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She heard the sound of a car approaching fast. She heard the sound of screeching brakes and then running footsteps.
“Who’s that?” Nathan demanded.
Paige knew the answer even before she saw Christopher burst into the courtyard, his weapon raised to back Paige up. He’d obviously gotten her message, but his timing had just made things a lot more complicated.
“No, it was all a trick!” Nathan said. He reared back, the knife in his hand, but Paige still didn’t have a fully clear shot to bring him down. At least, not a clear shot on Nathan himself.
Instead, she fired at the scaffolding, specifically at that weak, almost broken bracket. She heard the roar of the gunshots, one after another, then the crack as the bracket broke apart. She saw the scaffolding tilt and then collapse.
Nathan screamed as he fell, metal and wood clattering down around him in a cacophony that rang against the paving slabs below. Dust flew up into the air, making Paige cough with it. Through it all, the two figures Nathan had ambushed were still hanging there in the ropes that held them.
Paige rushed forward, knowing that she only had a second or two to get to Nathan before he got to his feet with the knife in his hand. She charged through the dust, getting to him while he was still on his knees, coughing and groaning. The knife was on the ground, and Paige kicked it away quickly, then covered Nathan, her gun trained on him without wavering.
“Get down on the ground!” Paige yelled at him.
He did it, and Paige wrenched his arms behind his back. Christopher was there also covering Nathan, but Paige realized that she didn’t need him for this part. This was her arrest. She’d done this.
“Nathan Edgemont, you’re under arrest.”
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
Paige went to the hospital with the pair Nathan Edgemont had been trying to kill, rather than heading back to the local PD with Christopher to take him in. Christopher could handle that part. He could handle questioning Edgemont, trying to get answers out of the killer artist. Right then, Paige didn’t want to be the one to do it. She was done with art for a while.
It also seemed better if she had that time apart from Christopher. She needed to handle things alone for now. More than that, she’d shown that shecouldhandle things alone. She’d taken down Edgemont pretty much single handed, after all.
Paige stood outside a hospital room, waiting for the doctor to give her the “all clear” to go in and talk to the pair Edgemont had been planning to murder. While she waited, Paige found herself looking up artworks, trying to find the one he had been trying to recreate this time. It didn’t take her long to findThe Loversby Rene Magritte. The details were the same, with that strange, faceless intimacy created by the bags over the heads of the subjects serving to depersonalize them.
“You can talk to them now,” the doctor said, stepping out of the room. “But not for long.”
Paige didn’t think that it would take long. She just needed to get initial witness statements in case Nathan wasn’t prepared to confess to his crimes. Paige imagined that he would, although his lawyers might go for some kind of insanity defense. Nathan would want people to know what he had done and why. He would want to draw as much attention as possible to his art.
Paige went into the small hospital room where a man and a woman were both sitting on the edges of hospital beds like they were eager to leave.
“You’re the one who saved us,” the woman said. She was in her twenties, blonde, and pretty, with a haunted look in her eyes from what had happened to her.
“I’m Agent King, with the FBI,” Paige said.
She was an agent now in her own right, one who had helped to take down several murderers and who had brought in this one pretty much alone. Paige wasn’t quite sure why she was telling herself that, except that perhaps she was trying to tell herself that she would still be able to do this job without Christopher in the future.
“I’m Candice,” the woman said.
“Ryan,” the man supplied. He was also in his twenties, with thin features and a short beard.
“I need to talk to you both about what happened,” Paige said. “The more we know, the easier it will be to make sure that Nathan Edgemont goes away for a long time.”
She saw Candice wince slightly at that. “We were coming back from our regular gig on the boardwalk,” Candice said. “We always take the same route back.”
“Then we heard a noise,” Ryan added. “One of our own songs. We wanted to know what was going on. We found this speaker—”
“That was when he attacked us.” Paige could see the panic in Candice’s eyes. “I can still feel his arm going around my throat.”
“I tried to stop him,” Ryan said, “but he hit me. The next thing I remember, I was tied up and being dragged towards that scaffolding.”
Paige realized that there really wasn’t much that they could say. “Can you identify the man who attacked you?” Paige asked. “If you see him again, will you be able to recognize him?”
Both of them nodded immediately. That was good. Really, it was the only thing that mattered here, making sure that they would have enough evidence to get a conviction.
“I heard something, while I was tied up,” Candice said. “I heard what he said about painting all the people he killed. Are you going to find those paintings? Is he just going to get to exhibit those? Does he get to be famous on the back of murdering people?”
