Agent Sauer seemed a little taken aback by that.
“Your job is to catch bad guys, Agent King,” he said, in a disapproving tone. “And I don’t want my agents putting themselves in danger unnecessarily. You could have been killed, and so could Agent Marriott. I also don’t like that you ignored me on this. We will talk about this more once you’re back in Quantico. But you’re right, you caught a killer. Well done. Finish up there and then get back here.”
Agent Sauer shut down the video call, leaving Paige and Christopher standing there in the aftermath of the debrief. It took Paige several seconds to realize that she was shaking.
“Paige?” Christopher moved over to her instantly. “Are you all right?”
Paige shook her head. It was as if everything was hitting her at once in that moment. She realized right then just how close she’d come to death. She could still feel the press of the gun against her own skull, still see the knife set against Christopher’s skin, forcing her to make an awful choice.
“Paige, you’re safe,” Christopher said. “It’s over. We caught him.”
Christopher held her there, a steadying presence. Paige felt like he was a point of stillness, holding her in place, giving her plenty of time to settle. The only problem was just how close he was as he did it. This close, Paige could take in the sweet scent of his aftershave, feel the muscles of his arms against her.
She wanted so much in that moment to just lean in and kiss him. Her eyes met his and seemed to lock there. It seemed as if there was a pull there, one that Paige couldn’t resist, didn’t want to resist, and it seemed to her as if Christopher felt the same way.
They both pulled back in the same moment, and just stood there staring at one another.
Christopher spoke first.
“Paige,” Christopher said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what this is, but it can’t be anything. I… I’m a married man.”
“And I’m not that kind of woman,” Paige said. “It was a mistake.”
“It’s not a mistake either of us can afford to make,” Christopher said. “You’re a great partner, and an amazing woman. I feel… well, it doesn’t matter what I feel. What matters is that we need to be able to work together without this getting in the way.”
Paige nodded, slightly too quickly. It felt as though they were both rushing to say that everything was fine, everything was normal.
“I know,” Paige said. “I want that too. I’ve been so careful.”
“Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we need to stop being careful, because that makes it into this thing that seems inevitable,” Christopher said. “We just need to behave normally around one another. We’re a good team, and I don’t want to lose that.”
“Me neither,” Paige said. “We work well together.”
They were a good team, but that was all they could be.
“We need to get back to Quantico,” Christopher said. “Agent Sauer will be waiting for us, and…”
Paige understood. Once they got back there, they could take a day or two to get some space from one another. They could focus on work again, and Christopher could get back to his wife.
Maybe it would be good to be back there for Paige, too. It would give her a chance to recover and clear her head. It would give her a chance to focus on the Exsanguination Killer again, too. Maybe once she got home, she would finally be able to find some answers.
EPILOGUE
Paige was back in her apartment, wondering if there was still a chance that she might lose her job in the next few days. Agent Sauer had sounded as though he’d accepted her and Christopher’s explanations before, but he’d also said that he wanted to talk to them again once they were back in Quantico.
Paige had only just become an FBI agent; she had no wish to lose that job now. Especially not when it had given her the chance to look deeper into the case that had haunted her since she was fourteen years old: the Exsanguination Killer.
Paige was putting off the moment when she knew she would start working on her carefully crafted file on the killer again, trying to factor in what she knew now about the notes the killer left and the murder weapon. She knew that she was putting it off, because she was scared of what she might find. Or rather, what she might not find.
Paige knew that her biggest fear was that there wouldn’t be anything in the evidence that could help to get her closer to the killer. After all, these were details that the whole of the FBI had been in possession of for years, but they still hadn’t managed to find anything based on them.
Would Christopher help her with this if Paige asked? Paige guessed that he might, although after what had almost happened in Lexington, things were still complicated between them. She wanted to be able to treat him like just a partner, but could she really do that if she was asking him for more? For him to go with her into something that wasn’t officially their business?
To distract herself from that thought, Paige went down to collect whatever mail she’d missed in the days she’d been in Lexington, walking downstairs to the solid row of metal mailboxes that dominated the wall next to the block’s entrance. Paige grabbed the mail without really looking at it, heading back upstairs and setting it down on her couch while she went to get her laptop, and the thick file where she’d pinned newspaper cuttings and handwritten notes. Paige had more notes on her laptop, pulling them up in front of her.
She couldn’t put this off any longer; she needed to look over the evidence and see if she could get anything else from it.
She started to work through it, adding in what she knew thanks to Sauer. There was the information about the murder weapon being some kind of scalpel. There was the note, taunting the FBI and the police for their inability to catch the killer. Both provided clues to the kind of person the Exsanguination Killer was: obsessed with control, even up to the moment of death. The way they killed suggested that the control was almost more important than the killing, certainly more important than any violence involved in it. If anything, the killer seemed to avoid excessive, extra violence.
But that didn’t get her any closer to the killer’s identity. None of it did. That was what was so frustrating about these crimes: the killer was good at leaving no traces, aside from the ones they chose. They killed their sets of three for reasons that only they understood, and then faded away as if they had never been there.
The frustration was intense. Paige set down her laptop, putting her head in her hands as she tried to think. But there was nothing to think about, nothing that could get her closer to an answer.
Paige went to open her mail, not knowing what else to do. It turned out to be the usual collection of bills and junk mail, except for one thing.
An envelope sat there with a postmark on it that had come from the St. Just Institute, the high security psychiatric institution where Paige had completed the research for her Ph.D.
That caught Paige by surprise. She hadn’t been expecting anything from there, hadn’t been back since the night the serial killer Adam Riker had escaped to torment her. The only part left of her life there was that she still communicated with Professor Thornton, her thesis supervisor. It was only a few months, but already it felt like a lifetime ago.