Page 42 of The Girl He Wanted

"I'll start writing it," Paige told him. She knew that it was better to get it down now, while it was fresh, and maybe, just maybe, doing that could distract her from the image of Dr. Kostopoulos falling.

Christopher left the room, leaving Paige alone with her thoughts. She looked back at the model of the Tower of the Winds, feeling a chill run down her spine. There was something about the intricate figures and the bloodstains that made her uneasy, as if the model was a symbol for everything that had gone wrong in Dr. Kostopoulos's life.

She still couldn't shake off the feeling that there was more to this case than they had uncovered. Christopher thought that the case was closed, but something still didn’t feel finished about all of it to Paige.

Paige tried to focus. She knew that she had to produce a report on how Dr. Kostopoulos had fallen, so she took out her phone to try to write the basics of it down. Even doing that, she couldn't shake the image of Dr. Kostopoulos falling from the roof, his body twisted and broken on the ground below.

Paige couldn't settle. She got up and walked over to the tower model. It was a beautiful piece of work, intricate and detailed, with every figure and symbol carefully crafted. But now, it was stained with blood, a reminder of the horror that had unfolded.

She tried to get the events that had unfolded on the roof into some kind of order in her head. She wondered what kind of person could become so delusional that they would kill multiple people and then ultimately take their own life. She couldn't imagine being in that kind of mental state, even having worked as a psychologist with people who had suffered terrible mental conditions, some of which had pushed them to do awful things.

Paige sighed, feeling exhausted and drained. She rubbed her eyes and tried to focus on the report again, but her mind was too scattered.

She needed to focus. They'd approached the house and found the door open. They'd called out for Dr. Kostopoulos. They'd searched the house for him when he hadn't responded. They'd found him on the roof, where he'd ranted about the Tower of the Winds and confessed to his part in the murders ...

Except that wasn't what had happened, was it? Dr. Kostopoulos hadn't confessed, not exactly. He'd said that he couldn't live with himself for what he'd done, but he'd never come out and said outright that he'd killed the three women who had died. He’d never confessed to killing them, only to writing their deaths.

Paige sat there, thinking about that fact. She sat there while a couple of forensic techs came and bagged the model tower as evidence, while they started to go through the rest of Dr. Kostopoulos's possessions.

Paige went looking for a copy of his last book, trying to reassure herself that this was the work of a man who was so obsessed, so dangerous, that he had undoubtedly done this.

She found a copy and started to read. As she did so, she remembered just how much violence there had been in this last work by the academic. But he'd been tormented by the model of the Tower of the Winds. He'd been obsessed with its figures and symbols.

She started to read through the book again, looking for the passages that had sent shivers down her spine before and made her so uncomfortable she had barely been able to keep reading. The same passages had her sitting there with her blood running cold this time.

There was a big difference between this version and the version that Paige had skimmed through online before coming here: this version had notes scribbled in the margins in a couple of different colors of ink, almost as if Dr. Kostopoulos was having a conversation with himself about it all. Arguing with himself.

"What are you doing?" Christopher asked as he came back into the room.

"I'm reading through Dr. Kostopoulos's work, trying to convince myself that he's the killer," Paige said.

"You really don't think that he is?" Christopher replied with a frown. “After everything that happened?”

Paige considered that. "I don't know," she admitted. "It's just that ... his confession on the roof wasn't exactly a confession. He never outright said that he killed those women. And then there are these notes in the margins of his book, like he was talking to himself, trying to justify something. I don't know ... it just doesn't add up."

Christopher crossed his arms. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that there might be more to this than just a crazy academic who turned into a killer," Paige said. "Think about it, Christopher. Assume that he's the killer."

"As far as I can see, heisthe killer," Christopher pointed out.

"Then why did we find him up here tonight, ready to kill himself?" That part didn't make any sense to Paige.

"Maybe he had a sudden attack of conscience?" Christopher suggested. "You heard him up there. He was sorry for what he'd done."

"Then why didn't he do that after one murder or hand himself in?" Paige asked. "I know killers' minds, and Dr. Kostopoulos was obsessed, completely obsessed. If he was the killer, trying to recreate the Tower of the Winds the way he wrote it in his book, then why didn't he finish what he started?"

"So, your reasoning for him not being the killer is that he didn't kill enough people?" Christopher said.

Paige shrugged. "Four winds, maybe eight if he's counting all of them rather than just the cardinal points. Only three murders. An obsessed killer would do anything,anythingto complete the pattern. He wouldn’t stop early."

"Is it possible that he considered himself to be the last part of that pattern?" Christopher asked.

Paige shook her head. "I don't know. Maybe. But it still doesn't add up. And then there are those notes in the margins of his book. It's like he was talking to someone, trying to convince them or himself of something."

"There's the blood on the model to consider," Christopher said.

"We don't know yet that it's from the victims," Paige said. "Another thing: have the search teams found any sign of climbing rope here? Didwesee any when we looked?"

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