Page 23 of Absent Remorse

Amber held up a hand for silence. There was a flicker of something at the back of her mind, something that she needed to concentrate on. She’d learned to trust that instinct, that part of her brain that told her that she had the answer to a puzzle tucked away in her head even though it wasn’t obvious. There was something snagged in her thoughts, something she’d heard here …

“Wait,” she said, turning to the coroner, “where did you say the victims were killed? The addresses?”

“14 Peel Street, 15 Greater Square, I don’t have an exact address for Alicia Greening, but-”

“But it was on ninth street?” Amber said.

She saw the coroner nod.

“Pi! He’s using pi! The locations of the murders are clues. We have 3.14159, but we can keep going ourselves with 2653…” Amber could have gone on. Puzzle setters liked to use Pi as a sequence, just as they might use a Fibonacci sequence or a series of prime numbers.

“What does that mean?” Simon asked.

“It means that, as long as I can work out which parts are hours and which are minutes, I should be able to unlock this layer too.”

She set to work on the watches. She’d already noticed that they were numbered in order, so it was a simple matter of working out how to divide the sequence up across the watches. A quick attempt showed that the killer hadn’t gone for three o’clock, one o’clock, four o’clock, with each digit representing an hour, so now it was just a question of working out exactly where the divisions fell. She set the first watch to 3:14, the second to 1:59, and kept going, reasoning that this way, the killer was forcing them to work as many digits through the sequence as possible.

As she set the last watch, Amber heard a click, and it was as if a whole layer of the cube fell apart in her hands, scattering watches to the floor. A couple of them broke there. The whole shell of that layer broke apart into fragments, with sections of strange whorls and symbols scattered across the floor.

As Simon and the coroner rushed to grab the pieces, sweeping them into evidence bags, Amber could only stare at the object left in her hands. It wasn’t a cube this time but a pyramid of the same blank metal that the outer cube had been constructed from. Its only distinguishing feature was a single ball bearing set at the very tip.

Amber had no idea what this layer meant yet, but she was confident that she would work it out. She needed to if she was going to stop more people from dying.

CHAPTER TWELVE

He walked the streets of Washington, following his next victim, trying not to be distracted by all the other possible victims he could choose in the streets of the city. He’d already made his decision about who would be the best person to include at this stage of the carefully curated experience he was building for the FBI.

He’d found that the key to a successful puzzle was making and breaking expectations. A good puzzle encouraged people through it in the initial steps, showing them patterns, letting them discover those patterns to make it to the next phases.

Then, to keep things fresh, and to make things more difficult, it broke from those patterns.

Of course, it was important to break from the patterns in the right ways. So far, he’d built a clear pattern that he had no doubt that the FBI would be latching onto. He’d given them three victims with clear links to one another, three young women, so similar in so many respects, ranging from the obvious to the more obtuse. There had even been some physical similarities between them, even if they were only coincidental. He’d killed them all on the street, establishing an MO.

Oh, how the FBI must think that they were making progress on hunting him through that side of things. They probably thought that they could ignore his puzzle, hunt him down using their tried and tested methods, and imprison him. Maybe they didn’t even realize the game that they were taking part in.

Soon, he would shatter their illusions so that they truly understood that they were just one more component in his grand game. One in which the elements of the puzzle were mixed in with what was jokingly called real life until it was impossible to tell one from the other.

An alert on his phone told him that at least someone in the FBI was trying to solve his puzzle. In fact, they had managed to get through another layer of his creation. Perhaps he’d given them too large a clue with the number on the interior of the outer casing.

He’d set an automatic signal to go out each time one of the puzzle layers fell away, routed through proxy servers to make it harder to trace him. Since the chips sending the signal were embedded in the body of the puzzle, he doubted that the FBI would find them if they weren’t actively looking for them. They would also send out a warning if someone started to break his puzzle apart to look for them. At that point, the FBI would be cheating, and he would simply disappear.

He hoped that they wouldn’t cheat. Whoever was playing along back in the FBI was obviously clever, or they wouldn’t have gotten as far as they had. A game like this was always a two-way street, and he was pleased that there was someone playing along who might do his puzzle justice.

He kept stalking, staying a little behind his target, knowing that he had already found the perfect person to fit in with the scheme of the puzzle. Location wasn’t as important now that they’d solved this layer, so he had more freedom about where he killed them. He let his eyes rove over the people on the street, taking in their slight looks of nervousness as he looked their way.

He’d had that kind of look a lot in his life. He’d never been the guy who got smiles when he looked someone’s way. He’d been the guy who got suspicious looks back at best, and occasionally shouts that he should leave people alone. Maybe it was the way he looked at the world and saw how to take it all apart, exactly like one of his puzzles. Maybe people didn’t like being looked at in a way that assessed exactly how to deconstruct them most efficiently.

He didn’t really know. The emotions of others had always been a mystery to him. He’d never really understood why people didn’t want to play the games that he constructed for them so carefully. Why they didn’t want to know him or spend time around him.

At least with this game, the FBI didn’t have any choice except to play it out to the end. That was the only way that they would catch him, the only way that they had a chance of getting to the truth of all of this.

In theory, the puzzle would lead them to him. Should he be worried about that? He’d assumed that his puzzle was impossible, yet they seemed to be making progress with it. Should he be frightened that the FBI would try to arrest him, would put him up in front of a court and accuse him of being some kind of monster?

No, he didn’t think so. For one thing, the louder the world shouted about what he’d done, the more attention his perfect puzzle gained. Even as they caught him, they would be providing him with exactly the kind of publicity that he’d been hoping for when he sent the puzzle to the journalist.

For another, if this game was to mean anything, then he had to play it fairly, at least for now. He couldn’t run any more than he could allow the FBI to simply smash their way inside with hammers and saws. That would be breaking the game, moving out from the beautiful, shared reality that they’d come to inhabit in pursuit of it.

Besides, he’d prepared one final layer for the possibility that they might reach him. He might not be strong or fast, but he would be ready for them when they came—ifthey came. Whoever solved the puzzle would try to come for him, and then the last act of the game would play out, leaving him as the victor.

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