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“You went to speak with Adam Riker?” Now Professor Thornton sounded almost shocked. “After all he did?”
“He claims that he knows who the Exsanguination Killer is.”
She kept walking along the boardwalk as she said it.
“But he won’t tell you,” the professor guessed.
“Not unless I do something he wants.” Paige stopped underneath a streetlight for this part.
There was another pause. “And what does Riker want from you?”
“He wants me to kill someone.” Paige wouldn’t have said it to anyone else as easily as that. The price Adam was trying to exact for his information was too much to even contemplate.
“Paige!” Now Professor Thornton really did sound shocked.
“I’m obviously not going to do it,” she said. “But even that is messing me up. Earlier, a man with a knife charged at me while I had my gun out. Protocol is to fire and keep firing until the attacker is down. I took a shot to his shoulder instead. It worked but . . .”
“But it might not have?”
Paige took a breath. “Christopher was angry with me for that one.”
“You didn’t want to take a life,” Professor Thornton said. “Especially not at the behest of a serial killer. That’s admirable, Paige, but it’s also important that you don’t put yourself in unnecessary danger.”
“I know,” Paige said. “But I also found some things out. Things Adam let slip.”
“Or that you think he let slip.”
That was always the danger when it came to Adam, but she’d seen how angry he was about it.
“No, I think this is real,” Paige said. She found a spot to sit as she kept going. “I have found a name that might be her.”
“Her? What do you mean ‘her’?”
Paige should have guessed that the professor would latch onto that detail. After all, it was one that had astonished her as well. Female serial killers were rare in the extreme.
“Adam let slip that the Exsanguination Killer is a woman, and that he met her in the St Just Institute. I’ve found a patient there who is currently out in the world and who seems to fit the profile.”
“Have you told your superiors?” Professor Thornton asked.
That question made Paige hesitate. Was she putting the professor in a dangerous position by telling him all of this? If her boss found out that she’d kept information from the FBI but told the professor, could he get into trouble for it? If so, it was probably already too late to do anything about it. No, by this point, she owed her former professor the truth.
“Not yet,” Paige said. “It isn’t my case. I don’t want to go to them with anything until I’m sure.”
“Is that the only reason?”
Of course, Professor Thornton would see through that half-truth. He knew how much more there was to her history with the killer.
“I don’t want them messing this up,” Paige said. “I want to be the one who catches the Exsanguination Killer.”
“And if they won’t let you on the case?”
Paige already knew the answer to that question because she’d thought about it plenty of times now. “Then I’ll go after her anyway, with or without Christopher, the BAU or even the FBI.”
She wasn’t going to let this go. She’d devoted so much of her life to being able to find the Exsanguination Killer that she wasn’t going to let the chance to find her slip through her fingers.
There was another pointed pause from the other end of the line. “That sounds like a very dangerous endeavor, Paige. I think you should consider telling your colleagues what you know. Either way, though, it isn’t the case you’re engaged in now.”
“No,” Paige admitted. She looked out at the ocean under the moonlight as she said it. “This case seems to involve an artist, looking to make his victims into art.”
