Page 1 of Absent Remorse

CHAPTER ONE

Marni had many jobs as a manager at the Hambledon Hotel in Washington DC. She made sure that the guests were happy and had everything they needed. She arranged for cars and theater tickets and told them about places that she thought they might enjoy visiting. Occasionally, she dealt with problems discreetly, so that they wouldn’t embarrass the higher profile guests there. Marni was someone who fixed things.

Today, it seemed that she had to fix the problem of someone sleeping on a bench outside the hotel. It happened. There were always homeless people who figured that if they hung out around the hotel, they might be able to get something there, either from the hotel or from its wealthier guests. Since those guests often didn’t like having to walk past someone homeless to get into the hotel, Marni often had to find ways to move people on when they weren’t wanted.

Marni had become adept at it. She’d learned how to move people along politely, when to offer them food around the back of the kitchen, when to threaten to call the cops, when to be sympathetic, and when to be harder about it all.

The moment Marni got outside, she started to suspect that this was one of the times when she needed to be a little harder. There was a woman lying there on one of the benches outside, in a broad square lined with cafés and high-end couturiers. She was obviously asleep, which at eleven in the morning said drunk, drugged, or both to Marni.

Marni had to admit that the woman didn’tlookhomeless. She was young, maybe in her twenties, with wavy, blonde hair and pretty features, made up as if for a night out on the town. She was well dressed in a red party dress and heels.

Maybe she’d drunk too much the night before and decided to sleep it off in a convenient spot. Maybe she was even a guest of the hotel, although Marni didn’t recognize her, and Marni made a point of being able to identify the guests by name.

“Time to wake up,” Marni said, shaking her shoulder. There was no response. “Come on, you need to get up and go home. The night’s over.”

She was being a little firmer now, shaking the woman harder. Still, there wasn’t any response from her. Now, Marni started to worry, especially since the flesh of the shoulder under her hand felt so cold. That didn’t mean anything by itself, since the nights could get pretty cold, but taken with the lack of response, it was a bad sign.

Marni had trained in first aid, of course. Accidents happened at work, and sometimes a well-trained manager was the only thing between a guest and worse harm until the EMTs could show up. She went to work now, shaking the woman harder in case that got a response. There was nothing.

Marni started to check for a pulse and for breathing. There wasn’t either. She rolled the young woman onto her back, ready to start CPR while she called for an ambulance.

That was when she saw the golden, jewel encrusted hilt of a knife sticking out of the young woman’s chest, blood staining her already red dress almost black. Her eyes were wide and staring, with no sign of life there.

Marni might pride herself on her discretion, but some situations went a long way beyond that. Some situations required the horror that she felt running through her, required the shivering, almost painful feeling of the situation being completely overwhelming.

She screamed, which brought others running. They stared at the body, and suddenly they were all shouting.

“Help!” she called out. “Somebody help!”

CHAPTER TWO

Amber was sweating as she went over the obstacle course at Quantico, her blonde hair slicked back from her slightly rounded face, the FBI issue training gear sticking to her as she scrambled over a wall, then went across a rope ladder.

Her blue eyes tracked the pack of other trainees in front of her. She was keeping up, barely, her slender frame and petite size proving to be an issue with some of the bigger obstacles. At least when it came to the next section, a crawl under netting, she could move as quickly as the rest.

She wasn’t wearing the glasses that she normally wore; they simply weren’t suitable for an obstacle course, and in any case, they made her look more like the puzzle editor she had been than the tough FBI agent she was trying to become.

Bursting out from under the netting, Amber made her final run towards the finishing line.

“Sprint!” one of her instructors called from the side. “This is the point where you have to be able to put on the pace to bring down your suspect!”

Amber gave it everything she had, pushing herself hard. She knew that she had to in all of the physical aspects of the training, because if she didn’t, then she would never be able to meet all of the requirements of the course. Amber ran for the line, crossing it with the group of trainees in front of her.

“Not bad,” the instructor said as Amber’s group finished. “Head back to your dorms and get ready for your next session.”

Amber staggered back in the direction of her room in a big glass and concrete block of them, the physical effort of the obstacle course almost draining her. She felt happy that she’d been able to make it around in the allotted time, though. She’d been staying there for several weeks now, fully committed to the twenty-week course that was designed to make her into an FBI agent.

Amber made it back to her room. It was spartan in its emptiness, with just a bed, a dresser for her clothes, and her laptop set on top of it all. Amber headed into the bathroom to shower, then came back out to start work on some of her assignments.

She checked her emails and messages first. There was one from Agent Simon Phelps, checking how things were going with her training. Amber considered how best to respond.

Everything is going well, thanks.

It was only a partial truth. Amber was finding the physical aspects of the training harder than she’d thought they would be. Her only consolation was that when it came to the more cerebral aspects, to interview techniques and to putting together pieces of evidence into a whole, she was doing much better.

The next message was from an online quiz looking for some additional puzzle questions. Amber was grateful for that chance to do something she was undeniably good at and also grateful that people still seemed to want her skills when it came to puzzles.

It didn’t take long to take twenty facts gleaned from the internet and turn them into questions, adjusting the phrasing to complicate them so that they would be harder for quizzers to work out. With this kind of thing, Amber always took it as an opportunity to learn new facts about the world. In this case, she learned that the kiwi had technically one of the shortest beaks of any bird because of a quirk of how those things were measured, and that cats were believed to be the only mammals that couldn’t taste sweetness.

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