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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
He stood there, watching the banjo player and the singer performing what passed for their act, staying well back so that they wouldn’t see the anger on his face.
They were insipid. Talentless. Oh, some of the audience seemed to be enjoying it, but that only showed what a lack of taste many people had. They were content with something that made them feel briefly happy, rather than something that challenged them, something that made them think and feel deeply.
Hiswork did and would. The canvasses he’d produced seemed to have more and more depth the more often he looked at them. And hedidlook at them. He stared at them in his workshop, seeing the scenes there, the sheer perfection of what he’d wrought.
He wondered if people would get the allusions to past works in his paintings and his performance-based art. Those allusions weren’t like the duo in front of him, just trotting out the old classics with no fresh spin. They were a comment on the past and a reinvigoration of the themes. He didn’t just copy old works, he used references to them to inspire something new, something special.
As he stood there staring from the edge of a small crowd of onlookers on the boardwalk, he found himself wondering if the police and the FBI appreciated all the layers of those aspects of his work they saw. If they got the little Easter eggs that he’d left for them, hidden among the lines of his paint. Presumably not, or they might have tried harder to stop him. He was confident that they wouldn’t succeed, but it might have been nice to have the struggle. Struggle produced the greatest art.
He'd found that out firsthand. There had been so much struggle, so much failure, and so much suffering in his life. He’d lost so much over the years and had never quite gained what he’d wanted from it. He’d been stuck producing mediocre art, until the moment when he’d realized that he needed to be more extreme to achieve all that he should.
Soon, the banjo player and the singer would have a taste of that, perhaps the first chance they’d had to be a part of real, meaningful art. He would lure them in, and he would kill them. But that was something for later. For now, he had preparations to make.
He made his way along the boardwalk to a spot where an alley led off from it. It was deserted at the moment, but he knew that the two would pass by on their way back this evening. He’d already worked out how he was going to get them in there, and everything that would happen after that.
He made his way to another small courtyard where a streetlight looked down. He’d set up ladders next to it, starting with scaffolding in place to allow him to construct the scene he wanted. He already had pots of paint in place to let him work. He assumed that anyone approaching would simply see someone painting a mural for a local business.
Right then, he didn’t care. He had his art to focus on. He had to get every pattern just right in preparation for his latest masterpiece. The moment to make his kill was fast approaching.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Paige hurried along the boardwalk to the spot where Christopher was waiting for her, wondering all the while why she was the one running to him. She’d been the one who’d been proved right, after all, and she wasn’t the one who was making it essentially impossible for the two of them to work together.
Take a breath,Paige told herself.You’re applying for a transfer after this case. The rest of it doesn’t matter. We just have to catch this one last criminal together and then we’re done.
Paige found herself thinking about the Exsanguination Killer. Catching her also mattered. Paige would do whatever it took to catch her after she’d killed Paige’s father. She would still be able to do that after she transferred, though. She had information that she could work from. Adam Riker had seen to that.
Paige could see the boardwalk starting to shut down for the evening as she walked. The restaurants were down to their last few diners. The people on the streets had started to thin out, so that Paige was left alone, walking from one patch of streetlight to the next. For a moment, a shiver went down her spine. She normally felt safe when she was out on a case because she had her partner beside her, but now, Paige felt vulnerable in a way that she hadn’t since she’d become an FBI agent.
Adam was clearly playing his usual games with her, but this time, Paige suspected that he’d messed up. He hadn’t meant to give her the information that he had. He’d meant to make it clear that he knew something real, but instead he’d given away information that might actually lead Paige to the killer.
Paige could still keep that hunt going without Christopher, without the BAU. She would find Ann Dawson. She would establish whether she was the Exsanguination Killer as Paige suspected. Paige could do that anywhere, even without the FBI, if necessary. But a transfermightput Paige somewhere her skills were appreciated, and where she could do her job without constant arguments or feeling like her opinion didn’t count for anything. Without worrying about the state of her relationship with Christopher. That could only be a good thing.
Here and now, though, Paige still had a job to do. She still had to work this case through with Christopher, still had to catch a killer who had already claimed three lives and would probably take more if they didn’t stop him.
She found Christopher on a bench next to a bandstand, working through criminal profiles on his laptop.
“I thought you might have headed back to the precinct,” Paige said as she approached.
“I thought about it,” Christopher said. “But I didn’t want to strand you on the boardwalk and if anything is going to happen tonight, it’s going to be here.”
He had a point. The one thing they knew for certain about the way this killer operated was that he killed his victims near the boardwalk. The closer Paige and Christopher were to it when they didn’t have another idea, the better the chances of them being able to intercept him when he struck.
“I wish we could persuade the local PD to patrol every inch of this place,” Paige said.
Christopher shook his head, though. “I might not agree with their whole angle about it being bad publicity, but you know as well as I do that it would drive the killer underground. He’d wait for it to die down, then strike again.”
“And we’d have that time to catch him,” Paige argued. “Or we could put all the police undercover as tourists or civilians.”
“There’s still too much of a risk that he’d spot them,” Christopher said. It felt as though he’d been shutting down Paige’s ideas since the start of this investigation. “Besides, it’s a moot point. The Arnville PD won’t give us the people we would need for something like that.”
Looking around, Paige couldn’t even see the few extra officers who had been out there when the boardwalk had been at its busiest. They obviously thought that with fewer potential victims, there was less risk.
Paige didn’t think that it worked that way. This was a killer who liked to make a statement, but who had also been very careful to keep himself out of sight. Surely, this was exactly the kind of moment the killer would wait for before making his move.
“If he’s going to kill tonight, it will be as things quiet down,” Paige said.
