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“Then that is what you need to focus on,” Professor Thornton said. His tone was a little stern now. “Paige, you aren’t a student anymore. You’re an FBI agent, and lives hang in the balance on your decisions. Whatever your problems with Agent Marriott, whatever your intentions are after this case is done, the fact remains that you have a killer to catch. It sounds as if you already have a working profile; you just need touseit.”
That took Paige a little aback because she knew that the professor was right. She was there to catch a killer and every moment she spent distracted by the state of things with Christopher was a moment in which the killer might strike again.
“You’re right,” she said. “I need to go. I have to get back to Christopher.”
She hung up and set off back along the boardwalk. Whatever was going on between her and Christopher, however little she wanted to face up to him right then, she had to go back. She had to do her job and make sure that whoever was killing people out on the boardwalk like this was caught. Afterwards, she could put in her request for a transfer, but for now, she needed to be the agent she had trained so hard to become.
Paige could see Christopher still ahead, still at the bench that overlooked the ocean, still there with his laptop. She steeled herself for the moment when she would have to talk to him. How should she do this? Should she go in all business, talking about nothing but clues and the possibilities for the case? No, trying to do that had already led to an uncomfortable awkwardness between the two of them.
She was going to have to do this another way. Maybe it was better to go back to him and address the issues between them, then tell him that they were going to have to focus on the case if they were going to get anywhere. Yes, that sounded like a better way to do things. The two of them could work well together when their complicated feelings towards one another weren’t getting in the way. They needed to find a way to get back there for the remainder of this case.
Paige took a breath and approached. “Christopher.”
He looked up. For an instant, Paige could see the hurt on his face, but then that hurt was replaced by a careful blankness that seemed almost worse, somehow.
“We should talk about everything that’s happened,” she said.
Christopher shook his head, though. “There’s no time, I have a potential lead. We need to focus on that.”
Paige could hear the urgency in his voice, but even so, she knew that it was a deflection. He was trying to find a way not to talk about everything between them and was using the case to do it.
The problem was that he had a point. If there was a lead, then they needed to make progress on it to try to track down the killer.
“What potential lead?” Paige asked.
Christopher looked relieved that Paige wasn’t pushing the issue and quickly held up his laptop for her to see. “I ran with your idea that the killer might be an artist. Finding artists who more than one of the victims might have known didn’t work because there were simply too many, but then I thought of running a search for local artists who have been busted for crimes before, particularly violent ones.”
Paige could feel a wash of excitement at that. If Christopher really had found an answer, if they really did have a chance to catch the killer here and now, that was a big deal. “What have you found?”
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
It could have looked romantic, Paige and Christopher sitting there next to the ocean on the boardwalk together. Except for the part where Paige was looking through police files, trying to find a murderer.
As Paige looked through the hits Christopher had found in his search for artists who had gone too far, she could feel his gaze on her, the weight of expectation that she would be the one to find the answers pushing them forward.
She liked that expectation, because of the trust behind it, the feeling that Christopher believed in her enough to find an answer where he couldn’t. Now though, she actually had tofindthat answer in order to prove herself worthy of that belief.
She started to look through everything Christopher had found.
“I started off with online searches for artists who had gone crazy,” Christopher said.
“That would be hard to narrow down,” Paige replied. Even so, she looked through what he’d found using that. It was a lot, covering everything from Van Gogh down to a couple of local artists who had been committed to psychiatric institutions in the 1920s.
Paige could see the searches Christopher had refined more, looking for more recent artists who had suffered breakdowns or who had shown signs of violence. Again, the problem with the reports seemed to be that it was hard to pick out what was relevant.
There were police records, too, along with what appeared to be records from local psychiatric institutions. They were in a jumble, with no real sense of order to them.
Paige needed to find, to design, a way to sort through it all.
“I thought about starting by excluding any of them that are too far in the past,” Christopher said. “But how far is too far?”
“It’s tricky,” Paige said. “Theoretically, we could take it back decades, just to cover anyone whose failed art career messed up their kids to the point where they did this, or someone who messed up a long time ago and it’s only now starting to have an effect.”
“But you don’t think that’s the case?” Christopher said. Paige had to suppress the urge to smile to herself. It really was like things were back as they had always been. She knew that couldn’t last, she knew the things between them weren’t going away, but for now, it was good to feel the two of them in sync once again.
“Why now, if it’s something that started years ago?” Paige asked. “Why wouldn’t they have started killing at some other point?”
“Some event that triggered it all now?” Christopher suggested.
