CHAPTER NINETEEN
Paige sat in Detective Sanchez’s office, reviewing the camera footage while the detective paced in obvious frustration.
“I can’t believe you two didn’t tell me where you were going. I could have told you that it was a storage facility that online sellers use.”
“It doesn’t exactly advertise that fact from the outside,” Christopher replied.
“It doesn’t need to, except online,” the detective said. “Frankly, I think the whole place is a little shady. We’ve caught people meeting up to deal drugs there a couple of times before.”
“Well, now you have an excuse to look closer at the place if you want to,” Christopher said. He was obviously trying to sell it to the detective as a win, rather than as an embarrassment for all of them.
“You do get how this makes me look?” Sanchez said. “Since Renard dumped you on me, the department thinks that I’m basically your liaison. So when you mess up and try to arrest some innocent passerby with guns blazing…”
“They weren’t blazing,” Christopher said. “No shots were fired, and we didn’t formally arrest anyone. Plus, we had plenty of grounds for being there.”
Paige tried to focus on the footage she’d gotten from the guard. It was grainy and low quality, obviously installed as cheaply as possible. The facility’s owners clearly thought that the deterrent effect of the cameras being present counted for more than whatever they saw.
“Look,” Christopher said. “I need to make some calls. I have to get in touch with Sienna Niven’s family, to see if they can tell us anything that might point us in the right direction.”
Paige heard Detective Sanchez sigh. “I’ll keep trying to run down the vehicle that brought the shark tank to the arts center. If we can find footage of it, it might give us our killer.”
Which left Paige trying to find a glimpse of the killer on the security footage from the storage facility.
“Hello, Mrs. Niven? This is Agent Marriott of the FBI. I’m calling about your daughter, Sienna. Yes, ma’am, I understand how difficult it must be for you at this time. I’m sorry for your loss.”
While Christopher spoke to Sienna’s mother, Paige scanned the footage carefully. It helped that she knew the timeframe to look at, because she knew that the tank must have been delivered sometime yesterday.
“I just wanted to talk to you more about your daughter’s life. Can you think of anyone who wanted to hurt her? Anyone who had made threats against her?”
Christopher seemed so by the book to Paige in moments like this. They’d already established that this was a serial killer, so the motives involved only had to make sense to him. There didn’t have to be anything in the victims’ lives that tied them to him.
“Yes I understand,” Christopher said. “Well, what about the people she knew, or her job? Can you tell me more about them?”
Paige realized that she didn’t have to scroll through a whole day’s worth of camera footage. She had a copy of the order form for the shark tank, and that gave the time that it had been ordered. Better yet, there was a delivery confirmation attached to it, which gave the time that the driver said that they had completed their delivery.
“Her sister? Yes, of course,” Christopher said. “Can you give me a number for Harriet, Mrs. Niven? Thank you so much. If you think of anything else, please don’t hesitate to call me.”
He hung up.
“Nothing from the mother?” Paige said, slowly scrolling through the footage to find a point maybe half an hour before the delivery time.
“I got the feeling that she didn’t want to know much about her daughter’s job, or who she hung out with,” Christopher said. “Dancing in a club wasn’t respectable enough. But she said that Sienna’s sister might know more.”
“There might not be anything to find,” Paige pointed out. “We didn’t find any connections between the first two victims.”
“The killer has to have met them somewhere,” Christopher countered. He went to make his second phone call.
While he did, Paige worked through the camera footage, looking for signs of the killer. She looked for the moment when the delivery had arrived first, because that would be the moment when the killer would have to be there in frame on the loading dock to receive his package.
Paige found the moment, the shark tank suddenly appearing there in fast forward, then a figure coming to it to move it with a small forklift. Paige backed up slightly, then let the footage start to play out at normal speed.
“Hello,” Christopher said as he made his call. “Is that Harriet Niven? My name is Agent Marriott, with the FBI. I need to talk to you about your sister. Your mother suggested that I might be able to talk to you to learn more about who Sienna’s friends were, and about her job.”
Paige found the moment when the killer started to come into shot. Her heart pounded with the possibility that she might be about to get a good look at him for the first time, and that she might have an image she could forward to the FBI’s techs to run through facial recognition software.
Even as he came onto the screen, though, Paige felt her hopes ebb a little. The man obviously knew that the camera was there, and he was doing his best to make sure that the camera never got a clear view of his face. He was wearing a hat and dark glasses, with a scarf pulled up over his nose and mouth, determined not to give away the least hint of his identity. The best Paige could do was to follow him with the camera footage, looking for the moment when whatever vehicle he loaded the tank into left the storage facility.
“Did anyone ever threaten her?” Christopher asked. “Really? Who?”