Page 40 of Absent Remorse

“He assaulted me! There! You all saw it!”

Maybe it was a good thing after all that the cameras were on, if only because they showed the world the truth.

“Professor, where were you last night?” Simon demanded.

“Here, of course!”

“What about yesterday at 2:15?” he asked.

“What? You expect me to remember every little thing?” The professor looked positively apoplectic. He stepped forward to push at Simon again. This time, Simon moved aside, twisting the professor’s arms behind his back. He was done trying to get answers out of a drunk this way.

“Come on,” Simon said. “That’s the second time you’ve tried to attack a federal agent. Professor Quern, you’re under arrest.”

“Under arrest? Never!”

“We’ll take you to a holding cell until you sober up. Maybe then you’ll remember your alibi.”

Simon made to turn the monitors off before he took the professor out of there. As he did so, though, he caught sight of the reactions on the screen. Some were angry, but others were more straightforward, pointing out that the professor had been in another of his streams at the time.

If that was true, then it meant that he had an alibi, one that they might be able to corroborate.

Simon still wanted to take him in, though. For one thing, although he was fairly certain that the professor was actually drunk now, he still wanted to check the alibi before he said for sure that the other man had nothing to do with the murders.

For another, he found himself thinking about the symbols all over the puzzle. If this was the man who had put them there, then Simon might have just caught a killer. If not, then this might just be exactly the person to help translate them.

He guessed that Amber wouldn’t like that. She clearly wanted to be the one to solve the puzzle, but this wasn’t about her, or even about the puzzle. It was about stopping a killer before he could strike again. If this drunken academic could help to do that, then Simon was more than willing to get his help any way he could.

He just needed to sober him up first.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

Amber could see Agent Palliser looking through the glass of Simon’s office, keeping an eye on her while she worked. Amber saw the senior agent reach for the door and braced herself, knowing that whatever was coming next wouldn’t be good.

“Ms. Young, have you made any further progress?” Palliser demanded.

“I think I’ve worked out that the patterns on this second pyramid are some kind of maze,” Amber said. “And I’m pretty sure that the idea is to move the ball bearing on the blank layer through that maze, hitting the symbols on it in order.”

“So, why haven’t you opened it?” Palliser asked.

“Some sections are missing, so I’m having to guess the way across them,” Amber said. “I’m also having to work out where the lines of the maze are on the main pyramid, when the two aren’t to scale. There’s a lot of trial and error.”

“It’s the error that worries me,” Palliser said. “Ms. Young, I have to ask, do you think that being involved in Agent Phelps’s cases is a way into this department?”

That caught Amber a little by surprise. “No, of course not. I’m just trying to help.”

“So, you don’t think that this is a way to avoid completing your training?”

Amber shook her head. Was this what Palliser’s hostility had been about? Did she think that Amber was trying to trick her way into the department.

“No, ma’am,” Amber said. “I’m only here because the killer sent the puzzle to a friend of mine and because I know puzzles.”

Agent Palliser seemed to consider that for a moment or two. “Keep going, then. If this is our way to the killer, then we need answers sooner rather than later.”

It wasn’t the same pressure as threatening to send Amber back to Quantico, but it was definitely a kind of pressure, reminding Amber that lives depended on her finding an answer to this, and that she was potentially the only one who could find that answer.

Amber threw herself back into trying to make the solution to the puzzle work. Amber knew as well as anyone that the definition of madness was doing something over and over again and expecting a different result, but that seemed to be where she was with all of this. She kept moving the ball bearing along the paths she’d drawn on the puzzle, trying to find the twists and turns she needed to make it unlock.

Amber was still trying to make it work when she saw Simon returning. He was bringing a strange man with him, one in a tweed suit who looked like he was almost staggeringly drunk. He brought the man to his office, and Amber looked up at the two of them in confusion as they came in.

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