What interested Paige was that he was so prepared to admit that he’d been there. It didn’t seem to occur to him that this tied him to the murder, or maybe he was just confident that he could stop Paige and Christopher from truly linking him to the murder.
“What about Gisele Newbury?” Christopher asked. “Have you ever met her?”
Julius shrugged. It wasn’t an answer, not really.
“We’re going to pull traffic cam footage for your car,” Christopher said. “We’ll know if you were on the same route as her. We’ll know if you had a chance to run into her.”
“A valid way of investigating the lead,” Julius said. “Although personally, I would have my characters pull up the GPS for my car, so that they would know the location much more accurately.”
“Julius,” Paige said. “You need to take this more seriously. You’ve been arrested on suspicion of murder.”
“Ah, you’re going to play the sympathetic one, probably the one who has insights into the personality of the suspect,” Julius said. “Well then, what do you make of me, Agent King?”
Paige wondered how much to say. The goal here wasn’t simply to diagnose Julius; it was to get him to talk. Her private thought was that Julius was deeply narcissistic, and clearly thought that he was in charge of the entire situation. She suspected, though, that if she said that, it wouldn’t help to get any answers out of him.
“I think that you’re obviously clever,” Paige said. “I also think that you’re playing games with us. Why aren’t you answering our questions directly?”
“It’s more fun this way,” Julius said. “What’s it like, being an FBI agent? Especially as a woman. I imagine that there must be all kinds of complications. Especially with your background. What was it like seeing your father killed? What was it like, when your mother moved in with a new husband, only for him to assault you?”
Paige felt a wave of anger rising in her. She knew that Julius was doing it deliberately, but it was still hard to hold back from lunging forward to strike at him.
Christopher seemed to sense the problem, stepping in to interrupt before Paige could act.
“I’m more interested in where you were when Gisele Newbury was killed, and when Peggy Cane was murdered,” he said. “I know you know the exact times, because you wrote about the murders in such detail.”
“I did, didn’t I?” Julius said, seeming proud, but not actually answering the question.
“Where were you?” Christopher asked.
“Oh… somewhere.” Julius had a cunning look on his face, but Paige couldn’t tell if it was because he thought he was getting away with murder, or just because he was playing games with the FBI.
“Where, exactly?” Christopher insisted.
“I don’t remember. Writing is hard.”
“You don’t remember?” Paige asked.
Julius shrugged, and Paige headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” he demanded.
Paige stopped. “Tell me about Peggy. Tell me how you knew about her murder.”
“Such a fascinating case,” Julius said. “Such a fascinating woman. The way she died there in the locker room. It’s almost like a locked room mystery.”
Paige had put up with enough from the writer. She headed for the door, Christopher following in her wake.
“It’s him,” Christopher said. “It has to be. No alibi, writing about the murders in detail. Obviously a narcissist. It’s him.”
Paige thought about it. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence stacking up around Julius, yet… where was the misericord? Where was the direct evidence linking him to the crime?
More than that, Paige found herself thinking about the kind of man who had committed these crimes. The kind of man who had lashed out because of small insults. Was that man Julius?
Paige just wasn’t sure. There was something wrong here, something that didn’t quite fit. Paige couldn’t quite put her finger on it, because at first glance it appeared that all the evidence they had pointed one way, but still…
“I don’t think that Julius Bryant is the killer.”
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
Paige saw Christopher staring at her in something like disbelief.
“You don’t think that Bryant is the killer?” he said.
Paige could only shake her head. The feeling wouldn’t go away, no matter how much she told herself that the evidence pointed his way.
“There are things that don’t fit,” Paige said.
“He literally wrote about how he killed these three women, Paige,” Christopher said.
“So he’s a bad writer who uses the deaths of innocent women to improve his profile,” Paige replied. “I’m not sure that it means that he’s the killer. In fact, it’s part of what’s persuading me that he isn’t.”
Christopher frowned. It was hard to ignore how good looking he was when his brow furrowed like that. Paige knew that she couldn’t focus on that, though.
“The fact that he’s written something close to a confession is evidence that he’s not the killer?” Christopher said, apparently not quite believing it even as he said it.
Paige did her best to explain. “My point is that throughout all of this, he has looked at all of it like a writer. Everything is material for his next book. Everything. He’s obsessive about the writing, but when we talked about the women, all he could say was how fascinating they were. That’s not the pathology of our killer.”
“Unless he’s killing these women just to provide more material for his books?” Christopher suggested. “I mean, you have to admit that he might be capable of doing something like that. And he’s obviously a narcissist.”
“He is,” Paige agreed.
“So it could be him?”
Paige considered it. Was it possible that she’d just misunderstood the motivations of the killer? Was it possible that all of this wasn’t about some lethally offended narcissist, but about one who considered his pet writing project to be more important than the lives of the women he killed?
“No,” Paige said at last. “Think about the footage from the bus. Think about the way Gisele was making people angry with her driving. We see our guy getting into an altercation with Peggy Cane. This is about revenge for insults, and Julius Bryant isn’t interested in that.”
“What if you’re wrong?” Christopher asked. “We can’t just let a guy go just because your hunch says that he isn’t the killer.”
“We’ve been here before,” Paige pointed out. In previous cases, there had been moments when they’d had a suspect in custody, and Christopher hadn’t been willing to believe that he wasn’t their man.
“What if this is the time when we really do have the killer?” Christopher asked. “All the evidence we have…”
“Is circumstantial,” Paige said. “Where is the physical evidence? Where is the murder weapon?”
Christopher looked as if he didn’t understand. “Like I told Julius, I’ve sent a forensic team to his house.”
“But the killer doesn’t keep the weapon in his house, does he?” Paige pointed out. “Look at what happened with Peggy Cane. He argued with her on the bus. Then, shortly after she got off at the bus station, she was found dead. The killer didn’t run home to get his misericord. He had to have it on him, ready to use. He carries it around with him.”