Page 40 of The Girl He Wanted

Paige had to find a way to talk Dr. Kostopoulos down, or he was going to jump.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

"Dr. Kostopoulos, please, why don't you step away from the edge so that we can talk?" Paige said.

Dr. Kostopoulos shook his head, his eyes wild and unbalanced. "You don't understand," he said. "I've done something terrible. Something unforgivable."

Paige took a careful step forward. "We can talk about it," she said, her voice low and soothing. "Whatever it is, we'll help you through it. But you have to come away from the edge first."

Dr. Kostopoulos hesitated, his eyes flickering back and forth between Paige and the drop below. Paige could feel her heart racing as she watched him, willing him to make the right choice.

"Dr. Kostopoulos, why don't you tell us about what you did?" Christopher said.

But the academic didn't even seem to hear. He was too consumed by his own thoughts and pain.

"You don't understand," he said, his voice filled with anguish. "I have brought such destruction upon myself and others. I have desecrated the Tower of the Winds, and now the gods seek revenge. The storm. Look at the storm. The winds are angry! I tried to appease them, tried to write the perfect things for them, do everything they would want, but they are wroth with me!"

Wroth with him? Paige knew then that Dr. Kostopoulos was mentally unstable. In her view, it was clear that he had become obsessed with the Tower of the Winds and was now suffering some kind of psychotic break. She had to tread carefully, or he would jump.

Briefly, she found herself wondering if that would be a bad thing. If he had killed three people, why not let him? Why not make the world a better place?

No, that wasn’t the way Paige did things. She was an FBI agent. She was going to talk this man down and then bring him in, whatever it took.

"Can you feel the winds?" Dr. Kostopoulos said. He spread his arms wide to the side. "Can you feel their power?"

The storm was building behind him, the wind whipping across the roof as rain continued to lash down.

Paige knew she needed to act. She slowly took a step closer to Dr. Kostopoulos, edging forward, trying to get as close as she could.

"Dr. Kostopoulos, we understand that you're in pain," she said, her voice calm and steady. "But you don't have to face it alone. We're here to help you."

Dr. Kostopoulos looked at her, his eyes flickering with emotion. For a moment, Paige thought he was going to step back from the edge. But then he shook his head.

"No one can help me," he said. "Not anymore. I have to pay for what I've done."

"Dr. Kostopoulos, what have you done?" Christopher asked. Paige realized that he was seeking confirmation that the academic was the killer. He wanted that confession here and now just in case this situation didn't turn out the way they were hoping.

Paige wanted to bring the academic in, wanted to be able to arrest him so that they could see him face justice. Doing that, though, meant being able to talk him down off the edge.

"I didn't understand the Tower of the Winds when I started working on it," Dr. Kostopoulos said. "I looked at studying it as a purely academic exercise, something to discuss with colleagues and get a couple of papers out of before I moved on to more important things."

“But you didn’t move on?” Paige guessed.

Dr. Kostopoulos shook his head. “As I delved deeper, I began to realize the true power that it held. The wind, the air, the natural elements that make up our world. The Greeks spoke of each wind deity as having a different character, as needing to be appeased."

Paige could see the desperation in Dr. Kostopoulos's eyes, as if he were grasping for something that was just beyond his reach. She knew then that he was a man who had lost his way, who had become too lost in his own work and his own head.

"I wrote this, you know," Dr. Kostopoulos said, as the rain continued to batter the roof of his mansion. "The tower, the sacrifices at each station, I wrote all of it!"

Paige felt a chill run down her spine. She'd seen his books. Dr. Kostopoulos had indeed written about people being killed at each of the stations of the Tower of the Winds. It was a kind of ritual that they had been chasing all along. Her mind raced as she tried to figure out how to bring him in without pushing him too hard. Even if she lunged for him, there was a chance that she might simply send him tumbling back.

"Dr. Kostopoulos, we need you to come with us," she said, taking another step closer. "We need to understand what's going on and how we can help you. Please come away from the edge."

Dr. Kostopoulos shook his head. "No, no, you don't understand," he said. "The sacrifice must be made. The tower demands it. The winds demand it. I know you don't understand, you can't. So few people do. When I started to write about all of this, my colleagues didn't understand. They said that I was deranged, that I'd given up on real research. They didn't see that I was doing true research for the first time in my life!"

His expression was frantic now, as if searching for the right words.

"I tried to teach people, tried to show them that the different directions of the wind blow through each of our lives, that we must understand the character of each if we are to become our authentic selves. But I got followers who didn't understand what I was saying, who tried to tack on their own stupid misunderstandings to my work! I could never show them clearly enough!"

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