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“I’m sorry folks, we aren’t seating new diners right now. We’ll be closing soon. You can have a drink at the bar if you want.”
Paige guessed that this was a big part of his job at this time of the evening, keeping out new diners so that the restaurant could actually close for the evening.
Christopher flashed his badge then. “We’re with the FBI. We’re looking for one of your employees: Lucien Alban.”
Paige caught the slight widening of the manager’s eyes and realized that there was a chance that he was going to overreact in a way that would only warn Lucien that they were coming for him.
“Quietly, please,” Paige said. “We don’t want to attract too much attention.”
The manager looked around. “He should be out here, but he isn’t. He should be on shift now. Hell, he should be the one turning people away at this time of night.”
Paige tried to imagine how that would have gone down if they’d come in and he’d seen them like that. Would Lucien have run as soon as Christopher announced that they were FBI?
“We need to find him,” Christopher said. “Urgently.”
The manager looked around as if Lucien might appear if he just did that. Paige was more interested in the pictures on the wall of the staff. There was a picture of Lucien there. He was a bald, thin-faced man with thick dark eyebrows that seemed to dominate this face. His features were handsome enough but there was an almost frightening intensity to the gaze of his dark eyes.
Paige found herself thinking about his file. He’d shown obvious signs of violence in his art, working with blood and addressing increasingly brutal themes. In his private life, he’d been quick to lie, had grandiose opinions of himself, and had a lot of casual sexual partners. There had been a question mark over whether to diagnose him with anti-social personality disorder or narcissistic personality disorder. Both had produced killers in the past. Lucien hadn’t gone that far, but he had attacked a former model, which was how he’d come to be shut away in a psychiatric institution.
Paige was still considering that when she heard a woman’s scream coming from the back of the restaurant.
Paige was so ready for the possibility of things going wrong that she found herself running towards the sound even before she realized it. Christopher was running with her, his weapon already drawn, ready for action.
There was a bathroom at the back, and Paige guessed that was where the scream had come from. The door to it was locked but Paige didn’t hesitate. Taking a step back, she kicked the door as hard as she could. The cheap lock splintered, letting Christopher burst in with his weapon raised to cover the interior. Paige followed a second later with her own weapon drawn to try to back him up.
“FBI! Freeze!” Christopher called out.
Even as he did it, though, a man came bursting past him. Paige had a moment to recognize Lucien Alban before he barreled into her, knocking her back, clearly trying to get away as soon as possible.
Paige turned and ran after him, trusting that if there was someone hurt in there, the restaurant manager would call for help. Right then, the best thing she could do was try to go after Lucien, aiming to bring him down before he could hurt anyone else.
Paige expected Lucien to run straight for the front of the restaurant but instead, he turned left, heading through a set of double doors leading to a kitchen. Paige followed him into the kitchen, where busy chefs were working almost elbow to elbow around a large, steel center aisle. Lucien darted to one side of that, obviously trying to keep it between himself and Paige.
“Give it up, Lucien,” Paige said.
“I didn’t do anything!”
He flung a large lump of steak in Paige’s direction, forcing her to duck out of the way to avoid it. Christopher was there in the kitchen then, too, moving around the other side of the kitchen aisle, so that Paige and Christopher closed in slowly on Lucien in a kind of pincer movement.
Lucien saw him coming and started to throw more things. He grabbed pots, pans, knives, anything that he could find. The barrage was enough that Paige had to duck down to avoid it all. Being hit by a thrown steak or a bottle of sauce was one thing, but knives or red-hot frying pans were quite another. Any one of them could have caused her serious injury, certainly enough to keep her from chasing him down.
Lucien took advantage of the moment of respite to run for a rear door, smashing into it and knocking it open in one quick movement, letting him out into the night air beyond.
Paige sprinted after him, out into a back alley coming off the boardwalk. Lucien was already running down it, dodging past trash cans as he went. He knocked one over into Paige’s path, forcing her to vault over it, then kept running.
Paige ran after him, skidding around a corner after him. Lucien was looking more out of breath now, but he wasn’t showing any signs of stopping. In fact, he leapt over a low wall into the yard of a house near the boardwalk. Paige followed, with Christopher just a pace or two behind her.
“We need to bring him down!” Christopher called out.
Paige nodded, but she wasn’t exactly sure how to do it. They couldn’t just shoot Lucien, but they weren’t gaining ground on him either. She had an idea.
“Keep chasing him,” Paige said. “Keep him running.”
She ran for another fence to the house running at a tangent to Lucien. She wanted to find a place to head him off, wanted to find a way to get in front of him to run him down. For now, that meant running parallel to him, running down small side alleys, trying to catch glimpses of Lucien wherever she could.
Paige realized that he was heading back towards the restaurant now. Did he have a vehicle there, a motorcycle or a car that he might be able to use to get away? It was the only reason she could think of that he might be heading back there with such determination.
Now that she thought she knew where Lucien was heading, she put on a burst of speed, determined to get there first. Paige hurried down an alley, out onto the boardwalk, heading over in the direction of the restaurant. She was breathing hard by the time she reached it, her heart beating quickly with the effort of running.
