“No, it’s fine,” Christopher said. “I asked, after all.”
“Having said that, 27 is the median age at which male serial killers make their first kills, so if these are this killer’s first murders, he may actually fit the classic age range. His home life is likely to have been disruptive, but the idea that all serial killers come from broken homes and suffer abuse is false.”
So far, it was just general information. Paige did her best to be more specific.
“This one’s fixation on Lars Ingram is significant. Probably he heard about Ingram’s crimes at some particularly important moment for him psychologically, and then researched him in order to find out more. It might be possible to track that research if it was done too openly, but honestly, all of Ingram’s crimes are well known, so enough research on the internet might give him everything…”
Paige trailed off as she thought about what Ingram had said to her back at the prison.
“What is it, Paige?” Christopher asked her.
“There’s something that Lars Ingram said when I went to see him,” Paige explained. “It seemed like an idle boast at the time, but now it has me wondering. He said that people didn’t know half of what he’d done. I thought he was just trying to be as frightening as possible, but what if he meant it more literally? What if he killed more victims than we think he did?”
“He was convicted for more than enough as it is,” Christopher said. “And he’s due to be executed for those crimes later today. I’m not sure what difference it makes if he committed more murders, at least as far as this case goes.”
“I don’t know,” Paige said, “but it feels connected to the rest, somehow. I want to at least check.”
“I guess we don’t have anything else to go on right now,” Christopher said. He sat with his fingers poised above his computer keyboard. “What are we looking for?”
“Any other murder that might plausibly have been his,” Paige said.
“So any murder around the period we know that Lars Ingram was active?” Christopher said.
“Plus possible missing persons,” Paige replied. She knew without being told that it would be a large number, but they had to find a way to narrow it down. “But not all of them. We’re not looking for kids who have run away and come back a few hours later, or ones who have obviously gone off to try to make it in LA.”
“Presumably, we’re looking for women in their twenties,” Christopher said.
“Specifically, ones who worked as caretakers, nurses, that kind of thing.” Paige didn’t think that was a part of Lars Ingram’s MO that he would be willing to compromise on.
“That does narrow it down a little for the last three or four years,” Christopher said. His tone had changed to something more intent, apparently seeing that they might be able to get something out of this now that they were able to narrow it down.
Paige went around to his side of the desk so that she could see the computer better, standing behind Christopher as he flicked through the files. She tried to work out which ones might be relevant.
“This one was looked at before,” Christopher said. “Andrea Wilson. But the police at the time didn’t think that the MO of the crime fit the pattern, because she was killed outdoors.”
“I think we should include it on the list,” Paige said.
They kept looking, trying to find nurses and overnight caretakers, babysitters and au pairs.
Another case caught Paige’s attention: that of a babysitter called Nikki Ashenko, who had gone missing almost three years ago. Technically, it was a missing persons case, because no body had ever been found, but she’d gone missing one evening in the middle of looking after two children. There were other possibilities too: a nurse who had just disappeared a year ago, a caretaker who had been killed at night, but it had only been a single stab wound, not consistent with Lars Ingram’s method of stabbing people seven times.
“There have been serial killers before who claimed to kill many more people than the official count,” Paige said. “The Zodiac Killer, for example.”
“So you’re saying that Lars Ingram might have killed all of these people?” Christopher said.
“Maybe,” Paige said. “Or maybe our copycat killed some of them. And as professional as he is now, I bet he wasn’t as neat or as careful the first time that he killed someone. If we can identify when that was, maybe we’ll be able to find the evidence that we haven’t been able to find at the scenes in the last couple of days.”
Of course, to do that, first they had to work out if any or all of these new cases really were Lars Ingram’s work.