Page 7 of The Girl He Wanted

As they left the conference room, Paige couldn't help but feel like they were running away from the Exsanguination Killer. She just had to tell herself to focus on the case at hand.

They had a killer to find in Winterly.

CHAPTER THREE

Heading to Winterly meant taking a flight along the East Coast, heading north. Paige watched Christopher as the plane made its way across the country, hoping all the while that he was all right.

The loss of his wife was still so fresh, and Paige couldn't imagine how he was feeling. She wanted to reach out and comfort him, but she knew that he needed space to grieve.

Instead, she focused on the case. The killer in Winterly had already claimed two victims, and they needed to stop him before he could take another life. A killer like this wouldn't simply stop until someone stopped him. That meant her and Christopher.

"Are you going to be able to do this?" Paige asked Christopher. He seemed different since the news of Jennifer's death. He was quieter, more withdrawn, seemingly lost in thought. Paige knew that she couldn't force him to open up, but it hurt to see him like this. "Are you going to be able to handle this investigation?"

Her worry was that he would break down in the middle of it or start to lash out blindly in the torment he felt.

Christopher looked at her, his eyes dark and deep with pain. He seemed to be searching for something in her gaze, something she couldn't quite put her finger on.

"I have to," he said at last, his voice almost a whisper. "I have to do something, Paige. Anything. I can't just sit around and do nothing. I spent a week trying to do that. It doesn’t help."

“You could have called me,” Paige said.

Christopher shook his head. “This was something I had to do by myself.”

Paige felt a pang of guilt. She could see clearly that Christopher was struggling with the loss of his wife, and she didn't want to make things worse for him. But she also knew that they couldn't afford to let their emotions get in the way of the investigation. Christopher was a good agent, probably better than her, but she was worried about what his grief might do to him here.

She couldn't do anything to help with that though, not here, not now. All she could do was be there for him if he wanted to talk, and hope that the two of them would be able to solve the case they'd been assigned. Perhaps afterwards, she would be able to do something to help him.

For now, Paige focused on reading through copies of the case files that Sauer had sent to her computer, hoping to find something that would give them a lead in the case.

As Paige scrolled through the documents, she couldn't help but feel a sense of dread building in her chest. The killer had left behind no evidence, no DNA, no fingerprints. There were witnesses after the bodies had been found, but none at the time, and the victims had seemingly been selected at random. The only apparent link between them was that they were both young women.

In the first case, the body had been found by a farmer; in the second, it was found by a couple of teenagers. There had been witnesses nearby in the second case—a woman named Bertha Matthews and a man named Alvin Richards—but their statements showed that they had really just seen “something” from the ground that had turned out to be the body.

The crime scene photographs showed them both still tied in place where they had been killed. Bea Milling had been the first victim, tied atop a water tower. Ellie Kane had been found tied to the hands of the city hall's old clock tower. The two victims in Winterly had been killed in similar ways, both found on high structures with their throats slashed. The killer had also left behind a strange symbol, scrawled in blood, and different at each scene. The local cops hadn't been able to make sense of it.

Paige studied the symbols carefully, trying to see if there was anything familiar about them. One looked like a Greek letteralpha, the next like the letterbeta. She couldn't shake off the feeling that it was important, that it meant something. But what? Was the killer merely labeling his kills as his first and second, or was there more to it than that?

"Why would the killer murder them in those locations?" Paige asked Christopher.

Christopher looked up from his thoughts, his eyes dark and intense. "Maybe it's about power. About control. The killer chooses high places because it gives him a sense of power over his victims. And the symbols he leaves behind? Maybe they represent something to him, some kind of personal significance."

Paige nodded thoughtfully, considering his words. "It's possible. But how can we use that to track him down?"

"We need to find out more about the victims," Christopher said. "Their backgrounds, their relationships, anything that might give us a lead. And we need to start looking for patterns. There has to be some kind of connection between the victims, something that ties them together."

It was both good and strange to hear him thinking so clearly, his voice not even betraying his grief. It was like he'd shut that part of himself away in order to let himself work.

Paige wasn't sure whether to be grateful for that or worried by it.

The flight landed in the town of Winterly, and Paige and Christopher made their way to the local police station. They were greeted by a weary-looking detective, who introduced himself as Detective Johnson. He was maybe fifty, with dark hair and dark rings under his eyes like he hadn't slept in a while. He was a little overweight, while his shirt had what looked like day-old mustard stains on it. Paige guessed that with the worry of the case he hadn't had a lot of time to give over to his appearance. He looked happy to see them.

"Thanks for coming down," he said, shaking their hands. "I just hope that you're able to find answers on all of this. We're at a loss here. We've never seen anything like this before."

Paige and Christopher exchanged a glance. They knew all too well what it was like to be in the midst of an unexplainable case. They knew how hard it could be for the local PD, trying to make sense of one. They'd investigated plenty of those in the past, and in each case, they'd managed to find the killer. Paige only hoped that they would be able to find answers here in the same way.

"What can you tell us about the victims?" she asked, hoping that the detective could give them something that wasn’t in the files.

Detective Johnson sighed heavily, his shoulders slumping. "Not much, unfortunately. Bea Milling was a college student. She was studying architecture at a local university. Ellie Kane, on the other hand, was a waitress at a diner. She graduated high school but didn't pursue further education."

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