For now though, Paige forced herself to focus on the job.
Steve Baker’s weapons were set out to one side of the office that she and Christopher were using, laid out on a table, waiting for their inspection. Paige went over to that table, trying to see if there was anything there that might potentially have made the wounds that Meredith and Giselle suffered. She was looking for anything thin and sharp, square sided and pointed.
Not the lance or the sword, obviously, because they were far too large to have done it. There was a dagger too, but this was a broad bladed, single edged affair almost as long as Paige’s forearm. A brief piece of research on her phone suggested that it was called a “messer” and it definitely wasn’t a candidate to have caused the wounds that killed the two women. It was completely the wrong shape. As for the shield and a couple of spiked pauldrons, they seemed more decorative and defensive than like something that could be used to kill in the way the serial killer had.
Maybe that meant that Steve had disposed of his weapon of choice, or maybe he kept it somewhere else, so that no one would spot it until he was ready to use it. Possibly he didn’t routinely carry it as a part of his knightly uniform, although the absence troubled Paige at least a little.
“I think his lawyer is here,” Christopher said, looking at a message on his phone that must have come through from the field office’s front desk to give him a heads up. “Come on, we’ll meet them in the interview room.”
“What do you think it means that the local PD aren’t liaising with us on this case?” Paige asked. That part of all this still bothered her a little. “I know you said before that it happens sometimes, but it still feels weird.”
She heard Christopher sigh.
“My guess is that they’re hoping we’ll fail,” Christopher said, with a note of disappointment. “They’re pissed that the FBI is involved, and the best way they can show that is to refuse to do anything to help. Then they tell the local press about our involvement, so that if we get anything wrong, they can emphasize that they’d be doing a much better job. It’s all just politics.”
Politics. The local cops refusing to help, and hoping that they would mess up in the middle of looking for a serial killer, and it was just politics? Paige couldn’t accept that. They should all be out there, working together, trying to catch a killer. The need to look good shouldn’t come into it.
Paige just had to hope that they could get something out of Steve Baker. With the way that he’d run, she had to feel a sense of hope that he might be the killer. He was clearly obsessed with Meredith. One look at him from the security footage had Paige convinced of that. Maybe he’d been just as obsessed with Gisele. Maybe that was what happened with him now: he stalked victims, and when they gave the least sign of rejecting him, he killed them with some unknown weapon that he'd picked up as part of his job as a knight at the Renaissance Faire.
It was plausible. Now, she and Christopher just needed to find out if there was any actual evidence to prove it.
She and Christopher went into the interrogation room, and found Steve in conversation with a middle aged man in a cheap suit who Paige assumed had to be his lawyer. Steve was still wearing the remnants of his armor, minus anything that might be used to inflict an injury. He looked far too hot and uncomfortable in it now that he wasn’t on the jousting field. Was that just about being indoors, or did it have more to do with him slowly becoming aware of the level of trouble he was in?
Paige and Christopher took chairs nearby, taking the time to consider Steve’s reaction to their presence. Whereas some suspects had a lot of bluster and anger to them, Steve looked nervous, and seemed to be looking over to his lawyer for support, as if hoping that the lawyer would just hand him a way out of all of this without him having to say anything to anyone. Paige looked up to where a camera was watching proceedings, wanting to make sure that everything was recorded properly for this.
“So, Steve,” Christopher asked once they were in position in the interrogation room, “why did you run from us?”
“I… I just panicked, that’s all.” There was an edge of fear even now in his voice.
“You just panicked?” Paige said. She didn’t believe it for a moment.
“The two of you coming towards me like that, so soon after everything that had happened, I just assumed…”
He tailed off, as if realizing that whatever he’d assumed wasn’t about to show him in a good light. Paige could see how someone might be worried by the FBI coming after them, but to take off on horseback like that? To run while endangering people? No, there was something more here than just natural nerves around authority. Paige wanted to know what it was.
“You assumed what, Steve?” Paige asked. “That we knew that you’d lied to us?”
“You don’t have to answer that,” his lawyer said.
“I didn’t…”
Christopher stepped in before he could complete the lie. “You told us that you hadn’t seen Meredith Park the day she died, and you implied that you were nowhere near her at the time she left her job.”
“That was all just a misunderstanding,” Steve said, in a worried tone, looking across at his lawyer as if the man would make the evidence go away.
“We have security footage from the restaurant showing that you were there just before she left yesterday,” Paige said. “You were looking her way. You even spoke to her.”
“That’s not a crime,” Steve said.
Christopher shook his head. “No, it isn’t, but lying to the FBI in the middle of an investigation?”
“You have no evidence that my client deliberately lied to you,” the lawyer said. “You say that he said that he was nowhere near Meredith Park, but we only have your word for that.”
Christopher went on as if the lawyer hadn’t spoken. “At the very least, that’s suspicious. Why didn’t you want us to know that you’d seen Meredith just before her death? Why did you decide that you needed to hide that, unless you had something to do with her death?”
Paige watched Steve’s face as Christopher made the accusation, trying to read any change in his expression. She could see the shock there, and the sudden fear. Was he afraid that he’d been found out, or simply afraid because of the enormity of what he was being accused of? It was hard for Paige to tell. That was the problem with trying to read faces: the same emotion could be sparked by many different things. He certainly didn’t look like he wanted to be there, but who would want to be in an FBI interrogation room?
“I didn’t… I couldn’t,” he said. “I loved her!”
That didn’t mean anything. Someone sufficiently obsessed could easily believe that he loved someone even while he killed her. Many people each year were killed by people who would swear afterwards that they loved the victim, and they meant it.
“The way you loved the woman you were arrested for harassing?” Paige asked.
The lawyer coughed. “I understood that we were discussing matters pertaining to yesterday.”
“A history of harassing women sounds like it might be relevant to the death of another woman who had become the object of your client’s attentions,” Christopher said.