Page 18 of The Girl He Crowned

CHAPTER TEN

They had to findanother way into this case, but Paige couldn’t help looking out of the windowof the office Sheriff May lent her and Christopher, staring at the darkeningevening sky and worrying about how much time the two of them had already usedup.

“Checking out theEddis skyline?” Christopher asked. His tone was light, but Paige knew he wasdoing it deliberately to distract her from her thoughts. He obviously knewexactly what she was thinking about.

“Just worryingthat the killer might already be out there killing someone else,” Paigereplied. “We’ve used up almost our entire first day here, and we’re no furtheron than when we got here.”

“We know a lotmore than we did earlier today,” Christopher countered. “We have information onthe gloves the killer used, and we know about the details of the crime scenes.What do you make of the business with the pendulums?”

Paige knew that hewas asking that simply because it was the thing most likely to catch herattention and draw her away from thoughts of how little progress they’d made,but itdidcatch her interest. The pendulums were the part of all ofthis that stood out the most, and that suggested that they might also be thepart of this that potentially provided the greatest insight into who the killermight be.

It was an anglethat they needed to run down if they were going to get anywhere. They needed tounderstand what it all meant to the killer if they were going to have a chanceof finding him.

“The pendulums areintriguing,” Paige said. “There’s the obvious symbolism that time is ticking away,but is that for the victims, or for us trying to catch him before he strikesagain?”

“Or her,”Christopher said. “I know statistically most serial killers are male, but wedon’t know for sure. After what Adam Riker said about the Exsanguination Killer…”

“I don’t even knowif we can trust that,” Paige said quickly, not wanting to go there. The lastthing she wanted was to think about Adam right then. She certainly wasn’t surethat something he’d said relating to another case could be relevant in thisone. Maybe that was what he’d wanted when he sent her the note asking her tospeak with him. Maybe it had all been a way for him to get into her head.

Paige shook herhead. “In any case, it isn’t relevant to this case. The way this killercommitted the murders suggests a degree of physical size and strength, and justthe approach here isn’t consistent with the way a woman would typically kill.”

“All right,”Christopher said. “So we can assume a male killer in this case. What else canthe pendulum tell us about him?”

“Possibly thathe’s obsessed with time,” Paige said. “Maybe with the idea of people having afinite amount of time, and his victims having used up all of theirs. Maybe hefeels thathe’srunning out of time. It’s not impossible that we’re lookingat a killer who is dying themselves. Sometimes, people can be shocked intoextreme actions by the news that they’re dying. They do the things they alwayswanted to do.”

“Most people gotraveling or make it up with long lost family,” Christopher said. “They generallydon’t start killing people.”

Paige shrugged. Itwas all speculation at this point. She’d done more work than most on trying tounderstand the motives of serial killers, but even she couldn’t claim that shefully understood them. That final switch that flicked them over into killingpeople remained the most elusive part of all of it.

“I’m not sure thatit gets us to the killer even if it proves to be correct,” she said. “What arewe meant to do? Contact every doctor in the city and demand details of every patientwho’s received a recent terminal diagnosis? Even if medical ethics didn’t stopthem from doing it, it would be wrong for us to go around disturbing dyingpeople like that just to find one killer.”

No, they wouldhave to do this another way. They would have to think of something else.

“I’m interested inthe fact that the pendulums seem to have been made from objects close to thespot where the murders took place,” Paige said. “It’s another piece thatsuggests a lot of preparation for each murder.”

“It’s alsosomething that we might be able to use to try to catch this killer,”Christopher said. “I’ll try calling Mr. Willis again. If we’re lucky, he’llhave security footage from the bridge repair site. A man that cautious is goingto want to watch over the materials on his site to try to stop anyone fromstealing them. There weren’t any cameras watching the bridge underpass, butmaybe there will be footage of the killer stealing what he needed to make thependulum.”

“It’s certainly apossibility,” Paige said. “Meanwhile, I want to look at the victims, to try towork out what it was about them that made the killer want to target them ratherthan someone else.”

That meant sittingthere, as Christopher went out of the office to make the call. Paige took theopportunity to start to go through the social media profiles of the twovictims, along with whatever the FBI’s techs had managed to scrape together ofthe two women’s online presences.

Paige started withDebbie Danton, and quickly found that there was a lot to get through. Just thesocial media pages had more posts than almost anyone Paige had seen, acrossmultiple platforms. One of her profiles described her as a “model, entrepreneurand social media influencer” and the shots on that platform mostly seemed tofeature her in a variety of locations around Eddis, never wearing the samething twice when she was posing for the camera. It was pretty obvious from theposts that she was wealthy, or that she wanted to appear to be, wearing themost expensive dresses and jewelry, posting shots of herself in mansions, ornext to sports cars. In Eddis, it didn’t seem so out of place.

There were alsoplenty of pictures of her at parties, and a part of Paige found herselfglancing through to make sure that they weren’t the ones Tom Wright had helpedto organize. There was no sign of him there in any of them, though. She mostlyattended more upscale events.

Was it possiblethat Debbie’s killer had picked her out as his victim online? She postedworkout videos, and several posts seemed to have her running routes and data onthem, so that anyone could have taken them and worked out where she might bevulnerable. There was even a picture of the bridge being repaired up there, sothe killer might have known about the scaffolding and the construction sitethat made hanging the pendulum so easy.

Was it possiblethat the murderer was stalking his victims through their social media, usingthem as a way to plot out the steps of the killings? Paige didn’t know, but shechecked Siobhan Maraty’s accounts next, wanting to see if there were any shotsthere of the place where she’d been killed. If so, then it might really bepossible that the killer was picking his murder sites that way.

There were.Siobhan’s social media didn’t include anywhere near as many posts as Debbie’s,and a lot of those posts seemed to be about trying to boost her work as amarketing consultant, but Paige got the same impression of wealth that she’dgotten from Debbie Danton’s feed. This was a woman who was happy to put upposts about the killing she’d just made with the rapid growth of her investmentportfolio, and pictures of herself next to her Aston Martin. There were also picturesof her in a park that Paige definitely recognized from the crime scenephotographs she’d seen of it. There was one there of Siobhan posing rightunderneath the tree where she’d been found dead, with a caption sayingMewith my favorite tree.

Could that be acoincidence? It was possible, of course, that anyone who knew both victims’routines well enough might be able to pick out the same spots another way, butPaige thought it was more likely that someone had gotten the information justby looking at the things they posted about themselves. The killer didn’t haveto be there on the construction site to see Debbie go past when he could simplywatch the posts she made of herself there.

Paige started tolook through those social media accounts, looking for anyone who had displayedhostility towards the women. In Debbie’s case, that wasn’t hard. It seemed thattrying to become a social media influencer came with the almost automatic priceof people posting negative comments, almost more than Paige could keep track of.The first time Paige saw a comment that saidI hope you die, bitch,she almostjumped up to announce that she’d found the killer. By the fifth such commentfrom different people, she’d realized just how hard it was going to be to pickone person out from the masses there.

Still, Paige madea note of the usernames, and resolved to send them over to Quantico to see ifthe techs there could start to link them to real people. If Paige was lucky,only one or two of them would live anywhere close to Eddis, thus giving her andChristopher a more manageable pool of suspects.

Siobhan Maraty didn’thave the same level of hatred on her social media, but to Paige’s surprise, shedidhave a couple of comments from Debbie Danton.

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