Page 13 of Absent Remorse

As he hurried down the alley, he found himself wondering how the FBI was getting on with his puzzle. He assumed that they would have received it by now, even if he couldn’t risk delivering it to them directly. Sending it to a journalist added a layer of protection and also ensured that his actions would get the kind of publicity he wanted. After creating such a perfect puzzle, he wanted to make sure that the world heard about it.

He was sure that the world would hear all about it soon enough when the FBI proved that they couldn’t solve it. He hoped that they wouldn’t try to tamper with it. He’d built in anti-tamper measures, of course, but if the FBI ruined his puzzle by trying to hack it open, it would irritate him.

For now, he hurried to intercept Alicia Greening. Timing was the third component of the perfect murder, ensuring that he struck at a moment when no one else was watching, or at least when no one else knew what was happening.

He pulled up a mask over the lower part of his face as he approached, taking out one of the stilettos he’d designed and made as he walked towards Alicia Greening. She only noticed him approaching when he was a pace or two away, and even then, she didn’t see the danger. She just looked at him in puzzlement.

Shekeptlooking at him that way even when he stepped right up to her and stabbed her with a single, clean thrust of the knife. He heard her gasp as he drove it home into her heart, letting go of it as soon as he’d done it.

He didn’t stop to watch the aftermath of his work. He’d already calculated what that would be. Instead, he walked off, leaving Alicia Greening already falling to the ground behind him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Amber could feel her frustration growing as she tried to work on the puzzle in Simon’s office. There were no obvious clues that she could find to let her know what was going on with the cube that sat in front of her.

The watches on the surface sat there ticking, and Amber couldn’t help the feeling that they were counting down to something. Symbols around them seemed to consist of straight and swirling lines, arranged in ways that were obviously deliberate.

“Do you have any idea yet how this layer might work?” Simon asked. He sounded hopeful, but also faintly concerned, as if he were worried that if they didn’t get answers quickly, his boss might throw Amber off the case.

Or maybe that was Amber’s worry, and she was simply projecting it onto him. It seemed obvious that Agent Palliser didn’t like having a trainee as part of one of her department’s investigations. It was a situation that meant that Amber had to produce some kind of results quickly in order to justify her presence here, or she might not have the chance to help.

Was this just about Amber wanting to be a part of it all? Had she just found a potential link to this case because she missed being a part of investigating things alongside Simon? No, it wasn’t that. Amber could help with this. The puzzle was a part of it, and she was the person best placed to solve a puzzle like this.

So, why couldn’t she find the answer?

“Amber?” Simon said, obviously waiting for an answer.

Amber tried to focus, tried to tell Simon the little that she knew so far. “This layer is different from the last one. That one was just about touching the right spots on the surface of the puzzle. This one … I assume the watches are significant. My guess is that the mechanism might require them to all be set to particular times to open the next layer.”

“But what times?” Simon said.

That was the question. “There’s nothing obvious on the puzzle that says how we’re meant to determine that. The markings might mean something, but I’ve already researched them, and they’re not letters from any language I can find, or any of the better-known ciphers.”

“There has to be something, doesn’t there?” Simon said. “Like last time. The killer put the information in there, because if the puzzle didn’t work, then it wouldn’t have seemed fair to him.”

He had a point. A killer focused on puzzles would want the puzzle to be solvable, or it wasn’t really a puzzle. It was just an impossible object that looked faintly like one.

“There’s a risk that itcouldbe a fake puzzle,” Amber said. “One that isn’t designed to be solved. Maybe the killer has made it that way to distract us.”

“But you don’t believe that?” Simon guessed.

Amber shook her head. She was confident of that part. “I was able to get the first layer. If he’d wanted an impossible puzzle, then why not leave it at that one layer? Why not just make an empty metal cube that reacted to heat to show symbols? No, he went to the trouble of making a real puzzle on the outside, so logically, this will be a real puzzle as well. It’s just that there isn’t any sign of how to solve it.”

Amber looked at the watches more closely, examining each for any sign that might suggest the way they were meant to be set.

“Could we just do it by trying different combinations?” Simon asked.

Amber shook her head. “Each watch has twelve possible hours we could set to, and sixty positions for the minute hand, correct?”

Simon nodded.

“Already, that’s 720 possible combinations,” Amber said. “If it were just one watch, that would be fine, but the moment you have two, it’s 720 squared, and so on. We have twelve watches here across the cube’s faces. That’s too many possible combinations to ever work through by hand. I mean, a supercomputer could do it, but a supercomputer couldn’t turn the dials of the watches.”

It was a low-tech way of preventing anyone from cheating, and it meant that they had to work through this the way the killer intended.

Amber noticed something on the side of one of the watches then: a tiny number eight, scratched into the surface. She found that a watch next to it had nine in the same spot. Were the watches just ordered for some kind of sequence, or was there something simpler going on?

Amber tried setting the first watch to eight o’clock, the second to nine, and so on, working around the cube until she’d done all of them. She half-expected a simple, satisfying click from the puzzle followed by the shell of the cube falling off, but there was nothing. It obviously wasn’t as simple as that. Amber let out a small sound of frustration.

---