Maybe that was what had happened here. Maybe the killer had murdered Gisele Newbury for a reason and realized that they liked killing so much that they’d then gone out to actively hunt another victim. And, if there were differences between the two, maybe that was because Gisele had been there in front of them because of the situation, while Meredith was a victim of choice.
Without more evidence, it was impossible to know for sure, but it was plausible. Certainly, it was a thought that suggested that Paige and Christopher should focus more on Gisele’s death. In particular, Paige found herself wondering if the fleur-de-lis or the blade might have some significance within her life that would make them an integral part of the murders. Of course, Paige knew from her research so far that there was no sign of the fleur-de-lis on Gisele’s social media, but maybe it would become relevant.
“Who would want to kill a realtor?” Paige said, trying to think of ways this might have happened.
“Someone feeling upset because of a property deal, maybe,” Christopher replied. “There’s a lot of money at stake with that kind of thing, and tempers can get pretty frayed. I can email her office and try to get details of anything she was working on at the time of her death. Then there will be lists of her potential clients. Maybe one of them will turn out to be upset enough with her to have potentially done this.”
“Maybe,” Paige said. “Although if we have to interview everyone on a realtor’s client list one by one, it could take a lot of time, potentially with no reward, and in the meantime, the killer is still out there.”
“Sometimes, grinding through the evidence is what it takes to catch someone,” Christopher pointed out. Even he didn’t sound like he wanted to risk leaving a killer out there like that, though. “But if we can find something that will lead us to him quicker, that would be better. It seems like Gisele is the key, though.”
Paige nodded. It was just a question of working out how to make inroads without having to grind this down over days or even weeks. That would give the killer far too much time in which to kill again.
The circumstances of Gisele’s death were odd, killed in her driveway, next to her car. Was that a deliberate ambush, or an indication of something else?
Paige found herself looking over the crime scene photographs. In particular, she looked at a wider shot of the scene, which showed Gisele’s Porsche on the edge of the driveway, practically out in the road, like she’d stopped suddenly as soon as she was there, trying to get out of it and get inside. Like she was already afraid of something out there on the road.
But if she’d been in her car, what could she have been afraid of? There had been no one in there with her according to the forensics report; everything about the crime scene suggested that the killer had approached her once she was out of the car, then killed her with a single stab wound. That had happened when Gisele was already home. So what had her in such a rush to get out of her car and get to her front door, to try to get to safety?
Maybe a road rage incident? Or maybe the killer following her car? Either one of those might have inspired that kind of fear, and either way, there was a chance that something like that would have been reported.
Paige checked the location of Gisele’s last viewing, then began to plot the route between there and her home. That gave her a sense of where Gisele would have been and when in the half hour before her death. Then she looked up the number for the local highway patrol. Hopefully, they would be more helpful than the rest of the Lexington PD had been so far, when it came to their investigations.
“Hello, how can I help you?” a woman’s voice on the other end of the line said.
“Hi,” Paige said. “This is Agent Paige King, with the FBI. I’m on the team investigating the murders of Gisele Newbury and Meredith Park.”
She quickly provided her badge number for the highway patrol to check.
“Hello, Agent,” the woman said. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m looking for any reports of erratic driving or road rage on a particular route between 4:30 and 5pm two days ago. Particularly anything involving a blue Porsche.”
“If you send me the route and the license plate of the vehicle, then I can check,” the woman said. “It will take me a minute to do it, though. I’ll call you back.”
Paige sent the information on Gisele Newbury’s route over to the highway patrol’s number, then waited. And waited. Was it possible that she wasn’t going to get an answer? Maybe someone else at the highway patrol had pointed out to whoever had answered the phone that they weren’t being helpful towards the FBI? If that proved to be the case, would she and Christopher have to go over there in person to try to get answers? Would they need to get a warrant for what they needed?
Then her phone rang, as the highway patrol called her back, and Paige snatched it up gratefully.
“Agent King?” the woman she’d spoken to before said. “We have a record of a call in that period, made by a Gisele Newbury. She reported that a car with no license plate was tailgating her, and flashing its lights aggressively. We dispatched a patrol car, but there was no sign of either Ms. Newbury or the other car by the time it got there.”
Because Gisele Newbury had been running for home by that point, assuming that it would be the only place she might be safe. Only she hadn’t made it home, because someone had killed her before she got inside her house. It had to be that driver who had followed her, didn’t it?
Was this all about one road rage incident? Was that what had started this and cost two women their lives? Where did Meredith Park fit into it? Was she really just a random victim slain by a killer who had decided that he liked killing too much to stop?
It was possible. The strange wound shapes and the fleur-di-lis ornaments left at the scenes suggested that the two deaths were connected. It seemed too much to ask that someone had seen the news of Gisele’s death and decided to copy the MO so precisely in such a short space of time. To source a small fleur-de-lis ornament like that would be hard enough, but the murder weapon would be almost impossible to copy, as Paige doubted that the shape of the dagger was a piece of information that had made it into the news.
No, this had to be one killer, didn’t it? One who had started by killing Gisele after some petty road rage incident, and who had then moved on to kill another woman either because of some personal hatred or simply because he wanted to experience the thrill of killing someone again.
The connection could be that slight. If Gisele had been killed because of some traffic incident, then she was essentially a random victim, thrown into the killer’s path. Meredith might potentially have meant more to him, or again, she might just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, making her death essentially random.
“Agent King, are you still there?” the woman from the highway patrol agency asked, after a few seconds.
“Yes, sorry,” Paige said.
“Did you need anything else?”
Did she? Was the confirmation of that call made by Gisele enough, or could Paige get more? It occurred to her that cars without license plates probably weren’t that common around Lexington. That might make it possible to find what she was looking for.
“Am I right in thinking that traffic cameras would flag any cars without license plates automatically?” Paige asked.