Page 50 of Absent Remorse

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Amber knew as she hung upside down by her ankle that she was going to die. She dangled there as helpless as a rabbit or a deer caught in a snare, while a man she now knew to be a killer was standing just a little way away, turning a thin, bladed knife over and over in his hands.

“Do you know how much effort I put into my puzzle?” Greg said. He didn’t look any better now that Amber was upside down, his form slightly undefined in his baggy, black clothes, his features dull and unpleasant.

“You didn’t seem to have any difficulty in killing so many people,” Amber snapped back.

“I’m going to have to kill you, too,” he said. “Now that you know who I am. I can’t allow you to go, because then I wouldn’t be able to start my game again somewhere else.”

“That’s what you’re planning, is it?” Amber asked. “To murder more people?”

“That part isn’t thepoint!” Greg said. Again, he sounded almost hurt by the way Amber was approaching it all. “It’s just … necessary, or none of it has any meaning. I discovered that when I killed my mother.”

“You killed your own mother?” Amber said. She could barely believe it.

“I didn’t mean to.” As if that made it better. “But it showed me what the heart of the game had to be. What the stakes had to be if it was going to be the perfect puzzle.”

“You think it was perfect?” Amber said. She knew that her only hope now was to keep Greg talking until help arrived. She might have Simon’s gun, but she’d already proven on the range just how little that was likely to help her. Hanging upside down was definitely not going to help her to make a shot that she couldn’t have made ordinarily.

“Of courseit was perfect!” Greg snarled at her. “Do you understand the work that I put into it?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” Amber said. Anything to keep him talking, trying to use up precious seconds. “Whatdidit take to come up with the puzzle cube?”

“More effort than you can imagine.” Greg seemed to preen, straightening up and holding out the knife. “A puzzle cube alone would have been hard enough, but to link it to events outside? I had to plan every step of each killing, making sure that the locations provided the clues I needed for the puzzle. Doing that without being caught meant plotting routes between cameras, learning how to open locks, learning exactly where to strike to kill someone swiftly.”

He made it sound like difficult work that someone had all but forced him into, rather than a series of murders that he’d carefully planned and then executed, murdering people for no better reason than to lead the FBI through his twisted game.

“So, the victims were only about the location?” Amber asked. “There wasn’t any other reason? Any other connection? They didn’t even matter to you?”

“The names made for a nice connection,” Greg said. “And finding three who knew one another who I could kill in the right locations? Do you know how hard that was?”

Amber didn’t know and didn’t care. What mattered to her was that this man had picked out four people and killed them, apparently not caring who they were or what was going on in their lives.

“You got through the first layer by chance,” Greg said. “What about the second?”

“What?” Amber said, caught out by the sudden shift of direction, or perhaps by the fact that every move she made resulted in her swinging back and forth as she dangled from the snare.

“What about the second?”

“What do you mean that I solved the first by chance?” Amber said. She was a little insulted by that. “Yes, I got lucky in discovering that the symbols appeared with heat, but I still had to work the rest of it out. You said yourself how difficult that was …”

She tailed off as she saw Greg’s smile. There was something hungry about it, as if he’d been hoping for this from the start. Amber realized that he’d tricked her into giving him what he wanted: the validation that came from knowing his puzzle was so complex.

“I knew you found it tricky,” he said. “What about the second layer? It took so much effort to kill in spots that gave digits to pi. It was almost a relief when you solved that one, and I had more freedom about the spots I chose. I’d set the radius on the sensors wide enough that I could pick from plenty of locations.”

Again, he sounded more like an enthusiast discussing their favorite hobby than a murderer.

“And then the key,” he said. “I caught you out, didn’t I? Adam Trench is even now in FBI custody, right? Or you would have come here with all of them.”

Amber shook her head. “The FBI are right outside.”

It was a lie, and a bad one at that, but it was the only thing she could think of to draw this out.

“I don’t believe you,” Greg said. “They wouldn’t send you ahead of them. You came here alone, wanting to finish the puzzle, wanting to find the truth. Well, you found it. You found me. And then you walked into my trap.”

He held up the knife he’d taken from the bench. “I took my time designing these. I had to learn how to forge knives to be able to include them in the game. I had to design each one to fit in with the street map on the jigsaw pyramid layer. I made them sharp enough to slide into a body without any effort. Physical violence has never been one of my strong suits.”

He seemed to have managed it easily enough with his four victims so far. Worse, he seemed to be getting ready to do it now, and Amber was still hanging helplessly upside down.

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