Page 8 of The Girl He Crowned

Christopher caughton quickly. “The scaffolding. Sheriff, have your people dusted the higherreaches of the scaffolding for prints and checked them for DNA?”

“Well, no,”Sheriff May admitted. “We figured, with it all being so high up, that it…”Realization dawned on her as she saw her men climbing over the scaffolding toget to the pendulum. “Get down!”

“What’s that,Sheriff?” one of her deputies called back.

“Get down, all ofyou, right now! And carefully. You’re potentially contaminating any evidencethat’s on the scaffolding.”

Paige was gladthat the sheriff had caught up, but she suspected that it might already be toolate. The deputies were already up there, their hands on the bars of thescaffolding where prints might have sat, their booted feet potentially scuffingaway DNA.

They were going tohave to work without it unless they got very lucky.

That left Paigejust staring at the crime scene, trying to find answers.

“Can you think ofanything else now that you’re here?” Christopher asked her.

Paige realizedthat she was staring at the pendulum. “There’s something about it just hangingthere like that, on such a thin thread. I thought before that all the symbolismfor the killer was about time running out, and maybe it is, but there’s alsosomething of the sword of Damocles to it as well, hanging there, with thevictim staring up from below, the way he did waiting for the thread that heldthe sword to snap, as if it says that none of us know when we’re going to die.”

“Do you thinkthat’s part of the point of it?” Christopher said. “Is it a message to us, orto the victims?”

“I don’t know,”Paige admitted, and it was important to admit that. It was easy to play theexpert here, largely because shedidhave considerable expertise when itcame to serial killers, but she couldn’t pretend to know things for sure thatwere really only conjecture. “It’s obvious that this is important to the killersomehow, but I don’t know if it’s the object itself or the symbolism.”

Paige lookedaround the underpass, trying to make sense of the location. “Which directionwould Debbie have come from?”

She saw the sheriffpoint. “As far as we can tell from talking to her family, this was her regularrunning route, and we have witnesses who saw her earlier on that route back inthat direction.”

It seemed that, asoverwhelmed as she was by this, and as big a mistake as letting her people goup on the scaffolding was, the sheriff had already asked a lot of the rightquestions. Paige was grateful for that; it would save her and Christopher a lotof work, letting them focus on other aspects of the case.

Right now, though,she tried to imagine herself in Debbie’s shoes. She would have run into theunderpass from that direction, into the shadows and occasional patches oflight. That light would have shone from the brass, and…

“I think thependulum might be at least partly a lure,” Paige said. “If you see somethingthat strange hanging ahead of you, it’s natural to stop and stare at it,right?”

“And a statictarget is easier to take down,” Christopher observed. “Do you think that’s allit is? A strange way to get them to stop?”

Paige shook herhead. “If it were that, why not pick something else? No, this means something,it’s just a question of what. Sheriff, if I give you my number, will you keepus posted on anything else you find here?”

“Sure, but whereare you going?”

Christopher raisedan eyebrow as if to ask the same question.

“We’ve seen thescene, but your people can do a better job of finding any small fragments ofevidence than we can,” Paige said. She didn’t want to spend too much time onthat when she and Christopher could be more useful elsewhere. “I want to go tothe coroner’s office, and see if they have anything yet that might help us withall of this.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Paige shuddered slightlyas she entered the morgue, and not just from the cold that helped with thepreservation of the corpses within. This was not a place she would have visitedif her job didn’t force her to.

“You’re not a fanof coroners’ offices?” Christopher asked, obviously catching the slight shiver.Was he really watching her that closely? Paige didn’t know whether to beflattered or worried that he was paying that much attention to her.

“It’s just thethought of seeing more dead bodies up close,” Paige explained.

Christopher put ahand on her shoulder, looking her in the eye, the sympathy in his expressionobvious. “The victims are not your father, and you are not the fourteen-year-oldwho found him anymore, Paige.”

It wasn’t asurprise that he knew that about her past; Paige had been the one to tell him,after all. Whatwasa surprise was that he’d guessed exactly what theissue was for Paige so easily. Paige had known that they were getting closer aspartners, getting closer in every sense, but she hadn’t realized just howclose.

“Are you going tobe ok with this?” Christopher asked, sounding slightly concerned.

It was alegitimate question. The first couple of times Paige had seen a crime scenethat still had a body present, she’d freaked out a little, had to leave tocatch her breath and focus. She’d been a civilian then, so it hadn’t mattered.Now that she was an FBI agent, she couldn’t afford to react like that. She hadto be able to keep her full attention on the case.

“I’ll be fine,” Paigeassured him. She hoped that it was true. It had to be because she had a job todo there.

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