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Paige did so for two reasons. First, whenever she started working on a case, she liked to get on top of the details as much as possible. Her biggest assets as an agent were her psychological background and capacity to synthesize large quantities of information that came from her days as a grad student. Both of those made working on the file an obvious first step.
Second, it gave her an excuse not to focus on Christopher. Even though he was sitting in the seat next to her on the plane, he might as well have been a hundred miles away. It seemed, after the two of them had kissed, that there was a new awkwardness between them that Paige didn’t know how to get past.
Christopher obviously caught Paige glancing his way. “Do you have anything from the files?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Paige said. “Just what Sauer already told us. The victims seem very different. One was a street musician; the other worked in a museum. They were both killed in the saw way, but there are subtle differences in the ways they were displayed.”
“Enough that there’s a chance of it being separate killers?” Christopher asked. He still sounded very professional, almost distant, like he knew that the two of them worked well together but didn’t want to inject even the tiniest note of the personal into his tone.
“I don’t think so,” Paige said, considering it for a second or two. “Yes, there’s a chance that one killer saw another’s work and decided to copy it, but I don’t think that’s likely, not so close together and not when the methods are so similar in every other respect. It’s more like the killer is experimenting each time he kills, varying how he displays his victims.”
“So, what does that mean?”
Even if there was a sense of distance between them, it seemed that Christopher was still prepared to rely on Paige’s judgement in this side of things.
Paige just wished that she had more answers for him. “I’m not sure yet. I think it might be significant, but I don’t have enough information yet to know how.”
Christopher nodded. “Let me know if you think of anything. When we land, I want to talk to the coroner to see if there are any details that we can get there.”
On another occasion, he might have given Paige more reassurance that she would be able to do it. Right now, though, it seemed that he wasn’t prepared to risk even that small deviation from pure professionalism.
“What are you going to be doing while I’m working on that?” Paige asked him.
She heard Christopher sigh. “There are some papers to do with my divorce that I need to go through. Jennifer’s lawyers are asking for pretty much everything.”
That might also help to explain some of Christopher’s sense of distance. His wife had declared that she was leaving him in the middle of their last case. The pressure of that had probably been a part of what had led to the two of them overstepping the line they’d so carefully drawn between themselves. Now, it was complicating the aftermath of it, making everything even more difficult than it needed to be.
To distract herself, Paige tried thinking about more immediate problems. There was a murderer out there, one that they had to stop.
Even as she thought about him, though, she found herself thinking about two entirely different killers. Adam Riker was one. Paige couldn’t help the feeling that he was manipulating her, even now. She’d gotten the better of him when she’d spoken to him back at the institute, but there was a part of her still wondering if he wasn’t playing some deeper game.
The Exsanguination Killer was the other. Now that Paige had a piece of information that might lead to her, it was hard to keep it out of her head. A part of her wanted to continue to look for Ann Dawson there and then, but she had to focus. She needed to workthiscase and focus on the killer she’d beensentto catch.
Paige read the crime scene reports first. Each of them was nearly identical in the details, making it seem more certain to Paige by the moment that this was the work of one man. Each victim had been subdued, hung up with ropes, then stabbed repeatedly before the killer left.
There didn’t seem to be much in the way of evidence. The rope was generic, the kind of thing that would have been easy for the killer to find at a hardware store. There hadn’t been any DNA evidence or fingerprints found at the scenes. Paige had guessed that there wouldn’t be anything that straightforward, or if there was, then the evidence wouldn’t match anyone with an existing record.
That wasn’t the way Paige worked in any case. She worked to understand killers, getting into their motivations and their methods. She tried to find links between their victims to try to predict where they would strike next.
Paige tried to do that part now, because there seemed to be so little to go on with the killer beyond his need to display his victims. She started to look into Hope Jackson and Aiden Martlet, trying to understand more about their lives.
At first glance, they seemed very different. A man and a woman, vaguely similar in age, but beyond that they didn’t seem to have any similarities. They had no physical features in common that Paige could spot from photographs of them before their deaths. They had very different jobs too.
Looking at their social media suggested that the two of them didn’t know one another, because they weren’t friends on any of the sites that they were on. Hope Jackson’s pages were full of video clips of her singing, typically performing out on Arnville’s boardwalk to passersby, while Aiden’s page was more about his social life, with pictures of him going out with friends or attending gigs.
Was that a link? Paige started to look through those pictures, trying to establish if Hope Jackson appeared in any of them as one of the musicians. It seemed unlikely, though, when Hope was a street performer rather than a regular gigging musician. As far as Paige could tell, the two of them simply didn’t know one another.
Paige looked up from her work. Christopher was working on his own laptop, apparently trying to find connections himself. He was working quietly, but he didn’t look like he was making any progress.
Paige couldn’t stop herself from checking for news of the Exsanguination Killer. There were no new kills reported, and the last one had been several weeks ago—long enough that it had slid from the press cycle.
She tried looking for information on Ann Dawson. It was possible to find out more about her crimes: she’d attacked three people after stalking them, lashing out and cutting them. None had died, but there had been an obvious escalation that looked as if it might lead to more.
Hadit led to more? Had she started tying people down, opening their veins and leaving them to bleed out? Paige didn’t know. More worryingly, it wasn’t obvious where Ann Dawson was now. Paige needed to locate her. A search in the DMV database didn’t provide an address for her. She seemed to have no obvious online presence.
Paige sighed. Being in the BAU hadn’t given her the information on the Exsanguination Killer that Paige hoped for, and it had only led to this difficult situation with Christopher. She couldn’t focus on that, though, not when there was a killer to catch.
Paige shook off those thoughts, returning to her research. Maybe the victims didn’t know one another but looking into their lives might still reveal something about why the killer had chosen them rather than someone else.
