CHAPTER FOUURTEEN
Paige got up early the next morning, heading to one of the casino’s smaller restaurants for breakfast and taking her laptop with her. She wanted to get a head start on the case.
She also wanted to get into it before Christopher woke up, so that she would be able to focus on the work, rather than on him. Paige was determined to just do her job to the best of her ability, find answers, and catch the killer. When she helped to bring him in, Agent Sauer would have to give her what he knew about the Exsanguination Killer.
Paige’s first surprise came as she stepped into the restaurant and found Christopher already there, working on his own computer while he ate. Paige went to join him; whatever awkwardness there was between the two of them right now, they were still partners in this, still meant to be working together to catch the killer.
“I wasn’t expecting you to be awake so early,” Paige said, as she grabbed coffee.
“I’m an early riser,” Christopher replied. “I thought about waking you up, but I figured I could try to get some more work in on the case while you got some sleep.”
That was pretty much what Paige had been hoping to do. She found herself wondering if Christopher had done it for the same reasons, or if it had been purely about wanting to make as much progress with the case as possible.
“What have you been working on?” Paige asked.
“We found Zane Caister,” Christopher said, “but we never ran down the client lists from the company he worked at. I’ve emailed them, asking them who bought safes and bullets from them in the last couple of years. We don’t have a serial number for the safe: it’s a prop rather than the real thing, but maybe we’ll find something.”
“You’re hoping that it will be rare for someone to perform both the bullet catch and the safe escape?” Paige said. It seemed plausible to her that they might be dealing with a long list.
Christopher nodded. “They’re two different styles of performance. The bullet catch is what you might call classic magic, while the safe escape is escapology. They’re not just two very different sets of skills; they tend to produce different approaches in the performers. Being good at one doesn’t make you good at the other.”
“So, are there a lot of styles of magic?” Paige asked. Maybe it could help to narrow down something about the killer if he favored one specific skillset over another.
“There are a few big divisions,” Christopher said. “Classic magic is what you could call the standard stage magic, with large props and big visual effects accompanied by typical magician’s patter. Silent magic branches off from that, just focusing on the visuals, usually to music. Close up magic is the kind you perform to a small group of people, and it’s difficult because they’re close enough to see more of what you’re doing. Card magic and street magic are both sub-specialisms of that. Then escapology and mentalism are kind of off to one side. Someone like Harry Houdini was an amazing escapologist, probably the best ever, but when people saw his attempts to do stage magic, they commented that it was kind of ordinary, and just relied on a lot of pre-prepared devices.”
“Like our killer,” Paige said. “You said that both of the tricks he copied are old ones, so maybe he has some kind of obsession with the history of magic?”
“That seems possible,” Christopher said.
“I had another thought last night, too,” Paige said. “Zane said that he wouldn’t have enough time to prepare the murders because he was working on his act. I found myself wondering if maybe it was someone who failed in their magic career.”
“That has possibilities,” Christopher said. “And there have been famous magicians who have given up in the past.”
“I just can’t work out how to find someone like that,” Paige said. “If their career is over, there’s not likely to be much out there announcing it.”
Christopher nodded. “But it might help us to focus in on someone once we have names to work with.”
That was a good point. If they got the list of customers from the prop company, and one of them turned out to be a failed magician rather than someone working actively, it might help to point them towards the killer.
“What do we do while we’re waiting for the company to get back to us, though?” Paige asked.
“We can keep looking for connections between the two women,” Christopher said. “If we go deeper into their lives, we might be able to find something.”
Paige frowned slightly because she’d already tried to find that kind of connection and failed. The two weren’t friends on any kind of social media, and hadn’t spent time in any of the same places.
“What kind of connection could they have?” Paige asked. “I’ve tried to find ones based on place or the possibility of them knowing one another socially, but it really does look as though the killer is targeting his victims randomly.”
Which made things harder, because it meant that they couldn’t get ahead of him, couldn’t work out where he was going to be next. It meant that they didn’t know where to start looking for evidence that he’d been there.
“I’m going to try asking their families for more details about them,” Christopher said, taking out his phone. “It might be that there’s something there that will connect them, or that will point to how the killer targeted them. You can try going deeper into their social media. Look for anyone who has a problem with them. And maybe look for any sign that they have a connection with magic.”
Paige nodded. If she could find something like that, then it would almost certainly be the context in which the killer had found them. She set to work on her computer, calling up what the FBI techs had been able to scrape from Clarissa Bale and Mylene Jacques’s online presences.
This time, Paige didn’t try to use filters and searches to narrow things down. She plunged into the data, focusing on the messages sent to the two women. Most were from friends, chatting about places they were planning to go, people they were seeing. Those weren’t the messages Paige was most interested in, though.
“Hello, Mr. Jacques?” Christopher said across the table as he made the first of his calls. “My name is Agent Marriott. I’m with the FBI, and I’m looking into your daughter’s case. Yes sir, I understand that this is a very difficult time for you, and I’m sorry for your loss. I was hoping that I could ask you more about her. The more I understand about Mylene’s life, the more chance there is of working out how the killer targeted her.”
Paige was currently looking through messages from guys trying to hit on Mylene. There were a few, and Paige looked through each message thread, making notes of the names, trying to find signs of anyone who wasn’t prepared to take no for an answer, anyone who didn’t take being rejected well.