“I don’t know what this is,” Meredith said. “Is this some performance piece for the Ren-Faire? Because I’m going home.”
She started to back away towards her car.
That was when she saw the knife in his hand. Meredith panicked then, turning, and running for her car.
Her feet tangled in her dress as she did so, sending Meredith tumbling to the ground. Her keys spilled from her hand, spinning away from her.
“Trying to take to your carriage, you villain? Ahead of your betters? The order of precedence demands satisfaction!”
Meredith was on her back now, staring up at him, at the knife that seemed so strange and so deadly. She opened her mouth to scream for help…
That was when he leapt at her.
CHAPTER TWO
Agent Paige King of the FBI was trying to build a profile for a killer. She was piecing information together, drawing out every psychological and evidential scrap, trying to glean every hint she could and work out what it meant, fitting it together in new combinations to try to establish anything she could about the man she was hunting.
She would find enough pieces of the puzzle to catch the Exsanguination Killer. She had to do it, for her father, and for the damage that had been done to Paige’s life since his death. Maybe if she found the killer, the nightmares of standing over her father, of being the one to find him, would finally start to fade away.
Currently, Paige was building the profile while sitting on the couch in her apartment, her notes spread out around her. Ordinarily, her apartment was small and neat, because Paige liked to keep things perfectly in order, perfectly under her control. Now, though, the scattering of papers made the whole place seem cluttered, so that it was hard to tell where anything was beneath the wash of them.
She had her laptop open, with her files on the Exsanguination Killer pulled up, along with the latest news reports on the most recent murder. Paige was trying to find anything in them that was new, anything that she hadn’t heard before.
Paige knew how she must look, sitting cross legged at the heart of it all, her slightly built frame hunched in like the focal point for some bizarre, paper based art installation designed to illustrate chaos at work. Her red hair was tangled from where Paige’s fingers had twined in it whenever she’d felt frustration, and that had been often enough that she knew it must look like some kind of strange bird’s nest arrangement now. Her green eyes were slightly bloodshot from having worked on this too long without a break.
She would take that break when she’d finally found something. When she’d worked out where the new information she’d obtained fit into the broader pattern of it all and she actually managed to find the killer.
Paige had gotten that information from Agent Sauer, her new boss at the FBI, after she’d solved her first case as an agent. She’d been able to see the files on the case, looking them over and trying to memorize as much as she could because Paige had known even then that there was no way she was going to get to take it out of Quantico to look through at her leisure.
Paige had at least some of what she needed, though. She knew now that there were facets to this that didn’t come through in the news, facets that hadn’t been released to the public by the FBI. That gave Paige some hope that there might be a chance to capture the killer, that the avenues she’d already exhausted weren’t the only ways to get closer to the Exsanguination Killer.
She’d already known about the killer’s methods: that they targeted both men and women, seemingly without a victim profile, drugging and then restraining them before opening their veins and letting them bleed out slowly. Paige knew that part better than anyone.
She’d seen what had happened to her father. She’d been fourteen when she’d been the one to find his body out in the woods, and even now, the horror of that moment sat in Paige’s chest. If she closed her eyes now, she was back there, staring down at him, seeing the darkened soil around him where the blood had run into it, the horrifying pallor of his body, robbed of his life blood by the wounds the killer had inflicted.
Paige shook her head, trying to focus. She needed to think clearly.
She’d learned other parts of the killer’s methods in the years since her father’s murder: that the killer struck in sets of three, and so far had killed more than twenty people that they knew about. That he always struck in outdoor areas to allow evidence to be washed away, or disturbed by animals to the point where it wasn’t usable.
But there had been two new things in the files that her boss had let Paige see, two new facets that might or might not reshape the spread of the papers and notes around Paige into some new arrangement. The first was a clue about the murder weapon: something small and extremely sharp, like a scalpel. That word brought all kinds of possibilities to Paige’s mind. Was this someone with medical training? Was this about the killer valuing precision, or maybe even disliking the idea of causing excessive physical damage as they killed?
Was this something that seemed impossible: a squeamish serial killer?
No, Paige didn’t believe that. Especially not given the second piece of evidence that Agent Sauer had dropped into her lap. The killer had left notes at the first kills of each cycle of three, taunting the police and telling them that they couldn’t catch him. Those notes were short and to the point, but they weren’t the sign of someone who shied away from what they did.
Instead, the taunting in them suggested a killer who was focused on the power the act of killing provided over others, and who liked the control they had over their victims. They killed neatly, not out of any horror about the blood, but to prove that they had so much control over the situation that they could do it that way. Killing slowly, killing precisely, was just another way of proving their power.
Paige was certain that they watched while their victims died. Why else kill using such a slow method? It wasn’t about causing more pain, because the method chosen didn’t involve torture or pain, but it did involve a victim who was conscious, slowly feeling their life blood ebbing from them. Everything about the killer’s MO said that the kill wasn’t the whole thing for them; it was about sitting back and watching the impact that it caused.
It was the beginnings of a profile, suggesting things about the killer that might lead to more, given time. The only problem was that just knowing that didn’t help Paige get closer to who had done this. Maybe the FBI would be able to do something with the letter, but they’d had those before and hadn’t found anything. In the absence of anything else, it wasn’t enough to go on.
The frustration of that made Paige push her notes to one side. Even as she did so, her phone went off. Agent Sauer’s name came up on the screen, and Paige answered her boss’s call instantly.
“Agent King,” he said, in his usual clipped, gruff tone, all business. “How soon can you get into Quantico?”
“Less than an hour, sir,” Paige said. If she drove hard, she could do it.
“Make it less,” Sauer said.
“Why? What’s going on?”
“There’s another killer for you and Agent Marriott to chase, and I need you on the case right away.”
*
Paige drove into Quantico as fast as she dared, wondering what had Agent Sauer calling her in so urgently. He’d said that there was a killer, but for him to insist that she get over there as quickly as possible, it had to be a bad one.