Paige could only sit there and stare at it, barely able to believe what she was seeing. She skipped to another section.
Gisele was an affront to me from the moment that I saw her. She had to die. She behaved as if she mattered, as if she were the most important person in the world. I couldn’t allow that. I had to show her that the world runs the way I allow it to, no one else…
“Christopher,” Paige said. “I think you need to see this.”
Christopher came over. “What is it? What have you found?”
“There’s a guy here with a website where he writes about the murders,” Paige said. “He’s writing as if he’s the killer, and he’s made a bunch of comments praising him online, making it sound as if he has this world changing agenda.”
Christopher looked over her shoulder at the writing there, starting to read.
“And the guy calls himself fleur-de-lis 1234 online,” Paige said.
“It’s definitely suspicious,” Christopher said. He clicked through onto the site, and now Paige saw that there was a small link entitled “About the Author”.
No, he couldn’t really have been stupid enough to do that, could he?
Paige clicked on it, and a page came up, showing a name and a photograph, along with what seemed to be a pretty standard author blurb.
Fleur-de-lis is a pen name of Julius Bryant, an author for more than ten years. His works have been on bestseller lists around the world and have won many prestigious awards. For agent inquiries please use the contact form below.
Paige was more interested in the photograph, of a lean, thin faced man with dark hair. There was something familiar about that man, something that made Paige certain that she’d seen him before.
It took several seconds for her to work out where, but when she did, Paige quickly started clicking through her laptop’s files, calling up security footage, looking for the section she wanted.
She found the image she was looking for in the footage taken from the restaurant the day Meredith Park had died. She paused it, turning the screen to Christopher.
“There, you see that guy? He was there in the restaurant before Meredith left, and he was staring at her strangely. I’m not imagining it, am I?”
Christopher shook his head. “You’re not imagining it, Paige.”
There, in the footage from the restaurant, was the same man whose features currently sat in a head shot on the author bio section of his website. Julius Bryant had been there in the restaurant with Meredith. He’d written about killing her.
They had to find him, right away.
“I’m looking up Julius Bryant,” Christopher said. “It looks like he’s an author who was dropped by his publisher a while back for poor sales and plagiarism. There’s no address here with the DMV, but I can see a thing where he’s talking at a convention for online authors. It’s in Lexington.”
“We need to get over there,” Paige said. “Before he has a chance to kill anyone else.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The convention was at a small hotel on the outskirts of Lexington which looked to Paige as though it had seen better days. It was the kind of place that businesspeople might book for an overnight stay if they were moving on in the morning, but that no one would really stay at if they were planning to see more of the city, or if they were there on vacation.
She guessed that conventions were part of the lifeblood of a place like that, including some pretty important ones. Certainly, looking at the details of the convention online, the organizers seemed to be making a big deal of it.
Paige read aloud as Christopher drove.
“This is Kentucky’s biggest and best convention for online creators of all kinds, featuring self-publishing, online only authors, musicians and creatives from fields as disparate as e-sports and crafting.”
“That sounds like we’re going to be walking into the middle of a lot of people there,” Christopher said.
Paige nodded. “It also sounds a bit… unfocused. Like they’re trying to get everyone they can from wherever they can.”
Put like that, maybe it wasn’t such a big thing after all. Maybe they were having to cast their net wide because they couldn’t get the numbers to justify a convention otherwise.
When they reached the hotel, it was clear that this wasn’t something on the scale of say a major comic convention, but the parking lot was still pretty full, and there were still plenty of people hanging around outside, talking to one another in the open air.
Paige ignored them; they weren’t the suspect she and Christopher were here to find. If Julius Bryant was scheduled to speak at this convention, then he would be somewhere inside.
They entered the hotel, and were immediately met by a greeter standing at a folding table full of name badges. The greeter was a young woman with purple hair wearing jeans and a yellow t-shirt with the words “Content Creator” emblazoned across the front.
“Hi!” she said in a slightly too cheerful tone. “If you’re here for the convention, this is the place to pick up your name badges. What kind of content do you create?”
Paige flashed her badge. “We’re not here for the convention. We’re looking for someone who is speaking here. Julius Bryant?”
“Oh, him,” the young woman said, with a slight note of distaste. “He’s speaking on a panel at the moment, all about finding new ways to make a killing in crime fiction online. I’m pretty sure the pun was his idea.”
She made it sound as if she expected the FBI to be there to arrest him for that, if for nothing else.
“And where can we find that panel?” Paige asked.
In reply, the greeter handed her a folded map of the hotel, apparently designed to make the whole place seem far larger than it actually was. The details of the different panels and events in each room were set out in small sidebars.
“It should all be on here,” she said. “I think the details of who’s speaking on what panel are on the back.”
It was obvious that she hadn’t bothered to memorize who was where, or at least, she hadn’t paid much attention to exactly where Julius Bryant was.
A part of Paige wanted to rush off in pursuit of their suspect, but she took the time to ask a couple more questions.
“Did you meet Julius Bryant when he signed in here?” Paige asked.
The greeter shrugged. “I guess.”
“What did you make of him?” Paige asked.
The greeter looked a little uncomfortable, as if she didn’t want to risk saying anything unpleasant about one of the speakers there.
“You’re not going to get into any trouble,” Paige promised her. “We just want to hear the truth.”
“Honestly? He kind of creeps me out,” the greeter said. “He walked in acting like he was the most important guy in the world, and I was kind of in a rush, so I just pushed his name badge his way without really stopping to talk, and he looked at me like… well, like I’d committed some unforgiveable sin, or something.”
Paige looked over at Christopher. To her, that sounded like exactly the kind of thing the killer would have done. Was it possible that Julius Bryant had just decided on his next victim? Was he only waiting for an opportunity to get this young woman alone before he struck?