Page 36 of Absent Remorse

Amber couldn’t find a set of numbers that matched the symbols on the pyramid, but she was sure that this had to be the way the puzzle worked. The ball bearing moved to the symbols in some kind of sequence, and the reconstructed layer was a clue to the order in which to do it. After all, the layer before had provided the clue needed to unlock the layer with the watches.

She could see that Simon was still busy with his research, looking as engrossed in it as Amber often found herself getting in puzzles. It meant that she didn’t want to disturb him now, not until she was confident that she had the key to all of this. She went back to looking at the lines and swirls on the pyramid, turning it over and over to look at it from every angle.

When she looked at it from the top down, Amber saw the way the lines seemed to form pathways and angles, the symbols serving as blocks even as they presumably served to communicate some sort of meaning. To Amber, it looked like … like …

“It’s a maze!” Amber said, unable to contain her excitement as she found what seemed to be the answer. She said it loud enough that Simon looked up from his computer.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“The symbols,” Amber said. “Maybe they’re writing, maybe there’s a meaning to them, but if you look at the pyramid from above, they form the lines of a maze. One with the ball bearing at the center.”

“So, you think you need to guide the ball bearing through that maze and … what? Reach the end of it?”

“Not the end,” Amber said. “Remember the numbers on the main puzzle? My guess is that we have to plot a route through this maze that hits those numbers in order.”

“Can you do that?” Simon asked.

That was difficult. Finding a route through the maze ought to be easy enough but finding one that would hit eleven specific points in order would be significantly harder. Doing that when she would also have to recreate that route on a pyramid without any of the same lines, which wasn’t to the same scale and which presumably wouldn’t give her any sign of whether she was doing it right, using a ball bearing?

Amber could only imagine how difficult that was going to be.

She began by putting the two pyramids next to one another, looking at the one she and Simon had built while she moved the ball bearing on the other. She tried to trace the pathways through the maze, but it was almost impossible like that.

Amber took a pen then, starting to draw the symbols onto the smooth metal of the main puzzle, trying to follow the lines as precisely as she could. It took what felt like forever, but at last she thought she had them pretty close.

Amber started to move the ball bearing through the resulting maze, shifting it through the twists and turns, trying to pick a path to the first of the numbers. She managed that, but with the second, she ran into a problem: the route went straight through one of the sections that was still missing, presumably waiting for sections of another knife’s handle to fill it. Amber had to guess her way across it, aiming for a spot on the far side that looked as though it might be the continuation of the route.

Amber kept going to each of the symbols in turn, and three more times, she found herself having to skip over gaps in the maze, aiming for the most likely spot. With trembling fingers, she moved the ball bearing to the last of the symbols.

Nothing happened.

A wave of confusion and frustration hit Amber all at once. She didn’t know what had gone wrong. Had she misunderstood this puzzle? Was it not a maze after all? Did the symbols mean something that affected the way she needed to approach it all, but which she simply didn’t get?

Or was it something simpler? Had she just not copied the maze across accurately? Had she missed out a twist or turn somewhere in one of the sections that was due to be filled by the knife hilts? It was impossible to know for sure without them, but did that mean that she and Simon were condemned to simply waiting for the killer to murder enough people to fill in the gaps?

No, Amber wouldn’t accept that; she couldn’t. It had been possible to solve the other layers of the puzzle without having to wait for more murders, even if they had provided clues. Amber had to believe that there was a way to use the information that she already had to solve this layer of the puzzle and, potentially, find the identity of the killer.

There had to be a way to do it, but right then, Amber couldn’t see what it was. All she could do was start over, trying to move the ball bearing through the maze again and hoping that this time she would get it right.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Simon could sense Amber’s frustration from across the room as she continued to work on the puzzle. She seemed utterly determined to keep going with it, but Simon wasn’t sure how much progress she was making.

She seemed to be attempting the same thing over and over, with the kind of almost obsessive determination that was both one of her most impressive qualities and something that worried Simon more than a little about her.

A part of him wanted to tell her to stop before this turned into full-on obsession, but he also knew that he couldn’t do it, not when there was a chance for her to solve it and provide Simon with the identity of the killer, all at once. Especially not when Agent Palliser was clearly impatient for results and had already threatened to remove Amber from the case.

Without her on it, would Simon be able to get into the puzzle? Palliser might have suggested cutting into it, but Amber’s warnings of potential anti-tamper measures had him worried, especially when they were dealing with a killer who seemed to know exactly how far along they were with his puzzle. Even if there weren’t vials of acid in there waiting to destroy the contents if anyone tried to break in, there was a chance that something about the puzzle would alert the killer the moment they tried to cheat like that, giving him time to run.

Simon couldn’t allow that, but he also couldn’t just rely on waiting for Amber to solve the puzzle, either. He had to find a way to keep searching for the killer and hope that he could somehow shortcut through all this business with the puzzle to get straight to the killer.

What was he looking for, though? Amber had said it: they needed someone with enough crafting expertise to build the puzzle, but also someone with the mind to design it, someone with a knowledge of obscure languages and an interest in puzzles. Preferably someone with a history of violence that could show they were capable of the killings.

The question was where he was going to find someone like that. Finding someone withoneelement of those he was looking for would be easy enough, but all of them at once? That seemed a lot more difficult.

He started by looking at those of Aiden Merr’s clients he could see on his PR firm’s social media accounts. There was still a possibility that this was linked to the victims in some way, after all. He might not have a client list to work from, but he could still use a mixture of the captions and image searches to establish who the people there were.

Most weren’t of any interest to the investigation; the important politicians and businesspeople Aiden Merr had worked with didn’t seem to have any obvious connection to puzzles, dead languages, or the skills needed to do all of this.

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