He stormed off. It was Paige’s first experience of local cops not being cooperative. The crime scenes she’d been at before had all been run firmly by the FBI, with no need to bring in the locals. Here, though, because the police had the case first, the FBI was working alongside them, and that should have meant trying to maintain good relations.
Instead though, it seemed that they were instantly at odds with the detective in charge of the case. Paige didn’t know if it was better or not that Detective Renard had walked off. On the one hand, Paige didn’t want to think that they were fighting the Las Vegas Police every step of the way. On the other, if Renard really didn’t want to work with them, maybe it was better that he wasn’t there.
“You two really are just making friends everywhere you go,” Detective Sanchez said.
“We’re here to do a job,” Christopher replied. His tone was wary, but not as sharp as it had been with Detective Renard.
Sanchez obviously caught that too. “You think I’m going to go easier on you than Renard?”
“I think that you put the effort in on your investigations,” Christopher said. “Renard wasn’t even there at the crime scene last time, and now he’s acting like we’re the ones not putting in the work.”
For a second or two, Sanchez looked as though she might spring to her colleague’s defense, but she didn’t. Instead, she shrugged.
“Renard has always been kind of an ass,” she said. “What do you need?”
“We want to take a look at the crime scene first,” Christopher said. “What do you know about what happened here?”
Detective Sanchez nodded and started to lead the way inside. “The victim is Sienna Niven. She worked as a dancer at a club well off the strip. The last anyone saw of her was at a party in a private club. She left with a guy.”
Paige was impressed. Detective Sanchez hadn’t originally been a part of this case, but it seemed as though she’d definitely done her homework on it. If anything, it seemed that she knew more about it all than Detective Renard would have.
“Are CSI teams working on the scene?” Christopher asked.
“Obviously,” Sanchez replied. “Although they haven’t found much at the moment. He didn’t leave any convenient prints on the glass, and the sharks are making the whole thing more complicated.”
“Sharks?” Paige said.
“You’d better see for yourself.”
Detective Sanchez led the way into the performance space. There was a stage there, surrounded by seating in a kind of amphitheater arrangement. There were spotlights shining down on that stage, because apparently no one had thought to turn them off yet. On the stage…
Paige gasped as she saw the large glass tank, filled with tiny sharks. She saw the woman hanging there suspended in that tank, her hair floating around her, chains wrapping her body. The dead woman seemed to stare out at Paige, accusing her for not having caught the murderer earlier, before she had become a victim too.
The horror of that moment was so great that for several seconds, Paige could only stand there and stare at the tableaux set up on the stage. She tried to imagine what it must have been like for Sienna Niven in those last moments, terrified as she was about to be pushed into the water, then left to drown with sharks swimming around her. The thought of it was even worse, so that Paige had to take a deep breath to steady herself.
“The CSI teams are ready to pull her body from the tank,” Detective Sanchez said.
Christopher nodded. “Do it.”
“They’ll be able to estimate time of death soon, although it must have been pretty late last night, because the sharks haven’t done much damage to her body yet.”
That was a reminder that the scene could easily have been even more horrific than it was. Paige knew, though, that Sienna Niven didn’t need her to stand there paralyzed by how awful her death had been. She needed Paige to be a professional, and to find the man who had killed her. That meant finding the right questions to ask.
“Another theater,” she observed. “Presumably accessed after hours?”
“There were no obvious signs of a break in,” Detective Sanchez said, still reading from her notebook.
“At this stage, we think that might be because he’s just that good at picking locks,” Christopher put in. “He didn’t have a key to the theater where Clarissa Bale was killed, but he broke in there effortlessly.”
“I want to know how he finds these locations,” Paige said. “He’s picking places where people perform. Obviously, that fits in with the whole magic angle, and it makes me think that this is at least partly a performance for him, but how is he finding these places initially? Maybe if we look back through local security footage, he will be there casing this performance space, working out how he was going to do all of this.”
She saw Christopher nod. “That’s a good thought. I’ll have the CSI teams forward any footage to FBI techs so that they can try to find any sign of him.”
“Then there’s the fact that he was able to get all of this in place quickly,” Paige said. “Was the theater open yesterday?”
“In the day?” Detective Sanchez nodded. “They’re hosting a performance art piece.”
“Meaning that he had to get that tank, and those sharks, into place after the theater closed,” Paige said. “What would that take? A specialist removal company? A truck of his own and specialist gear to move everything?”