“Even there,” Paige insisted. “I’d expect them to start to escalate. The would want to prove that they could go even further.”
Christopher stopped and stared at her, with a serious expression. “Paige, do you really think that the killer has just… what? Written a confession somewhere for the world to see?”
Paige shook her head. “Maybe not anything as obvious as that, but there will be something. A killer like this thrives on the attention. More than that, I think they’ll want to engage with the attention. They’ll want to be in the middle of everything, basking in the notoriety. I just have to work out how they’ll do that.”
Christopher still didn’t look entirely convinced. “That seems… kind of nebulous. I’m not saying don’t pursue it, but while you’re doing that, I need to check out the fleur-de-lis angle. If Sauer hears that we ignored it and someone else dies, he’ll want to know why.”
That stopped Paige, her surprise overtaking her. She’d thought that Christopher was handling the pressure of this case, but that last comment definitely suggested that it was starting to get to him.
“Is everything ok?” Paige asked him.
Christopher looked as though he might just say that everything was fine, but he could obviously see the way that Paige was watching his features, able to read the tension there.
He shook his head. “It’s just everything with the local PD. By standing off like this, they’re putting pressure on us to solve the case quicker, saying that they could do things better. I’ve already had a dozen emails from reporters requesting interviews about why we’re not making progress in the case.”
Paige hadn’t known that. She guessed that Christopher was doing his best to shield her from that side of things.
“So you want to put our efforts into the fleur-de-lis?” Paige said. She didn’t actually want to give up on the angle she thought she’d found, but she also didn’t want to put Christopher in a position where he had pressure from every side because of her.
“No, it’s ok,” Christopher said. “We’ll work quicker if we split up on this. I’ll try to look deeper into the fleur-de-lis, you follow up on your idea that the killer might come out into the open for the attention.”
He still didn’t sound as though he believed that it would work, but at least he was giving Paige the space she needed to look into it.
Of course, it meant that there was a new pressure on Paige to find results. She’d been the one to insist that they go over to the psychiatric institution to talk to one of the patients. She’d been the one to suggest this new line of inquiry. Now, she was the one who was going to spend time looking at it rather than helping Christopher with what seemed like a more solid, tangible aspect of the case.
Every minute that Paige spent on this was potentially time in which the killer might strike again. She didn’t know if he was killing on a schedule, or simply reacting to the small insults that came his way in the course of everyday life. If it was the latter, then Paige had no way of knowing whether the killer would target someone in the next ten minutes, or leave it another day before he struck. Paige doubted that it would be longer than that, though. Spree killers accelerated, they didn’t fade away.
That raised the worry that if Paige was wasting time on this hunch, it might cost another woman her life.
Why was this killer only targeting women? He didn’t seem to have a preferred victim type in terms of age or looks, so why wasn’t he targeting men as well? The answer to that seemed obvious to Paige: his method relied on being able to physically overpower someone quickly. He might believe that he was special and important, but some part of him had decided that he couldn’t risk taking on larger, stronger men. He was deliberately sticking to targets he believed to be weaker than himself. There might be other reasons too, of course: a strong streak of misogyny, perhaps, or just a pathology that was only about punishing women for the mistake of insulting him. Maybe that was even linked to his apparent fascination with the medieval.
Paige didn’t know, but she was determined to find any trace of him, wherever he was.
The question now was how she would go about finding someone like that. Paige guessed that in the modern world, someone wanting to announce what they were doing would do it somewhere on the internet, but where?
Paige started by searching for the case. That was faintly depressing, because the first hits to come up were all news stories with headlines like.
FBI stumped as killer claims third victim!
and
Lexington PD pushed out by FBI as local women die
It seemed that the local police force’s approach of standing back and waiting for Paige and Christopher to fail was starting to bear fruit. She hated that they were playing games with the lives of innocent people like this. If they’d helped, maybe that would have been enough to catch the killer by now.
Paige forced herself to click on those stories, ignoring the main body of the text and skipping through to the comment sections. She had to brace herself for that part, because she thought she had a pretty good idea of just how negative it was going to be about her and Christopher in there.
Paige quickly found that she didn’t know the half of it.
Have you seen that woman agent who has been showing up at the scenes? Hope the killer targets her next. Maybe then the FBI will send some real agents to solve this.
All of this is just faked, there to let the FBI come in and take over from local police.
The level of bile in the comments that followed was enough to make Paige feel a wave of disgust. It made it hard to wade through them all, trying to ignore the chatbots and the trolls to look for anyone who was expressing admiration for the killer, or even claiming outright to be them.
There were a depressing number of fans of the killer out there already. Paige guessed that most of them were doing it just to provoke a response, but she still had to follow up on each account, trying to work out if it might have any connection to the killer. That meant trying to track other comments made by the user elsewhere, looking for others that might praise the killer, or hint at knowledge that the general public didn’t have.
It was thankless work, and Paige found herself wondering if maybe Christopher had a point. Maybe they did need to focus on the things that were more tangible, and follow up on the physical evidence.
Then she came across a comment by a poster calling himself “Fleur-de-lis 1234”, which said:
This killer is clearly a superior human being. He ignores the petty morality of the world and imposes his own, with the most beautiful deaths. More on my web page.
There was a web address linked to the comment and Paige guessed that it was about a fifty-fifty shot that it was some kind of virus, but she had to know for sure if this was their guy. She clicked on it and instantly found herself on a dark, brooding webpage, decorated with a fleur-de-lis design that was far too familiar.
Paige read through the webpage, barely able to believe that it was there. She found a selection of Gothic looking photographs of castles, torture implements, and women in heavy dark makeup. Her real interest, though, was caught by a section that called itself a serial novel. It was titled “How I could have killed them better.”
Paige clicked on it and started to read.
As I approached Meredith, she turned to me, begging for her life. Such weakness. Such stupidity. Couldn’t she see that I’d already made my decision? I closed in on her with the knife in my hand, feeling the tautness of my skin around my knuckles as I gripped it tightly…