be funny, intelligent and caring. She could be professional about all of this.
Paige swallowed as she realized just how difficult this might be, but she still picked up the phone to make the call to her soon-to-be boss.
“Sauer,” a gruff voice on the other end of the line said, as if he couldn’t be bothered to waste more words when just one would do.
“This is Paige King. I called you last night to accept your offer.”