Page 44 of Absent Remorse

“We don’t know,” Simon said, “which means that I should get a K9 unit down here to sniff out any explosives and probably specialist bomb techs to check it over.”

“And how long will that take?” Amber asked.

“That doesn’t matter,” Simon said. “Not when there’s a chance of being killed.”

Except that wasting time might mean other people being killed. Besides, Amber didn’t believe that the killer would simply try to blow them up. He’d created a puzzle; if the solution simply led to death, then it wasn’t really a solution. It made a mockery of the idea of it being a puzzle.

Amber couldn’t see him doing that, but shecouldimagine him using this as a distraction, reasoning that every second they wasted trying to find him was a second that he’d earned with the complexity of his puzzle. If they spent their time standing here now, that only played in his hands.

Amber thrust the key forward into the lock and turned it.

“Amber, no!” Simon called out, but it was too late. Amber was already opening the door of the locker.

It swung open easily, without any explosions or sudden surprises. In fact, the locker simply looked … ordinary. It had a bag waiting in there, complete with a name tag on one side.

“Amber, that was incredibly dangerous!” Simon said, in obvious horror.

“Killing us with a bomb would have been cheating,” Amber said. She was already lifting up the bag.

It seemed to hold a couple of changes of clothes, some money, some ID. Amber didn’t understand that.

“It’s a go bag,” Simon said. “A bag for someone to grab if they need to run away in a hurry.”

“Does that mean that the name on the ID won’t be real?” Amber said.

“Probably.” Simon took it. “But the ID has a photograph on it. Hold on.”

He took a picture of the ID using his phone, then sent a message.

“I’ve asked Palliser if she can run facial ID on the image. We should get something back soon … there.”

His phone buzzed with a return message.

“We have an ID. All of this belongs to a man called Adam Trench.”

Adam Trench? They had a name for the killer, just like that? Amber could barely believe it.

“Do you have an address for him?” Amber asked.

Simon nodded. “Palliser sent one. We need to get moving.”

Amber could feel her nerves thrumming with excitement. They’d done it. They’d solved the puzzle. Now, they just needed to go arrest the murderer responsible for it.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Amber sat in Simon’s car, looking across at the small suburban house belonging to Adam Trench and feeling her heart race with the prospect that they could just be a short distance from a murderer.

Simon had turned the sirens and lights off as they pulled into the street, clearly not wanting to give Trench any warning that they were coming. Amber hoped it would be enough. It seemed that the killer had known when they’d solved each stage of the puzzle, so it was possible that he also knew that they were coming for him.

Amber looked over the house, trying to get some sense of the killer within. It was a small house with a white picket fence and a single SUV in the driveway. The lawn was neatly tended, and it looked … ordinary. The kind of place that a small family might have grown up in, rather than it having anything to do with killers and strange puzzles.

“Tell me about Adam Trench,” Amber said.

She saw Simon look at something on his phone, presumably a police file.

“He’s a minor league con artist. He’s been pulled in for small stuff, but there was always the suspicion that there was more somewhere behind it all. He was never convicted of anything involving violence, but there were suggestions of it a couple of times when cons went wrong.”

“So, you think that all of this is one big con to him?” Amber asked. “You think there’s some kind of angle to it all that we can’t see?”

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