CHAPTER TWENTY
Paige knew that she needed to see how these cases fit together. She needed to visualize the pattern in them, and that meant getting their details somewhere more physical than a computer screen.
She gestured to the glass board on one side of the room. “I want to construct a timeline, to see if it tells us anything. I need to see this.”
“Sure,” Christopher said. “What are you hoping to find?”
“I want to look at patterns of activity, to see if any cases stand out as potentially the work of our copycat.”
Serial killers often had patterns to the timing of their kills. Those patterns could accelerate, but large deviations for no reason were rarer. If Paige could find one of those, maybe it would indicate a case that wasn’t Lars Ingram’s.
Paige drew a line on the board with a marker, then put in the most recent murders as a starting point, writing the dates and names in red. Those were a known starting point, murders they knew were definitely down to the copycat.
“Ok,” she said, going back to the computer and checking the dates of the murders Lars Ingram was convicted of. She wrote those on the board in green, the kills stretching back three years, with fifteen women that they knew about dead in that time. Already, the intervals between the murders looked messy to her, but she wasn’t sure if that was just normal variability in the data or something else.
Paige kept going, pulling up the missing persons files that seemed even vaguely suspicious and starting to add those dates and names in blue.
“Doesn’t this just confuse things?” Christopher asked. “It’s going to be hard to see real patterns when there are so many dates, and we don’t even know which ones might be relevant.”
Paige shook her head. “We need the data. The more, the better, right now.”
She went to write Nikki Ashenko’s name in, went back to the computer, and checked the date again. She frowned and wrote it on the board, drawing a ring around it and the murder that sat directly above.
“April 19th,” Paige said.
“What about it?” Christopher said.
Paige pointed at the board. “Lars Ingram killed someone on April 19th, three years ago: Bethany Deering. Nikki Ashenko went missing on the same day.”
“Meaning that Ingram couldn’t have killed her,” Christopher said.
“He physically might have been able to, but he’s never committed two separate murders on the same day.”
Paige could see Christopher looking thoughtful now. “Strictly speaking, we don’t know that Nikki Ashenko was murdered. She just went missing. And even if she was killed, we don’t know that it’s related to any of the rest of this.”
Paige could understand his caution, but she still thought that this was their best shot of getting answers in this case. She also thought that there were plenty of reasons why they should assume that this disappearance was connected.
“She was a babysitter, who went missing at night, while two kids were asleep upstairs,” Paige said. “If she were going to run away somewhere, I don’t think she would have abandoned the children to do it. She was early twenties, in a caring profession… she fits the profile.”
“Ok, I’ll agree that it looks pretty good,” Christopher said. “But we would still need to find evidence that she was murdered before we could link it to the rest of this.”
“Did the police search?” Paige asked.
“The file says they conducted a preliminary search but wrote it off as a runaway.”
“Then I think we should check out the area of the disappearance,” Paige said. “We have to know for sure, one way or the other.”
For a moment, Paige thought that Christopher might not agree, but then he nodded sharply. “It’s our best shot. Let’s go.”
*
They drove out to a small town in Virginia, the kind of place that Paige had grown up in. The kind of place where people assumed that everyone knew one another and that things were simply safer. Her own life had proven that wasn’t the case.
Paige didn’t know this particular small town, but she felt as if she did. It had the same kind of general store on the main street, the same cluster of small restaurants that wanted to pull in people from D.C. but mostly just catered to the locals. The same small gas station and collection of small stores that had probably been run by the same people for years.
They drove up to a small house on the edge of the town, where Nikki had been working when she disappeared. It seemed like a perfectly ordinary family home, backing onto a small stretch of woodland, with a single Citroen on the driveway and rose bushes in the garden.
Paige took a copy of the case file with her as she and Christopher went up to knock on the front door. A woman in her forties answered. She was round featured and dark haired, with a slightly harassed look, as if she’d been trying to do too many things at once before the two of them arrived.