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Yet a sick, horrifying feeling started to run through Andrea. All of this felt too real. Itlookedtoo real. She found herself reaching out towards the woman hanging there, barely daring to do it. The moment she touched the flesh of that woman, she knew that it wasn’t the plastic of a mannequin. She knew then that this wasn’t fake, that there really was the body of a dead woman strung up there as if to display it to the world.
Andrea could feel her heart beating faster, her breath coming in short pants that couldn’t bring in enough oxygen. She was standing in front of a dead body. She’d touched a dead body.
In that moment, Andrea did the only thing that she could do. She opened her mouth and screamed.
CHAPTER TWO
The moment Paige walked into the psychiatric facility, she could feel her heart beating faster.
“This isn’t the same as last time,” she reminded herself.
She wasn’t here to speak to Adam Riker today, wasn’t there to talk to the man who had escaped and tried to kill so many people around her, who had tried to turn her into a killer.
Today, she was there to talk to Louisa Fischer, a pyromaniac whose obsession with fire led her to set larger and larger blazes until eventually her actions had led to the deaths of two people.
By the standards of the St Just Institute, that barely made her a threat at all. Back when she’d worked there as a psychologist, Paige had been given the job of assessing the worst kind of murderers, trying to understand whether their actions could truly be attributed to behavioral disorders or whether they were merely trying to pretend insanity to avoid culpability for their crimes.
Paige followed an orderly through the institute, heading for what she couldn’t help thinking of as an interrogation suite, although a hospital like this wouldn’t call it that. This was a treatment room, a place for psychologists to talk to their patients.
The room was painted in soothing pastel tones. It featured soft, plush furnishings and pictures on the walls that had been produced by the patients there. Patients, rather than inmates. In theory, if they could be cured to the point where they didn’t represent a threat to the public anymore, they might be released at any time. It was simply that, given the severity of their disorders, it very rarely happened in practice. Certainly not quickly.
Paige used the glass of the door to check that she looked sufficiently like the FBI agent she was today, rather than like the psychologist she had been. She wasn’t tall. Her petite frame was wrapped in a professionally dark suit. Her red hair hung free around her heart shaped face, her green eyes staring back at herself levelly without a hint of the tension Paige felt today.
“I’ll leave you here, Agent King,” the orderly said. “We’ll bring Louisa through in a few minutes. When you need to leave, hit the intercom.”
Paige went into the room, sat down, and waited. She checked her phone, grateful to see that there were no messages from her boss, Agent Sauer. He wouldn’t be happy to hear that she was there, particularly when Paige hadn’t yet told him that she’d managed to find out from Adam Riker about the Exsanguination Killer, the man who had murdered her father when Paige was just fourteen.
He’d tried to keep everything he could from her, but he’d still let slip that the Exsanguination Killerwasn’ta man, but a woman, and that he’d met her somewhere in the St Just Institute. Those two facts weren’t much, but Paige hoped that they would be enough to find the killer. Paige had managed to call in a favor to gain access to the institution’s records and those had, in turn, pointed her towards one woman: Ann Dawson.
It wasn’t Ann Dawson she was going to talk to now, though, because one of the things that made her such a good potential suspect was the fact that she wasn’t currently in the institute, her freedom seeming to coincide far too neatly with the murders of the Exsanguination Killer.
Louisa Fischer had just been her roommate here. She wasn’t implicated in any of Ann’s crimes. She certainly wasn’t implicated in any of the murders by the Exsanguination Killer. Yet Paige had to hope that she knew something, that Ann Dawson had let something slip in the time she’d spent in the St Just Institute. She needed something that would move her forward with this. She needed something that would let her find the woman who had killed her father.
Even as Paige thought it, a door at the far side of the therapy room opened, letting in a woman escorted by a single female orderly. The woman was in her late twenties, with dirty blonde hair and a slender, angular figure. She wore the grey sweats that were standard for all the patients here—shapeless and interchangeable, easily replaced if they were stained or torn.
She looked twitchy, although Paige couldn’t tell if that was due to fear or just because of whatever drugs they had her on here to try to control her condition.
“I know her,” Louisa said in a slightly scratchy voice. “I’ve seen her before.”
Paige stood. “Louisa, I’m Agent Paige King of the FBI. I also used to work here. Perhaps that’s how you know me.”
Louisa looked as if she was considering it, trying to make some sense of the shift from someone who had worked at the institute to an FBI agent. Paige had to admit that it was a shift that she’d found hard to make sense of herself, yet she couldn’t deny that her skills as a psychologist had helped her to catch some of the most dangerous criminals out there.
Today, she hoped to use them to get closer to one more.
“Please take a seat, Louisa,” Paige said.
The former arsonist sat across from her, and now, Paige could see that quite a lot of the twitchinesswasdown to nerves. She wasn’t sure what was going on, and she clearly wasn’t happy to be there.
Paige had to hope that it was because she knew something, and she was worried about telling Paige.
Paige waited for the orderly to leave the room before she began to ask questions—partly because she wanted to take more time to observe Louisa Fischer, and partly because she wanted the conversation to just be between the two of them.
Paige found herself thinking about what she knew about Louisa. Her file had said that she was an arsonist, that she had come from a broken home with an alcoholic mother, that she had been a loner through much of her school years, but apparently not by choice. The full details weren’t there, but Paige could guess at some of the motivations that went along with all of that.
“They tell me that you like fire, Louisa,” Paige said.
Louisa looked her over carefully as if trying to guess what the correct response would be.
