Page 45 of The Girl He Crowned

“If you’recertain, then I believe you,” Christopher said.

“What are yougoing to do?” Sheriff May said. “Keep causing chaos in my town? No, this is thekiller. If you don’t like that, then you can both get out of my department. Goon, out, both of you. We’re charging Saul Bennett.”

The vehemence ofthe sheriff’s reaction caught Paige a little by surprise, but she guessed shecould understand it. She’d hoped that they’d finally wrapped up the case andher small town could go back to its normal life. Now Paige was threatening totake that away from her.

There was nothingelse to do but leave, with Paige and Christopher making their way out of thesheriff’s station to their waiting cars.

“Sorry,” Paigesaid. “I wasn’t expecting her to react that badly.”

Christophersmiled. “To be honest, I was wondering how long it would take for us to upsetthe sheriff. It seemed pretty clear that she was more interested in placatingthe powerful people in Eddis than doing her job.” His expression turnedserious. “But we’re left with a problem. We still need to catch the killer, andif it’s not Saul Bennett, where do we look?”

“I still think theanswer lies in the files we got from Hales and Co.,” Paige said. She pulledthose files up on her phone. “It’s the only context we know of that includesall three victims.”

“Yes, but how canwe use it?” Christopher asked. “There’s a lot of information there.”

Paige nodded,staring at the screen. There were a lot of names there. Potentially a lot ofother victims. There had to be some way of working out who the next one mightbe, but she couldn’t see it, couldn’t work out the connection.

She was meant tobe good at this. Her Ph.D. had meant looking at large volumes of data, lookingfor patterns, trying to find different ways to parse it all.

“Where is it?”Paige asked aloud. “There has to be an answer. Why can’t I see it?”

“You’re being toohard on yourself,” Christopher said. “You’re amazing at this, but you’re tryingto find a pattern in something where you don’t even know if there’s a patternto be found. The killer could just be picking names randomly.”

“No, I don’tbelieve that,” Paige said. She tried ignoring different parts of the files,working out different ways that names might not fit a broader pattern. “Therehas to be something if I can only…”

She tailed off asthe answer swam into focus there in front of her.

“I’ve got it!”

“What is it, Paige?”Christopher asked. “What have you seen?”

“Look at thefiles. Siobhan Maraty, Debbie Danton, and Melody Smythe are all among the mostrecent custom clients of Hales and Co.”

“They have a lotof clients,” Christopher said.

“But not a lot ofcustomclients,” Paige said. “Look, most of these orders are for their standardline.”

“There are stillothers in between them,” Christopher pointed out.

“There aremeninbetween,” Paige said. “Look. There are no other women’s names in between themon the list once you only look at the custom orders. He’s working his way downthe custom client book.”

“But he didn’ttake them in order,” Christopher said. “Look, Siobhan Maraty comes after DebbieDanton.”

Paige nodded.“That could just be convenience, knowing that one would be easier to kill thanthe other? But if I’m right, it means we know who his next victims might be.”

She kept goingthrough the client book. There were only two more women’s names there forcustom work after the three victims: Harriett Small and Yolanda Vert. Thekiller hadn’t struck so far today, meaning that either one of them might be hisnext target.

“These two womenare in danger,” Paige said. “We need to get to them and make sure that they’resafe.”

“We’ll have tosplit up,” Christopher said, obviously not liking it.

“It’s better thatwe do that than leaving one of them to die,” Paige replied. “Come on,Christopher. This is right, I canfeelit.”

“All right,”Christopher said. “I’ll take Harriett Small. You take Yolanda Vert. And keep incontact. Let me know if you seeanythingsuspicious.”

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

It hadn’t takenhim long to discover Yolanda Vert’s lies. She was a politician after all,serving on the town council of Eddis, helping to make it into the twistedcesspit with a gilded veneer that it was.

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