Page 15 of Absent Remorse

“Did security cameras from any of the stores pick up anything?” he asked.

Detective Ede shrugged. “We’ve asked for the footage. We’ll forward anything that comes up to you, but my guess is that if he had the sense to wear a facemask and hat, he was probably careful about not letting his face be seen by cameras.”

“We still might be able to track his movements after he did this,” Simon said. “Maybe follow him with the cameras to a point where we can get a clear view of his face.”

Amber hoped that was true, but a part of her suspected that it wasn’t very likely. The killer must have planned all of this to be certain that he would be able to attack his victim and just walk away.

“Do we know who the victim was?” she asked. It didn’t feel right, thinking of her just as “the victim”.

She saw the detective check his notebook. “The deceased was Alicia Greening, of 124 15thStreet. She seems to have been coming back from coffee with some friends she met on a regular basis. Beyond that, we don’t know much.”

It gave them something, though, because when taken with everything about the way the killer had avoided being seen, it suggested that he’d planned all of this, picking her out as a target ahead of time.

“What do we do now?” Amber asked Simon.

“There are two strands to this,” Simon said. “On one hand, we need to keep working this like a standard investigation to try to locate the killer that way. On the other, I need you to keep trying to make any progress you can on the puzzle we were sent. That might be the key to all of this.”

Amber was determined to solve it, but still, the second layer of it had eluded her best efforts to understand it so far, with no sign of a way into the answer for it.

“So, what other angles do you want to pursue?” Amber asked.

“We’ll start by looking through the security footage,” Simon said. “Then we’ll check for any connections between the victims. If we’re lucky, there will be someone who hated all three of them, and we’ll be able to identify them as the killer.”

Amber hoped it would be as simple as that, because trying to find an answer to the puzzle was proving nearly impossible, and because this crime scene had demonstrated one thing clearly: this was a killer who was going to keep murdering women until he was stopped.

CHAPTER NINE

It seemed obvious to Amber within a few minutes of starting to look through the security footage with Simon that they weren’t going to get a clear view of the killer. He’d struck in a blind spot between a couple of cameras, moving with the crowd so that it wasn’t possible to pick one person out for sure as the likely culprit.

Shewasable to make out a figure in a facemask and hat, but he was impossible to identify more clearly. He was wearing a bulky coat that served to disguise his frame, along with dark glasses that made facial recognition more difficult. Combined with what seemed to be a knack for avoiding looking at the cameras, it seemed impossible that they would be able to get an ID on him from the footage.

“How’s the puzzle coming along?” Simon asked her. It was obviously a reminder that Amber should be focusing on that, rather than on the more mundane aspects of the case, yet the truth was that Amber was no further along with it than she had been before.

“I still can’t see a way into the problem,” Amber said. “The watches are numbered, and it doesn’t seem to be to tell us what time to use on them. The symbols around them might be a code or a language, but I haven’t seen anything like them before, so I’m not sure what to do with them. I’m not sure if they even mean anything, or if they’re just there as a distraction to make the puzzle more complex.”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Simon said.

“I hope so, but in the meantime, I can help with this.”

“Agent Palliser might not be happy,” Simon replied. “You’re here because of the puzzle. If she sees you doing other aspects of the case, she might think you’re just trying to find a way into an FBI case.”

“Is that whatyouthink?” Amber asked. Simon’s opinion mattered to her more than Agent Palliser’s. After all, he was the one she was working with on this.

“No, and I guess Icoulduse the extra help. But the puzzle should be your main priority, Amber.”

Amber nodded. “It will be. But maybe looking at the rest of the case will give me a way into it. If the killer intended the puzzle and the murders to be connected, maybe there’s something in all this that can get us closer to the solution.”

“All right, I’m going to take a look at the files for the first couple of victims to see if there are any lines of inquiry we can follow there. Why don’t you look into the two most recent victims to see if there are any connections between them?”

“If this is a psychopath playing games, then there might not need to be a connection,” Amber pointed out.

“But if there is, it could lead us to the killer. Most multiple murders are linked in some way. If we can find that link, we might be able to find an answer even without solving the killer’s puzzle.”

Amber fully intended to solve the puzzle, but she knew that finding the killer was a far greater priority. Once they caught him and took him off the streets, then she could take her time solving the puzzle that he’d sent.

For now, she took the details of the two victims from the case files. Rose Ferne was an advertising executive who had lived in a large townhouse a little way from the center of the city. Mandy Grieder had been a teacher who had lived in a more run-down area. Beyond that, there wasn’t a lot of information in the files, particularly on Rose, since she had been killed more recently and the cops hadn’t put as much together about her.

Amber went looking for information online about the two of them, treating this the way she might treat research if she knew that they were going to come up in a quiz later. She looked through publicly available records to find their addresses, ages, families, and jobs. That didn’t take long, but it also didn’t give her much to go on.

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