She found herself in a large kitchen, which looked as though it was barely used. It was too pristine, too sterile, as if Antoinette ate out or got takeout most nights.
“Antoinette? Are you in here?” Paige called out. There was no answer, but Paige couldn’t leave it at that. She knew that she had to sweep the house. She started to move forward, heading into a living room with furniture that looked a little fussy and old-fashioned, as if it hadn’t been updated in a while.
Paige was more concerned with making sure that there wasn’t a killer in the house. She made her way through it, heading slowly upstairs with her gun held up ahead of her. She swept each room in turn, pausing at the door to each of the bedrooms, opening each one in turn, and then bursting in, moving quickly to make sure that the room was empty.
Finally, there was only one bedroom left. Paige could feel the tension rising in her. If the killer was anywhere in the house with Antoinette, he was here. She tried the handle, slid the door open, and then burst inside with her weapon raised, ready to fire.
The bedroom was empty.
Paige dared to breathe a sigh of relief, but even as she did so, she felt a twinge of disappointment. She’d been hoping that she could end things here. Now, she still needed to find Antoinette.
Paige called Quantico again.
“This is Agent Paige King. I need an urgent trace on a cell phone number. I believe the phone may belong to someone who is about to be the victim of a killer.”
“Give us the number, Agent, and we’ll get right on it.”
Paige read the number from her own phone, and then waited. It felt like hours before she got a reply, but in fact it must only have been seconds.
“We’ve narrowed it down to one city block,” the tech on the other end of the line said.
In Las Vegas, that was still potentially a lot of places.
“Can you pull up records on those buildings?” Paige asked. “Do any of them look like theatres or performance spaces?”
Those had been the venues where the killer had undertaken his grisly work before, murdering women out on stage as if for an invisible audience. No, Paige realized, she and the others arriving at the scene had been the audience.
And this crime was meant to be the climax. For that, Stephen Booth would choose somewhere special. Somewhere meaningful to him.
“There’s one space,” the tech said. “An old park. It’s disused now, but it seems that there were regular performances there.”
Paige froze at the thought of it. “That’s the place. I need an address, right away.”
“Sending it through to your phone now, Agent.”
Just like that, Paige knew where the killer was. He was planning to finish this in a way that made for a big reveal and then… well, then he would probably try to disappear, vanishing into mid-air like one of his tricks.
Paige couldn’t allow that, and she definitely couldn’t allow another woman to be killed. She had to get there before Stephen had a chance to kill Antoinette.
She ran downstairs, moving quickly now as she raced out of the house. Paige sprinted back to her car, threw herself into the driver’s seat and punched the address the techs had gotten for her into her GPS.
She set off with a screech of tires, siren blazing to keep traffic out of her way as she drove. Before, she’d been racing to get to the house, but now, Paige was driving at a speed that terrified even herself. She had to make it to the old park before Stephen killed Antoinette. Paige was the only hope the former assistant had of coming through this alive.
Paige called Christopher as she sped along, weaving in and out of traffic, hoping that this time, she might get an answer. It went through to voicemail, though. He was obviously still in his interrogation of Mark Zint. Paige could only hope that he would be done soon, or she was going to have to take on a serial killer alone.
Paige tried to tell herself that she’d done it before. She’d gone to face Adam Riker alone when he’d captured her mother, and she hadn’t even been a trained agent then. Even so, Paige found herself wishing that Christopher were there. Paige was the one who found the killers, but Christopher was the one with the skills to take them down.
Faced with Christopher’s voicemail Paige did her best to summarize the situation as she drove.
“Christopher, I’m leaving the house of a woman named Antoinette Couchon. She was the assistant to a magician, and she has a facial mark the same as the other victims. I believe that the magician’s son, Stephen Booth, may be the killer. I’m currently heading to a performance space in an old park. I’ll send you the address. Call me when you get this.”
Paige tried to keep the panic she was starting to feel out of her voice, while still conveying a sense of urgency. She had to do this, and if Christopher wasn’t there to help, then Paige would just have to do it alone.
She was going to go to the address where Antoinette was. She was going to do everything she could to save her. She was going to take down Stephen Booth. Paige didn’t need Christopher’s help to do that, because she had more than enough training to do it by herself.
She just really, really wished that he were there.