“Maybe today’s the day when Julius decided to leave it at home,” Christopher suggested, but he didn’t sound as certain as he had before. “Maybe he only carries it with him when he’s actively out looking for someone to kill.”
That was possible, but for Paige, it still didn’t fit with her profile of the killer. This was an opportunistic killer, who reacted to the petty insults of ordinary life. This was someone who had to be ready to strike back at a moment’s notice.
“I’m not even sure his coat is right,” Paige said. “Yes, he has a long coat, but look at it, and then look at the footage from the bus. I’m pretty sure it’s a different design.”
“He might own more than one coat,” Christopher pointed out.
“So a different coat, and he’s not carrying the murder weapon, and he’s not reacting the way we think he ought to? He isn’t even getting angry with us in there, except at the thought of being left out of all of this. I’m telling you, Christopher, this isn’t our guy.”
“So we just happen to have found another narcissist who was staring at Meredith Park shortly before she was murdered?”
That was a more damning piece of the puzzle, but it was still circumstantial.
“Everyone paid her attention,” Paige said. “And I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I want to go back through Julius’s posts. I want to check the dates on them.”
She heard Christopher sigh. “All right. I trust you, Paige. If there are things that you need to check, then check them, but I need to go back in there to try to get a confession out of Bryant. You know that we can’t afford to just ignore someone who is this strong a suspect.”
Paige understood what he was saying. With the pressure from the press, if they just let him go on her hunch, there would be instant anger from Agent Sauer, demanding to know what they were doing. There was a chance that they would even be replaced on the case.
“I know you have to keep going with him,” Paige said. “Just… don’t push too hard, or I get the feeling he might tell you what you want to hear, just for the attention.”
“I’ll be careful,” Christopher said, and headed back into the interrogation room.
Paige went to the office she and Christopher had borrowed there in the field office. She started up her laptop and began to look for discrepancies. She checked the footage taken from the bus station first. Sure enough, while the figure there arguing with Peggy Cane wore a long coat, it didn’t look anything like the one that Julius Bryant had with him.
Christopher had already made the obvious counterargument to that point though. Paige needed to find more if she was going to convince her partner that they had the wrong man.
She looked at Julius’s serial novel next. Crucially, Paige was looking for the upload dates of each section. If the Gisele Newbury section had been uploaded on the day of her murder, then yes, it seemed like an incredible coincidence that Julius had happened to be in the restaurant of the Renaissance Faire just before Meredith Park died. But there was another possibility, one that Paige quickly found borne out by the dates on the uploads.
In that moment, Paige thought that she understood Julius Bryant’s involvement. She hurried over to the interrogation room, where Christopher was still trying to get an increasingly agitated looking Julius Bryant to talk to him.
“It all started with Meredith, didn’t it Julius?” Paige said, as she stepped into the room.
“What?” Christopher said. “Paige, the first victim was-”
“I know Gisele Newbury was the killer’s first victim, but for Julius, it started with Meredith Park. I just checked the dates on your work, Julius. The first post was on the day of Meredith’s murder. You wrote her murder first, then wrote Gisele’s afterwards.”
“Did you like my work?” Julius asked. Even here, even now, he was looking for validation?
“I’m mostly interested in where you got your ideas,” Paige said.
“Ah, the question every author gets asked.”
“My theory is that you were obsessed with Meredith Park. I think if we look back further through the security footage from the restaurant, we’ll find you there, again and again, looking her way. I think that when she was killed, you felt like you had to write it, as… what? Some kind of tribute?”
“Can a tribute bring the loveliest of flowers back to life?” Julius said. “In his sonnets, Shakespeare writes of keeping his love alive through verse. It’s a lie, but I had to try. I had to. I have to.”
Paige turned her attention to Christopher. “He only wrote the Gisele Newbury section after Meredith’s death. My guess is, once he’d written the part for her, once he’d gotten some attention for it, he felt like he had to keep going.”
“A work is not complete until the audience deems it so!” Julius said.
“It doesn’t mean he didn’t do this,” Christopher said. “He might have killed Gisele, killed Meredith, and only then decided to write about it.”
“I thought you said that you thought he was killing them specifically to have something to write about?” Paige pointed out.
“Does this mean that I’m free to go?” Julius said. He stood and started for the door.
“No, it doesn’t,” Christopher said. He gestured for Paige to speak to him outside again. Once they were outside the door to the interrogation room once more, he looked a little less certain than he had, though.
“You still think it’s him?” Paige asked.
“I still think it’s possible,” Christopher said. “We can hold him for 24 hours. We’ll see what results come in from the search of his house and from looking back through the security footage. But let’s say for a moment that you’re right, and Julius Bryant isn’t the killer. Now what?”
That was the question that was bugging Paige because she didn’t have an answer right then.
“I’m not sure,” she admitted.
“We need something more than that, Paige,” Christopher said. “It’s not just that Sauer is going to be breathing down my neck for the number of arrests we’ve made that haven’t proved to be the killer, it’s that the whole FBI is going to start to look bad in the eyes of the Kentucky press. They’re all clustered downstairs still, waiting for a comment that we can’t give them in the middle of an active investigation. I thought we were going to be able to announce that we had the killer in custody, but now, they’ll be happy to run more stories about how we aren’t doing our jobs while women are dying. And honestly, I’m not sure they’re wrong.”
Paige could feel the weight of the pressure there, not least because it was on her just as much as Christopher. They needed an idea that would get them to the killer. The physical evidence wasn’t taking them anywhere. Paige needed to go deeper into her profile of the killer. She needed to think about the ways Nadia and Julius had reacted.
She needed to think about what made this killer unique, too. This was an individual, not just a general profile. They knew a few specific things about him. They’d seen specific things about his behavior. This wasn’t just a delusional narcissist like Julius, obsessed with his own brilliance but ultimately more fascinated by women than a danger to them.