CHAPTER FOUR
Paige was a little surprised by the speed with which they rushed down to the airport, definitely not leaving any time to pack. She and Christopher were hurried through airport security, their badges letting them move quicker than the usual line.
It meant that Paige got more time in her seat with her laptop balanced in front of her, more time in which to pull up the files and try to get a head start on the case.
“We’ll probably have some time when we land for you to do that,” Christopher pointed out.
Paige was all too aware of his presence in the seat next to her. Close enough that she could reach out and touch his hand if she wanted…
Except that doing so would be a very bad idea. He was her partner, not anything else.
“I want to be sure that I’ve got as much of it in my head as I can,” Paige said. “I can’t help if I don’t have all the information.”
“It’s not about helping anymore, Paige,” Christopher pointed out. “You’re a fully trained agent now. This is your case as much as mine. I’m not here to hold your hand.”
Those words hit Paige all at once. She was used to a dynamic between the two of them where she did everything she could to help solve the case, but ultimately, Christopher was the agent working it. He was the one with the responsibility to succeed, and he was the one making the final decisions. Whether people lived or died came down to him. Now, even though he was still the senior agent in their little partnership, Paige was every bit as responsible for succeeding in this as he was.
“All the more reason to make sure I’m on top of everything,” Paige said. There was another part to it too: if she focused on the work, then it was easier to ignore the potential difficulty of thinking about the attraction between her and Christopher.
“Ok,” Christopher said. “Just make sure that there isn’t some kid looking over your shoulder at all of the crime scene photographs.”
He had a serious point. Much of what was in the police reports wouldn’t be for public consumption. There would be details in there that the FBI would want to hold back, and certainly, it wouldn’t be right for just anyone to stare at pictures of the dead women.
That meant Paige had to hunch in over the screen as she started to read, trying to shield it from view as the plane took off and winged its way towards Las Vegas. By this point, there were crime scene reports, files from the coroner, lists of evidence, and whatever the FBI techs had been able to scrape from the social media accounts of the victims.
It was all raw data at this point, but Paige was used to sorting through large bodies of information, trying to find the threads hidden beneath. She’d done it when she was a research student, interviewing serial killers for her Ph.D., trying to understand them and what motivated them. Of course, there, one of them had escaped and tried to kill the people around her because he thought that she could be just like him.
This killer had killed two people so far that they knew about: Clarissa Bale and Mylene Jacques. Both were young women in their twenties, both were lovely, and maybe that pointed to the start of a victim profile for Paige, except that the two women were too dissimilar for it to be that simple. They didn’t look alike, and they worked different jobs. Clarissa was an aspiring actress, while Mylene worked in sales. They both lived in Vegas, but in different areas: Clarissa in a shared apartment, Mylene in a suburban home on the fringes of the city. None of those things seemed to be what the killer was focusing on.
Paige tried running searches on their social media, trying to establish if the two of them had any connection with one another. They didn’t seem to be friends or followers on any of each other’s accounts, but that wasn’t enough for Paige. She looked for any places they’d checked in that the two had in common, trying to find any context in which the two might have met one another.
More importantly, trying to find any context in which the killer might have found both of them. If Paige could find spots where they’d both been, then maybe that would give her and Christopher somewhere to start searching for any evidence of someone following them there.
It might also point to someone who simply had a reason to hate both of them. With only two victims so far, it didn’t necessarily mean that they were dealing with a classic serial killer, in spite of the bizarre methods used in the murders. It could just be a guy who had broken up with both of them, or a woman who thought they’d both gotten jobs that she should have had.
The only problem was that Paige couldn’t find anywhere that they’d both hung out. Any point of connection between them at all. Maybe they’d both gone to the same show once, or the same mall, but Paige couldn’t see any evidence of it, certainly not recently.
And it would be recent. This was a killer who’d embarked on a sudden spree, with kills close together. While the roots of that might be years in the making, Paige had the feeling that the trigger would be more recent. That meant that he would have looked for his victims more recently too. Maybe that search represented a chance to find him, but only if Paige could work out a spot where he might have found both his victims, or the criteria he was using to pick them.
Because there didn’t seem to be anything in the files that could give her that part, Paige decided to switch her approach, trying to focus on the crimes and the methods involved.
She looked over the crime scene photographs, trying to spot anything in them that stood out as unusual. Of course, since both murders mimicked magic tricks, there was plenty that was unusual there. It was just a question of what was relevant.
The reports gave roughly the same details that Agent Sauer had set out for her and Christopher back in Quantico. Paige felt a sense of growing horror as she looked over the photographs, seeing the dead women lying there, Clarissa in the middle of a stage, Mylene hunched up inside a safe. Both of them pale and panicked looking, eyes wide as they fought for their last breaths. There wasn’t the blood that Paige had seen at other crime scenes, wasn’t the physical damage, but the sight of the women dead there like that was still more than enough to make her recoil in horror.
Paige was grateful for that sense of horror, in a way. After all the time she’d spent working with serial killers, and all the things she’d seen in the last couple of cases she’d worked with Christopher, Paige had started to worry that she might become inured to the violence. She had started to worry that she might not feel anything anymore, that she might become something as empty and dead inside as some of the killers she chased. She didn’t want that. She didn’t ever want to stop seeing just how vile it was that two young women had been killed like this.
Paige took a second or two to swallow back her horror. It was one thing to feel it, quite another to be overwhelmed by it to the extent that she couldn’t do her job as a federal agent. She needed to do the work here, needed to find the killer for these victims, and for all the others who might die if Paige didn’t find the killer in time.
She found herself staring at the photographs of the victims again, trying to pick out any details she could. There were close up shots of their faces, discolored by death, eyes wide and staring. Clarissa Bale was wearing heavy makeup.
Why the makeup? It was possible that it was simply what she wore every day, but combined with her figure hugging dress, Paige didn’t think so. Was she going on a date when she was killed? Was she on a night out with friends, or coming back from some kind of event? No, Paige realized, those weren’t the only options. Clarissa was trying to be an actress, so maybe this counted as her preparing for an audition. Maybe she was just trying to look her best in the hope of being picked for a part.
“Christopher,” Paige said. “Do we have anything that points to Clarissa Bale having been given an audition for something?”
“Maybe in her messages or email?” Christopher suggested, without looking up.
Paige looked through, and found an email.