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Paige didn’t think that was likely. This was a killer who hung his victims up. That meant that he had to know that there would be somewhere to display them in or around the crime scene. No, he’d picked out this spot, and probably his victim, ahead of time.
She watched the CSI team and the coroner’s people at work. Usually, this part of things had been dealt with by the time she got to a crime scene. Paige was normally looking at a space that had had the body taken away, maybe even been cleaned. Now, though, she was in a fresh scene, trying to find something that would help lead her to the killer.
“We should split up,” Christopher suggested. “Try to cover as much of the scene as possible.”
He’d wanted to split up before on this case. Maybe a part of it was that it was simply the most efficient way to cover the most ground, but Paige had the feeling that Christopher was also doing it to try to keep a sense of distance between the two of them.
Paige was ok with that for now though, because it meant that she didn’t have to focus on how strange things had become between them while she was trying to work. Paige forced herself to go towards the body, wanting any information she could get from the coroner.
The coroner was there, dressed in a plastic evidence suit. She looked up as Paige approached. “Are you going to ask me for conclusions before I’ve had a chance to look over the body properly?” Dr. Mikkel asked.
Paige guessed that the coroner didn’t like having to commit to final answers without time to process all of the evidence properly. Even so, Paige pushed her. “I’m just looking for preliminary impressions. You don’t have to commit to anything, just tell me if there’s anything obvious. Are we likely to be dealing with the same killer?”
“The method appears to be consistent,” the coroner said. “Multiple stab wounds to the chest and bruising around the throat. Beyond that, I wouldn’t want to speculate.”
Paige could understand the caution, but even so, she wanted anything she could get from the coroner. Any scrap of information might prove to be the one that allowed her to work out who the killer was.
Paige forced herself to look over the crime scene around the dead woman. The display of her there like that still reminded Paige a little of the way that Adam Riker displayed his victims. And there was no doubt that itwasa display, a way of grabbing as much attention for the crimes as possible. This was a killer who seemed to want notoriety, or who perhaps wanted to find a way to break through the city’s message that everything was fine, and that people should keep going as normal.
Paige took a step or two back, trying to get an overall picture of the scene as a whole. The woman hung in a spot where she would be seen by anyone passing by the café, and where it was possible to see the ocean in the background.
There was something else that Paige saw there, behind and around the victim: marks on the wall in a variety of colors, with reds, purples, and blues in distinct swirls and well-defined marks.
“Is that paint?” Paige asked.
The coroner looked over to it. “We would have to test it to be sure, but yes, probably.”
“And there was paint at the other crime scenes, too, wasn’t there?” Paige said. She vaguely remembered seeing it in the crime scene photographs from the earlier murders, but on the ground, it had all been wiped away.
“Have you found something?” Christopher asked, coming over.
“This paint,” Paige replied.
“It could just be graffiti,” Christopher pointed out.
“But it was present at the other scenes.” Paige looked at it some more, trying to make sense of the patterns there. “I think the local PD thought it was evidence of gang involvement.”
“It still could be,” Christopher said. He sounded as if he was actually considering it as a theory. “What if all of these kills are linked by some kind of gang activity or a killer with that background? What if they all upset the wrong group of people?”
Paige wasn’t sure about that. To her, the paint didn’t look like gang signs, even if she wasn’t an expert on that kind of thing.
“Why would a gang do this?” she asked.
“To send a message?” Christopher suggested. “The main thing a gang wants when it kills someone is to make people afraid. All of this could be to achieve that. It could be a way of warning people off. Maybe all of these people did something to upset the wrong gang or just the wrong person.”
It was possible, but that implied a kind of connection between them that Paige hadn’t been able to find so far.
“We have an ID on the victim,” Basman said, interrupting while making notes in a notebook. “That’s Professor Allison Hartley. She was a professor of art at the local college.”
He’d obviously done a lot while Paige had been busy looking at paint. He’d found out who this woman was, providing them with at least a starting point for their investigation into her death.
More than that, something about what he’d said started to set off connections in Paige’s brain. “An art professor?” Paige repeated.
“You think it’s significant?” Christopher asked. He was obviously still caught up in his gang angle.
“Hope Jackson was a struggling singer. Aiden Martlet was . . . what did Sebastian Dvornic call him? A hack artist? Now, we have an art professor. All people on the fringes of the arts. All people who either weren’t quite good enough to make it as artists or who didn’t care about it.”
Three of them was too many to be a coincidence. This killer had decided to start targeting people who were involved in the arts. Was it significant that he’d targeted people who weren’t very successful? Paige suspected that it had to be a part of it, but it was impossible to work out the significance of it without asking more questions. They would need to find out, because Paige suspected that was the only way that they were going to be able to find the killer they were hunting.
