Page 51 of Absent Remorse

“I have to kill you now,” he said, testing the weight of the knife. “It’s kind of a pity, because I’d like to try making a puzzle you couldn’t crack, but I can’t let you live. I can’t.”

Amber raised the gun she held, trying to dissuade him. “Stay back.”

Greg ignored her, starting forward. “One thrust through the heart is all it takes. Hold still. It will be quick.”

“Stay back!” Amber said, trying to keep her aim steady in spite of the swaying brought about by hanging from the snare. Trying to focus the way she might have focused on the practice range. Trying to focusmorethan that, because her life was at stake if she got any of this wrong.

She heard sirens then, somewhere outside, followed by the sound of running feet. The trouble was that Greg seemed to hear it, too, obviously realizing that he had run out of time.

“Time to die,” Greg said and leapt forward. His face was suddenly twisted into a snarl of rage. The knife was outstretched in his hand, lancing towards Amber’s chest.

For a fraction of a second, Amber hung there, sure that she was going to freeze up, not managing to fire. Instead, she squeezed the trigger, feeling the pressure increase until the moment when the sound of the gun filled the workshop, loud enough to almost deafen Amber.

Greg went down screaming as Amber’s shot hit him perfectly in the knee, the knife skittering out of his grasp as he hit the workshop floor. Even as he went down, Amber saw Simon rushing past her, obviously having burst into the workshop just a moment before.

He kicked the knife further away from Greg, dragging him onto his stomach and cuffing him while Amber felt a wave of relief flooding through her. There was one thing she wanted to say that she knew she shouldn’t, since she wasn’t an agent, but she couldn’t stop herself.

“Greg Sanderson, you’re under arrest.”

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

Amber sat in Simon’s office, knowing that she was probably in trouble. Palliser was out there, not looking happy about any of it. Simon was out there, too, looking like he was doing his best to defend her, but Amber guessed that he wasn’t going to be able to salvage things completely.

The fact was that she’d gone out alone, with a gun she shouldn’t even have had, to take on a killer. Amber knew that she should have tried to persuade people to back her up, should have tried to get Simon and maybe a whole tactical team to go with her, but at the time, that had simply seemed impossible.

At last, Agent Palliser stepped away and Simon came into the office.

“How much trouble am I in?” Amber asked.

“Trouble?” Simon sounded confused. “Amber, you’ve just caught a serial killer when we all thought that we already had the killer in custody.”

That caught Amber a little by surprise.

“So, I’m not about to get thrown out of the training academy?” Amber asked.

“Thrown out?” Again, Amber could hear the disbelief in Simon’s voice. “Do you really think that we’re going to throw out someone who has managed to solve a nearly impossible puzzle, catch a killer, and save the lives of who knows how many future victims in the process?”

“I thought you’d be angry about me going off alone with your gun to investigate,” Amber said.

“I wasworried,” Simon corrected her. “You shouldn’t have been there alone. You shouldn’t have felt that you had to investigate that workshop without anyone else. It almost got you killed.”

“I can look after myself,” Amber said automatically, in spite of the danger she’d been in back when Greg Sanderson had been about to stab her. She’d walked into a trap without even considering the possibility that a man who could devise such complex puzzles might defend his hiding place with that kind of thing.

“I can see that now,” Simon said. “That shot you took … to manage a disabling shot like that from such a difficult position … that’s very impressive, Amber.”

Amber felt a note of pride hearing Simon praise her shooting like that. It gave Amber hope that she might even be able to pass that part of the training to become an agent. It seemed that the only missing component for her had been the stress to push her into being able to pull the trigger. At the very least, she felt as if she’d managed to overcome her deep-seated fear of guns.

“What happens now?” Amber asked.

“Greg Sanderson will be charged with the murders,” Simon said. “We started to look into Adam Trench’s affairs and found evidence of several of his cons, so we’ll be holding him as well. We have a tech team working to put the puzzle back together. We suspect that we’ll need to demonstrate it being solved in front of a jury in order to convince them about how we solved this.”

“Will I need to testify?” Amber said.

“With luck, no,” Simon said. “We’ll take a statement, and hopefully that will be enough, but it’s possible that you’ll have to explain how you solved the puzzle to a court.”

That was good.

“And what about my training?” Amber said. She didn’t want the time she’d taken away from it for this case to ruin her chances of passing the course.

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