Paige nodded. That was the worst case scenario. Although there was one other possibility that was in some ways even worse.
“That’s assuming that this is someone who has simply suffered a breakdown and decided to go on a killing spree,” Paige said. “The scarier possibility is that this is someone who has killed these victims for a reason, because once he achieves his aims, he might just disappear.”
“And if he does that, then he might pop up later, killing again,” Christopher said.
Paige nodded. Once someone had started trying to resolve their problems by killing people, it was easier for them to do it again. And if they were able to disappear, then they might never be found.
“What do you make of the elements Sauer brought up?” Christopher asked. “The unusual murder weapon and the symbol?”
“I’m looking through the coroner’s report now,” Paige said, pulling it up. It was hard to read the dry, almost cold way the coroner catalogued the women’s injuries, noting defensive bruising to their arms that suggested their assailant had been in front of them when he attacked them. They’d seen the attack coming, tried to save their own lives, and been killed anyway. They hadn’t been able to do anything to stop him.
“They have bruises that suggest they tried to fight back against their killer,” Paige said, “but the only knife wounds are the single ones to the heart that killed them.”
She saw Christopher frown at that. “Stabbings are usually messier, unless the killer takes their victim by surprise. Usually even then. Most people start stabbing, and they don’t stop. And if someone fights back, their first instinct is to use the knife.”
Which usually meant multiple cuts to the arms and body as the victim tried to prevent the knife from getting to them. But in this case, there hadn’t been those wounds.
“So he was careful to only use the knife for the finish?” Paige said. “That sounds almost like ritual behavior, where he feels that he has to do things a particular way, either because it’s what has worked for him in the past, or because it’s the only way to guarantee the rush that comes from a kill.”
Paige kept reading through the coroner’s report, trying to glean anything else from what the coroner had said about the wounds. It was obviously something that meant a lot to the killer, otherwise why make such an effort to do things so precisely? Was there something in there that they could use to try to get closer to him?
Paige paused as she saw the coroner’s notes on the likely murder weapon.
“There’s something strange here too,” Paige said. “The killer doesn’t seem to have used a normal knife. The coroner says that it isn’t like any knife he’s seen.”
“And he will have seen a lot of knife wounds,” Christopher said. “Maybe if we get him to reconstruct the shape of the blade fully, it will tell us something.”
“The preliminary report says that the wounds were square sided, more like the victims were stabbed with a sharpened fire poker than with a knife,” Paige said. It was confusing because she’d never heard of a weapon like that. “Presumably that isn’t what he used? People would notice someone carrying around a weapon like that.”
Christopher shrugged. “At a Renaissance Faire? It’s possible that people thought it was a part of a costume. But out on the street where Gisele Newbury was killed? I think that would stand out too much.”
So it was probably something smaller, then. Something with a very unusual blade profile. Maybe, if they could identify exactly what it was, then it might help to move them closer to finding out who the killer was. Paige made a note of it as a possible line of inquiry.
For the moment, though, Paige had to keep looking for other possibilities.
“What do you make of the fleur-de-lis?” Paige asked Christopher. In some ways, it was the strangest part of all of this.
“It has to mean something to the killer, right?” Christopher said. “Why else go to the trouble of leaving it by both of the victims?”
“It’s possible that it might be linked to the victims,” Paige suggested. “It might be something relevant to both of them, rather than to him.”
She started to look for any sign of that symbol in the social media profiles of the two women who had been killed. Maybe it might provide a link between the two of them and so point to some kind of reason why the two of them had been chosen as victims.
Paige couldn’t find it anywhere, though. There wasn’t any obvious connection between the two of them that she could find. There were no clear pictures of a design like that on the women’s profiles, and a quick search for the design produced too many results to go through. The fleur-de-lis, meanwhile, was simply too much of a common design for it to be easy to find one person based on it. It cropped up in everything from fabrics to wallpaper, company logos to woodworking designs.
A little basic research suggested that it was a very old design. Paige found herself thinking about it in the context of the Renaissance Faire. Was the fleur-de-lis linked to that, or was it to do with something else?
“What I don’t get is just how different the two victims appear to be,” Paige said. “There’s a restaurant worker in her early twenties, and a realtor in her mid-thirties. One was killed at a Renaissance Faire, the other outside her home. They don’t look alike, they don’t appear to have known one another, and I can’t think of any obvious reason why the two of them might have been targeted. There has to be some kind of link, though.”
Christopher shrugged. “If it’s there, I’m sure you’ll find it. The question now is what we should do once we’re on the ground in Lexington. Do we try looking at Gisele Newbury or Meredith Park first? We’ll need to look into both murders, but maybe if we get enough from one crime scene, it will give us a head start on the investigation.”
Paige could understand that. The question was, with two such different murder victims, which one fit the killer better? Which one was closer to the killer’s normal life? The temptation was to say the murder that looked more normal, out on the street, but Paige found herself thinking about the fleur-de-lis and the strange weapon.
That combination was enough to point Paige in the other direction.
“The two clues that we have so far have this vaguely medieval tinge to them,” Paige said. “A strange dagger and an unusual symbol? Plus, Meredith Park is the most recent victim, so there’s more of a chance of finding something that isn’t already in the files there.”
Christopher nodded. “I agree. It looks as though we’re going to the Renaissance Faire.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Lexington Ren-Faire was located on the outermost fringes of the city, in that in between space before the lands around gave way to seemingly endless open fields and horse ranches. Paige could see several such ranches in the distance, along with what appeared to be a couple of race tracks. It seemed that everything in the area was given over to horses, although some of the skyscrapers back towards the center of the city suggested that there were plenty of other major businesses there as well.
Paige’s eyes were more on the sprawl of the Renaissance Faire than on the city. It was strange to think that this one had become permanent, rather than moving around. It was bigger than she’d imagined it might be. Her mind’s eye had conjured up somewhere small, maybe covering a single field. Instead, this was a large, meandering campus of a theme park, set behind large, arching black iron gates that seemed to have a deliberately handmade quality to them, as if they’d been produced by a medieval blacksmith rather than by machine and wanted to make sure that they showed it.