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Paige went for the gun. She leapt for it, throwing herself across the courtyard, reaching out a hand to grab it even as the impact of the ground knocked the breath from her lungs. Paige knew that she couldn’t lie there in pain. She had seconds at best. She rolled onto her back, gun raised and ready to intercept Nathan if he was coming at her, adrenaline making her feel as if she might pull the trigger then if he was.
Instead, though, Paige saw Nathan heading for the scaffolding he’d constructed, for the people he’d selected as his victims. Paige fired off one shot, but her head was still spinning, and it went wide. There was too much distance to be sure of what she was hitting.
Paige got up, running for the scaffolding now. Nathan was ahead of her, though, already clambering up it onto one of the planks, managing it easily despite the scaffolding beneath him looking a little unsteady. He had a knife in his hand now, a wickedly sharp-looking, single-edged thing half as long as his forearm.
“Stop!” Paige called out, managing to get into a firing position again. Her head was starting to clear a little now, so that she had at least a chance of making the shot.
But Nathan wasn’t just lunging for the two victims with the knife outstretched. That would have left him as an easy target. Instead, he darted behind them, using them for cover as Paige tried to line up a shot.
“You can’t stop me!” he called out. “The only thing that matters is my art!”
He was going to kill them. Paige had hesitated, and now he was going to kill them.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Paige kept her gun levelled at Nathan, ready to take a shot if she got a clean chance to bring him down now. The only problem was that she couldn’tgetthat clean shot, because he was tucked away behind the people that he was planning on making his victims, hidden so that any attempt to shoot him would be likely to hit one of them.
As Paige kept her weapon aimed, her phone started to ring. She dared a glance at the screen and saw that it was Christopher. Paige knew that she couldn’t take the call; she had to focus on the killer in front of her and how she was going to stop him from murdering two more people.
The trouble was that Paige couldn’t work out exactly how she was going to do that.
“If you kill these people, you won’t be able to hide behind them,” Paige called out. “I’ll be free to open fire on you, Nathan.”
Would fear help at this stage? Could she use the threat of her weapon to stop him from using his?
“Great art demands sacrifice,” Nathan said. “Van Gogh’s work wasn’t appreciated until after his death.”
“And you think that yours will give you fame?” Paige countered. “If people remember you as anything, it will just be as a killer. They won’t remember your art.”
If his art was what mattered to him, then that had to be the way to get to him, to make him either give himself up or move clear enough of the two bound people for Paige to take him down.
“Caravaggio was a killer,” Nathan said. “People still talk about his art, rather than him.”
Paige knew enough about art to know how she was going to get into Nathan’s head. She’d taken an op-ed course in art history when she was at college. She thought that she understood the mind of an artist. She had to be careful about how she did it, though. She couldn’t make it too obvious to him that she was trying to manipulate him.
Paige needed to do something, though. She started moving around Nathan so that she was more in the shadows. Paige wanted to make it harder for Nathan to keep track of her, so that she might be able to get the angle she needed to take a shot.
“Caravaggio killed someone, sure,” Paige said. “But thatiswhat people talk about when it comes to him, Nathan. People mention his name precisely because he stabbed someone. And that was in a swordfight at a time when that kind of thing happened. He didn’t murder innocent people.”
“Innocent?” Nathan demanded. “Is that what you call people who pollute the world with bad art?”
Paige caught a note of hurt somewhere beneath the anger. Something that felt deeply personal.
“Wasyourart bad art, Nathan?” Paige asked. Now that she knew his name, she could search for him and his work.
The images that she found of his pieces weren’t what Paige was expecting. Where Lucien’s works had been dark and blood filled, Nathan’s were just ordinary. Very ordinary. Watercolors of flowers and cottages, a few hyper realistic images of animals.
“It wasworsethan bad,” Nathan said. “It was uninspired. Insipid chocolate box paintings, photo-realism with nothing in it that I couldn’t have gotten simply bytakinga photograph. No power, no impact!”
“So, you went to the opposite extreme,” Paige said. She shifted her position slightly as she did it. She didn’t want Nathan to get used to her being in one spot. The less he knew exactly where she was, the more chance Paige had of being able to get to him without him seeing her coming. “You went for the brutal, the ugly.”
“Ugly?” Nathan snapped back, anger there in his voice. “You’re going to resort to simple aesthetics as an argument? Duchamp’sFountaindisproved that art was all about aesthetics back in 1917!”
Nathan was talking about the urinal Marcel Duchamp had entered into the Society of Independent Artists’ show in New York.
Paige tried to think of a comeback to that. “But you clearly like art that appreciates aesthetics, or why would you go to such trouble to copy the works of some of the old masters?”
“Copy? Is that all you think I’m doing?”
