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“It’s all right, Louisa,” Paige said, trying to reassure her. “I’m not judging you.”
“People did. They said that it was my fault people died. I didn’t want them to die.”
She also hadn’t done anything to check that the building she was setting light to was empty, but Paige knew better than to say that. She needed to find a way to establish rapport with Louisa if she was going to get any answers out of her.
“I’m here to talk to you about a former roommate of yours,” Paige said. “What did Ann think about fire?”
Louisa was silent for several seconds. Again, Paige had the impression of her trying to calculate everything that was going on, but from what Paige had read about Louisa and her crimes, she was not cold or calculating. She was someone who got so caught up in the moment, in her love of the fires she set, that it completely overwhelmed her. Paige had to focus on that part, on the emotional side of the patient.
“She didn’t care about it,” Louisa said.
“She didn’t think that it was special?” Paige asked.
Louisa shook her head.
“Not like you do?”
That got a silent nod. Paige needed more than that. She needed to get Louisa talking if any of this was going to work.
“What was Ann like?” Paige asked.
Louisa shrugged.
“You shared a room for more than a year,” Paige said. “Is a shrug all that’s worth?”
“She was . . .” Louisa looked like she was struggling for the right words. Paige found herself wondering how much the drugs were affecting her right then, or if this was simply because she didn’t want to talk. “Scary.”
“How was she scary?” Paige asked.
Louisa shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You’re safe here,” Paige said. “She can’t do anything to hurt you.”
Still, Louisa was silent, and Paige could feel her frustration growing. She needed this, but how was she meant to get answers out of someone who so obviously didn’t want to talk? She could make threats, but what good would that do here, and did Paige really want to threaten someone who wasn’t a cold-blooded psychopath like Adam? Just the thought of doing it disgusted Paige.
A thought came to her. A cold-blooded psychopath.
“How about if I guess what made her scary and you can tell me if I’m right?” Paige said. “I guess that she would be friendly and full of charm, then suddenly she would go cold and look through you like you were barely even there. I guess that she would try to manipulate everything to suit her, then get angry if it didn’t turn out that way. Only with her, when she got angry, she would plot ways to hurt people. Am I close?”
For a second, as Louisa was silent, Paige thought that she’d gotten nowhere with this. Then the other woman gave a small nod, barely discernible. “She would . . . hurt me,” Louisa said. “She liked to cut people. She said that she would cut me up bad if I didn’t do everything she wanted.”
Louisa looked around sharply as if expecting the words to summon her former roommate. “She said that when she left, she’d come back for me, and if I was good, she’d get me out of here, but if I’d said anything, she’d kill me.”
It sounded as though the facility should never have let her go, but the very fact that she’d been able to convince trained medical minds that she was well again said something about her ability to plan ahead and convince others.
“Do you know where she went after she was released?” Paige asked. “Did she ever talk about anywhere important to her?”
That just got another shrug, along with a closed expression that was as good as a brick wall. Paige could feel her frustration rising even higher. She wasn’t getting anything here except hints.
Could Ann Dawson be the killer she was looking for? It was possible, but there was no direct evidence, nothing beyond the vague sense that her personality fit with that of the Exsanguination Killer.
“Did she ever talk about killing people?” Paige asked, trying one last gamble. “Did she talk about tying them down and bleeding them to death?”
It was too direct, and she knew it. The question just sent Louisa back into herself more, so that it was obvious Paige wasn’t going to get any more answers.
They were done here.
“All right,” Paige said. “I’ll go.”
