As she arrived, she hurried to the third floor of the building that housed the BAU behind ivy covered walls, pausing only long enough to go through the obligatory security checks at the door. Even with her ID as a federal agent, she still had to pass through layers of scanners before she could even get into the building. It was just another reminder of the importance, and potential danger, of the job that she did now.
Sauer was waiting for her in a glass walled conference room on the third floor. He was a knife-thin man in his forties, with thin features and a dark beard. He wasn’t the only one in there. Agent Christopher Marriott was there already, tall and broad shouldered, with sandy hair and boyish good looks. He was wearing a regulation dark suit that fit him well, and stood at one side of the room expectantly as if he'd been waiting for Paige to arrive for a while now.
Paige felt the same flare of attraction that she always felt when she saw him, because almost from the first moment she’d met Christopher, she’d felt a kind of connection to him that had been hard to explain, but that had drawn her towards him. That attraction was quickly followed by a now familiar sense of guilt. Christopher was a married man, and her partner in the FBI. Not only could nothing happen between them, just thinking about it felt wrong. Sometimes, in spite of how well they worked together, it made just being near him difficult.
“Paige, how are you?” Christopher asked. “Are you ok?”
There was a faint note of worry in his voice, and Paige realized that while she’d thrown on her own standard, cheap dark suit, she’d forgotten to untangle the mess of her hair. Christopher had obviously picked up on that small difference, and if Sauer had told him about the information he’d passed to her, maybe he understood some of her potential sources of worry. He would know that she’d been spending her time looking into her father’s killer, and how that might affect her.
“I’m fine,” Paige assured him. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t true. All that mattered was that she was there to do her job.
She looked over to Sauer with a hint of hope. He’d said that there’d been another death. Was it possible that this was about the one killer who had a connection to Paige? Was that why he’d called her in so quickly?
“Is this about the Exsanguination Killer?”
Paige had to ask it, had to hope that this was finally her chance to go after her father’s killer. Even as she asked it, though, Agent Sauer was already shaking his head.
“I’ve told you before, we already have good agents working that case,” he said. It was clear that it was an issue he wasn’t about to give any ground on. He wasn’t about to let her on the case in a hurry.
Was Paige really meant to stand back and not argue about that? Was she really just meant to accept that she couldn’t be a part of the one investigation that had been the whole reason she had wanted to join the BAU in the first place?
She didn’t have any choice, though, when it came to which cases she worked. She was an FBI agent now, and agents followed orders. There were other killers in the world beyond the Exsanguination Killer, killers she could help to put behind bars to stop them from ever hurting anyone else, and to bring some kind of closure to the families of the victims. That mattered too.
Paige saw Christopher look over with another expression of concern, obviously knowing how much the Exsanguination Killer case meant to Paige.
“If that case does need any extra agents at any point, sir…” he began, obviously understanding how much it meant to Paige, and trying to increase the chances of her getting to work on it.
“That’s not the case I came here to talk to the two of you about,” Sauer said, slightly more firmly. He gestured for the two of them to take a seat at a wide conference table. “We don’t have a lot of time. This is a killer who seems to be killing at short intervals, and there’s already a media storm over it.”
Paige was at least able to control her feelings enough to be able to bring herself to sit next to Christopher. She understood now that a lot of the extremes of what she’d felt recently had been about the sudden reappearance of her father’s killer. She could control herself, and sitting further away would only make things seem weird. It would increase the strangeness brought about by the attraction between them, not reduce it.
Sauer took out an iPad and called up images on it for the two of them to look at, obviously wanting them to see the situation before he started to explain it. The first photograph he showed them was a crime scene photograph of a young, blonde-haired woman lying on her back in a parking lot, her otherwise pale white dress stained red by blood. Paige winced at the sight of her there like that, even though she’d been expecting something like it. Even though she had seen plenty of bodies by now, it didn’t get any easier. There was still the sense of pent up horror under the surface that always came to Paige when she saw the dead, but also a sense of anger, a need to correct the sudden wrongness in the world brought about by the killer.
Paige didn’t know if she was transferring those feelings from what she felt about the Exsanguination Killer, or if it was just her natural reaction to the sight of the dead woman. It didn’t matter. Either way, she knew as soon as she saw the body that she had to find answers.
“This is Meredith Park,” Agent Sauer said. “Twenty-three years old. Until last night, she worked in the restaurant of the Lexington Kentucky Renaissance Faire. She was found dead by her colleagues in the employee parking lot. She’d been stabbed once, directly through the heart.”
That was a tragedy, but there had to be more to this, or the local police department would be handling it. A single murder wasn’t enough to bring in the FBI. It certainly wasn’t enough to bring in a specialist unit dedicated to hunting serial killers.
“What’s the serial killer angle, sir?” Christopher asked, obviously thinking the same thing that Paige was.
Sauer changed the picture on the iPad, showing a dark haired woman, probably in her thirties, lying propped against the wheel of a car. She was wearing a dark gray pantsuit, rather than the old fashioned style of dress Meredith had been wearing, but it was just as stained with blood. It was hard to believe that much blood could have come from inside one person, but Paige knew firsthand the reality of that.
“This is Gisele Newbury, thirty-five years old, a realtor. She was found dead outside her house by one of her neighbors two days ago, killed at around 5pm. Again, she died from a single stab wound to the heart.”
That was an interesting similarity, but Paige still wasn’t sure that it was enough.
“So what makes us think that the two are connected?” Paige asked. “Yes, the MO is similar, but stabbing is pretty common. The two cases don’t have to be related.”
“Because the killer left the same symbol behind at each scene,” Sauer said, flicking over to the next image. It showed a small metal fleur-de-lis design, left there as if to lay claim to the murders.
“A calling card?” Christopher said. Paige saw him look her way. “How often does that happen?”
It was gratifying that Christopher looked to her expertise on these things, that he saw her as the expert on serial killers despite all the ones he’d helped to catch, but it also put pressure on Paige to be right.
“Not as often as people think,” Paige replied. “The truth is that most serial killers just kill and move on. They don’t work the way people think. They aren’t this… elaborate.”