Paige could see the fear renewed again on Isaac’s face. “I didn’t kill anyone!”
“No?” Paige asked. “Where were you last night? Where were you two nights ago?”
“I…,” Isaac shook his head. “Nowhere, and you can’t prove that I was.”
Paige could see guilt written in every line of his posture. He was holding back, not willing to answer, and the reason seemed obvious.
“I think we’ll find plenty of proof once we get warrants to search your home,” Christopher said. “We’ll go through your computers, through your entire life. And we’ll take DNA. If there’s one scrap of physical evidence at either of the crime scenes, you won’t just be admiring Lars Ingram from afar, you’ll be joining him on death row.”
Isaac started to stand. “I didn’t do this!”
“Sit down!” Christopher ordered him, obviously thinking that he was about to try to fight his way free.
The more Paige saw of his reactions, though, the less convinced she was that he was the killer. It wasn’t the denials; every killer would do that as a matter of course. It was the fear, the suddenness of his reactions. Paige could see plenty of guilt there in his expression, but the more they asked him about this, the more Paige found herself believing that his guilt was about something else.
“What did you do, Isaac?” Paige asked. “What did you do that made you run from us? What did you do that has you jumping around, scared that we’ll ask about it?”
“I’m not scared of you!” Isaac said. “Scared of a woman? When all you do is mess with people’s heads, lead them on, get them fired?”
So he blamed the women he’d worked with for his firing? That wasn’t entirely surprising, and it fit with the profile of someone who might go out and kill.
“You want to know why I went to see Lars Ingram?” Isaac snapped. “Because he knew how to deal with bitches who spent all their time pretending to care, but who were really just out for what they could get from people.”
“But you still say that you didn’t kill anyone?” Christopher asked.
Isaac gave him a determined look. “I didn’t.”
Christopher leaned over the table. “Why should we believe that? You still haven’t told us where you were last night, or the night before.”
Still, Isaac hesitated.
“What were you doing, Isaac?” Paige asked. “What were you doing that was so bad that you’d rather we thought you were a killer than talk about it?”
Isaac glared at her, sudden and direct. “I was following them! All right? Is that what you want to hear?”
“Who were you following?” Paige asked.
“Check my phone.”
He took it out, putting it on the table and opening it up for them. He called up its photos, and they showed a woman in her twenties, young and pretty. The photographs showed her walking back from a bar, showed her heading towards a house, showed her through a couple of the windows as she moved around. They were exactly the kind of pictures the killer might have taken, except that the woman in those pictures was neither Marta Huarez nor Zoe Wells. Instead, Paige recognized the receptionist from the firm Isaac had been fired from.
Paige flicked through the photos there, checking for any sign of the two women who had been killed, but there wasn’t anything.
“So you were stalking the receptionist from the place you were fired?” Paige said. “Why?”
“Because…” Isaac looked away now. “I wanted to kill her. I was going to kill her. I just…”
Paige realized what the shame was, then. “You couldn’t do it. You wanted to, but you couldn’t, and now you’re ashamed that you’re not a murderer?”
“I should have been strong!” Isaac said. “I should have been able to do everything that he did. But I didn’t. I just sat outside her house, all night.”
“All night?” Christopher asked. “You didn’t go off anywhere else?”
Isaac shook his head. “I thought, if I just worked up to it…”
So his defense to the accusation that he’d murdered someone was that he’d been trying and failing to murder someone else?
“We can check the location data on your phone,” Christopher said. “We’ll know if you’re lying.”