Page 35 of Absent Remorse

“They’re also crucial parts of this. Do you have a multi-tool? Anything with a screwdriver or a blade?”

It turned out that he did, and Simon took the knives one by one, working to unscrew them.

“It’s better if I do this part,” he said. “If you’re the one to do it, Palliser will probably accuse you of tampering with crucial evidence as a civilian. At least I’m an agent.”

He took them apart, passing Amber the pieces. Each handle fell into multiple pieces as it came apart, and now it seemed that Amber could see where they fit within the whole.

Amber slotted them into place one by one, moving faster now, the way she might have with a nearly complete jigsaw. As it came together, she could see where each piece fit more clearly.

Finally, it was together. It wasn’t complete, because there were still gaps, presumably where the hilts of more knives would fit, but it was at least a pyramid shape now, and it was close enough to complete that Amber could make out most of the symbols there, the patterns of them forming lines and swirls, symbols and letters that seemed to flow together in some kind of coherent whole.

For the briefest of moments, Amber felt a sense of triumph. She and Simon had built this together. They’d done it. They’d solved this fragment of the puzzle!

Then, slowly, as she stared at it, Amber felt the sense of triumph starting to fade. She’d made this pyramid, she’d managed to put the symbols into an order that made a kind of coherent sense, or at least fit together in one whole. There was only one problem with it all, though, one thing that she couldn’t avoid, and which sapped her brief instant of happiness from her in spite of her efforts in the last few minutes.

Amber stared at it, and she still didn’t know what any of it meant.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Amber found herself wishing that she understood any of the symbols on the pyramid she held.

She turned the pyramid she and Simon had constructed over in her hands, trying to see how it matched up to the blank one that formed the current layer of the puzzle. The angles were the same although the dimensions were different, and the pyramid they’d constructed had whole washes of symbols covering it, none of which made sense to Amber.

Amber started to search for those symbols using the same online dictionaries that she’d used to unravel the previous layers.

“What are you doing?” Simon asked.

“Trying to find some kind of meaning in these symbols,” Amber said. “They look like they might be some kind of dead, non-European language, or maybe some obscure, old cipher system. Before, with the symbols for the different numbers across the pyramid, I was at least able to find letter systems that looked as though they fit the symbols before. That got me looking in the right dictionaries.”

“So, you think the same thing might work here?” Simon asked.

“Maybe.” It was hard to tell yet. “I’ll need to look at as many dictionaries as possible. I only found the answer to the numbers by accident and that was after hours of looking.”

She’d only found the answer after realizing that theywerenumbers, because that let her know where she ought to look, narrowing down her search. With these strange symbols and lines, there didn’t seem to be any kind of clue that might help her with them, anything that might tell her which alphabets to look through.

“Could it be a cipher?” Simon asked. “Something needing a keyword, like with the Puzzle Killer?”

Amber shook her head. “I think if this killer were going to use a cipher, he’d pick one that was well known, some famous historical cipher or something out of fiction. Something that could be spotted so that people would at least have a chance to decipher it.”

“So, it’s more likely to be a language?” Simon said.

“Maybe,” Amber replied. She wasn’t surewhatall of this was. “If so, the person who put this together must have been some kind of expert in obscure, dead languages, because I can’t find modern ones that match up with all of this.”

She had trouble conceiving of the mind that had managed to come up with all of this. This was someone who had obvious practical skills in both wood and metal working, presumably along with some knowledge of electronics if they had managed to rig the puzzle to let them know when Amber and Simon got through its layers. All of that suggested an engineer, but they would also have to be someone with a love of puzzles, a knowledge of dead languages and, of course, the cold-blooded capacity to simply walk up to strangers and stab them precisely through the heart.

“Have you thought about what kind of person it would take to be able to do all of this?” Amber asked. “To be able to physically construct the puzzle, to have the knowledge to imagine it allandto be able to kill people like this?”

Simon nodded. He moved back to his computer. “It’s an interesting combination. Maybe one that can tell us something about who the killer might be.”

She saw him working there at his computer, doing his own brand of research. Amber suspected that it wasn’t going to come up with the answer to the puzzle even if it managed to come up with the answer to who the killer might be. Amber focused on the puzzle instead, trying to make some sense of it.

She’d found the numbers; she had to hope that she would be able to find a translation for the rest of the symbols. Once she did that, Amber was confident that she would be able to come up with an answer. She’d done it before once she’d managed to translate the hieroglyphs on the outer layer. She’d done it with the second layer as soon as she’d seen the clue hidden on the inside of the first layer.

Was there anything hidden here? No, it seemed to Amber that it was more about the similarities and differences between the two layers. Two layers, one with symbols covering every inch of it that she and Simon had been able to construct, one with nothing but a moveable ball bearing and a series of symbols representing numbers across a multitude of languages.

Those symbols weren’t present on the model of the pyramid that she and Simon had constructed. There were blank spots on the model where the symbols sat on the seemingly featureless pyramid.

That had Amber wondering. Did the symbols on the pyramid she’d constructed provide clues as to the order she was meant to move the ball bearing to the numbers on the main puzzle? Were they also numbers, or was there something more complex going on?

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