They didn’t need to be. A killer who was doing this was interesting. The fact that they were doing it said that there was something different about their pathology, something that it might be possible to latch on to.
Maybe that design would be enough to lead to him. Maybe it would point to a link between the victims that had gotten them both killed. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just a design that he liked and had decided to use. She and Christopher would only really find that out once they got to Kentucky. For now, what mattered was getting there. There was a killer out there, and if he’d killed two women in two days, then there was a sense of urgency to it. They needed to get out there before he had a chance to kill age. At least with this one, Paige had a chance to stop him before he managed to hurt anyone else.
CHAPTER THREE
Paige used the flight to Lexington to go over the case files for the murders on her computer and start doing some research. The more information she could get at this stage, the easier it would be to make connections once they got on the ground. She could feel the pressure of needing to be on top of it all, but Paige didn’t let that slow her down.
As usual, the crime scene reports, coroner’s reports, and everything the FBI’s techs had been able to scrape from the victims’ social media had all been uploaded to the FBI’s systems for Paige to access. It meant a lot of information, but more information was better because there was a chance of finding a way through to the truth of all of this.
Christopher sat next to her on the flight, looking more relaxed than Paige felt. He’d looked through the files back in the meeting with Agent Sauer, but now seemed to be just waiting for their arrival in Kentucky before he did anything else.
“Why aren’t you going over the files too?” Paige asked. She didn’t mean it as if he wasn’t pulling his weight. She just wanted to understand his working methods.
“I have the basics,” Christopher said. “I want to see the situation on the ground before I make any decisions about it. Maybe you should too, Paige. You don’t have to be the one doing all the work.”
He seemed to be a man who liked to deal with the things in front of him, rather than speculating. He wanted to get answers through hard work and talking to people, rather than by theorizing based on the files. In a way, Paige liked that about him. That very down to earth approach made him a rock she could depend on as a partner, knowing that he was able to deal with whatever came at the two of them as a result of their cases.
At the same time, though, it meant that she was the one now who had to go through the files in detail, trying to find anything that might give them a head start on the case. She was the one who had to take the research side of things.
“Are you all right, Paige?” Christopher asked.
Paige thought for a moment that some of that dissatisfaction might have shown on her face, and she looked over to him with surprise that he’d managed to pick up on it so easily.
“Yes, why?”
“I mean, with the whole thing of the Exsanguination Killer being back. I know you were hoping Sauer was going to assign us to that. I know you’d rather work that case than this one.”
That was true, as far as it went. Paige wanted to be there to make sure that the man who had killed her father finally faced justice. She wanted to be a part of bringing him to justice. Paige had put a lot into trying to find him so far, and just hearing that there was another murder attributed to him unsettled her. It was a part of why she was throwing herself into the research for this now. It at least helped to bury some of what she felt.
“It’s… a difficult situation,” Paige said. “My father meant everything to me. Being the one to find him dead changed something in me. It hurt more than anything else since. It tore my life and my mother’s life apart. Without that one moment, we never would have ended up living with Jeremy…”
Jeremy, her stepfather. The one who had abused her until her mother had found out and taken them both out of the house right away. That hadn’t taken away anything he’d done, though. He was in her nightmares as often as the Exsanguination Killer.
Christopher reached out as if he might put a comforting hand on her arm, because he knew all about Jeremy. Paige had told him. The two of them had even been to visit him, to warn him that an escaped killer might be about to target him. Paige hadn’t been able to keep herself from punching Jeremy. Christopher had been there for her then, too.
Christopher pulled back, though. Maybe before Vegas, where they’d come so close to crossing the line with one another, he wouldn’t have hesitated like that. But now, there seemed to be that wall of awkwardness between the two of them that neither one of them could breach. That it wouldn’t be right to even try to breach. They both knew that they were attracted to one another, and they both knew that nothing could happen. Maybe they should have asked to be reassigned, but they worked too well together as partners for that.
“I feel like trying to do something to catch the man who did all that is the only way to make any of it better,” Paige said. “If I catch him, maybe then some of the nightmares will stop.”
Paige realized a second too late that she’d overstepped with that word. Of course, Christopher caught it.
“Nightmares?” Christopher asked. “I didn’t know you had nightmares.”
Paige knew that it was too late to deny it, so she nodded, instead. “Dr. Thornton calls it PTSD from everything that happened. I’ll be there again, in the woods, just staring down at him…”
Paige shook her head. Her former Ph.D. supervisor’s diagnosis notwithstanding, it wasn’t something she was happy talking about now. It felt too personal, too intimate, and Christopher wasn’t someone she could afford to get that close to. The more lines she crossed with him, the more chance there was of crossing one that she shouldn’t.
“None of it matters,” Paige said, even though that was a lie. It all mattered to her, more than she could express in words. It was there in the background every day of her life. “What matters now is that we catch this killer. He might only have two kills that we know about, but in a way, that’s worrying.”
“Why?” Christopher asked. Paige imagined that he could guess the answer to the question, but he obviously wanted to hear it from her. Maybe it was a way of passing the time on the flight, or maybe he just wanted to listen to her talk.
“Because it means we could be dealing with a spree killer,” Paige said. “And that’s far more dangerous.”
“The distinction being…”
“Some serial killers operate over years,” Paige explained. “They kill people at intervals, usually fairly regular intervals that mean something to them, or that represent how long they can go before the need to kill gets too great. Occasionally they pause when life events intervene, often they accelerate, but they never really stop. Spree killers… they still meet the definition of a serial killer because they kill multiple people in separate incidents, but they aren’t lurking in the background unseen for months at a time. They try to kill as many people as they can in a short space of time.”
“Meaning that this one will kill again and again over the next few days until he’s caught?” Christopher said. Paige could hear the worry in his voice.