That caught Paige’s interest, but she tried to focus on her own job here. She wanted to find what she could from the camera footage. She switched to footage that covered the parking lot for the storage facility, focusing on the time just after the fish tank was handed over.
Paige saw the delivery truck leave, the logo for Exotic Aquatics emblazoned on the side. That wasn’t the vehicle she was looking for though. That came out of there about ten minutes later: a gray van, with no distinguishing features. The footage was grainy, but Paige went back and forth working through it until she found…
“Yes! I have a license plate for the killer’s van,” Paige said.
Christopher was still making notes intently on the end of the phone, so Paige went to run the license plate without waiting for him. Maybe once she could put a name down in front of him, he’d forget about trying to track a serial killer by looking at the crime like a normal murder.
There was only one problem with that approach: when Paige ran the plate, it came back as the license plate for a Toyota Prius, not a van. The killer had cloned the license plate to avoid being tracked.
It meant that Paige had hit a dead end. Oh, maybe it would be possible to trace the van using traffic camera footage from around the storage facility, but Paige doubted it. A man careful enough to use a fake license plate would be careful enough to use a few back streets to avoid cameras on his way back. They’d had what looked like a good lead, but now it seemed that they’d lost him.
“I’ve got nothing,” Paige said as Christopher hung up the phone. “I have clear shots of both the killer and his vehicle, but he’s disguised, and his van is using a fake license plate. Maybe we can get something from traffic cameras, but I doubt it.”
Paige felt almost guilty, giving Christopher that news. Even though it wasn’t her fault that the killer had been careful, it still felt like it a little. It still felt as if she should have found a way to do more to uncover his identity in spite of the precautions that he’d taken.
“It was always likely that he’d be careful,” Christopher said, “but I think I have something. Sienna’s sister told me that while she was working as a dancer at a club, she had a problem with a guy who was stalking her. He came to see her there at the club, and then he started to stalk her online as well, hitting on her. He offered to pay her for sex, and when she turned him down… well.”
He turned his phone to Paige. There was a message there, screen-grabbed from an account.
I’ll kill you, bitch. No one says no to me. Especially not some cheap stripper who thinks she’s too good to follow through.
“And we know who the message is from?” Paige asked.
“A guy called Mark Zint,” Christopher said.
Paige tried to think it through. It was definitely a promising lead, but she wanted to make sure that it worked before the two of them started chasing after it.
“This guy, Zint, wouldn’t Sienna have known his face? Why would she have gone with him last night if she knew it was him?”
“Because the party she attended last night was a masked costume party,” Christopher said. “If Zint was careful, she would never have known it was him.”
And they knew from the footage that the killer was very careful. A man like that might have disguised his voice, changed his mannerisms… it was plausible that it could have been him.
Paige looked up Mark Zint in the police database and found that he had a couple of civil lawsuits against him for sexual harassment. This clearly wasn’t the first time that he’d behaved that way with women. She searched for him online, trying to learn more about him generally, and when she did, she stopped dead.
Las Vegas magician drops out of the limelight out of sexual harassment claims, one article read. Successful Vegas magician Mark Zint has canceled his shows and parted ways with his agent after a string of allegations against him by multiple women, who all claimed that he used stage hypnosis sessions to seek inappropriate relationships. The magician has issued a statement saying that he vehemently denies all of the allegations, and that he will be seeking treatment for depression and addiction issues.
Paige looked over to Christopher, barely able to believe what she was reading. “He’s a magician. Apparently a pretty successful one, so he has the money to do all of this. More than that, he’s a magician who doesn’t have a career anymore, which means that he has the time to come up with it. And it seems clear that he has some pretty obvious problems with women.”
“Does he fit the profile of the killer?” Christopher asked.
Paige paused for a moment or two, wanting to be certain. There wasn’t any doubt, though. As far as she was concerned, everything about Mark Zint looked like their killer.
She nodded. “I think it might be him. At the very least, he’s a serious suspect.”
Christopher looked pleased about the confirmation. “We’ll need to tread a little carefully, though, after today. Sauer won’t like it if he gets too many calls about us accusing innocent people.”
“Does that mean we can’t go after him?” Paige asked.
“It means that we talk to him. We try to find out more. And then if he doesn’t give us good answers… then we can think about arresting him.”