Page 27 of Absent Remorse

Amber was also wondering what was happening, but her dread didn’t have anything to do with the possibility of legal trouble.

“I’ve been trying to contact you for half an hour,” Simon said. “You need to get ready to go.”

“What is it?” Amber asked. “What’s happened?”

A part of her knew the answer already. That part sent a cold thread of pure dread running through her.

“There’s been another murder. Local PD and the coroner’s people are on the scene, but we need to get there right away.”

***

Amber looked at the large, brownstone townhouse in more than a little disbelief as she and Simon walked up to it, past the lines of police tape. They had to push past a crowd of reporters who had already been there for a while. Joseph was there with them. He smiled over at Amber as he saw her. Amber smiled back. When he gestured to the camera beside him, though, Amber had to shake her head. She couldn’t get drawn into saying anything on camera in the middle of a case, even by Joseph.

“The murder took place indoors?” she said.

That didn’t seem to fit the pattern of the other kills.

“A passing cop saw the door hanging open,” Simon explained. “He thought that maybe he was interrupting a burglary. Even when he found the body, he didn’t know what he was looking at, he thought it was just another murder. It was only when the coroner’s team got here and found the knife that they realized that it was a part of the same sequence of murders.”

A thought came to Amber, and she looked at the number of the house. 714. That wasn’t right.

“The address doesn’t fit the sequence of pi that he used with the other murders,” Amber said. “If he’s been killing people to provide clues to his puzzle, then shouldn’t he still be working his way along that sequence?”

“You solved that layer of the puzzle though,” Simon pointed out. “But … how does he know that?”

“Exactly,” Amber said. “So, either he’s getting information about the puzzle somehow, or this is something that doesn’t fit. Are you sure the knife is the same?”

“I haven’t seen it yet,” Simon said. “You’re thinking this could be a copycat?”

It was just that the murder didn’t seem to fit the existing pattern. Amber went inside with Simon and saw CSI technicians working their way over the entrance hall of the townhouse little by little, scouring every inch of it. The coroner was there, not looking happy about it, although it seemed that his people had already left with the body.

“There you are,” he said. “I figured the two of you would have been here before I was.”

Amber didn’t want to have to explain that she’d essentially slept through Simon’s attempts to tell her about the murder because she’d been so exhausted from trying to figure out the puzzle box last night.

“Well, that just means that you can give us a summary of what’s going on here,” Simon said. “What are we looking at, Liu?”

The coroner switched to that professional voice that he seemed to use when talking about the details of murders, as if they were no more than facts to be recited, rather than horrifying events that had tragically cost people their lives.

“The victim is Aiden Merr, 27.”

“Aiden?” Amber said. “A male victim?”

Thatreallydidn’t fit with the killer’s pattern so far.

“Are we sure this is the same killer?” Simon asked.

The coroner shrugged. “All I can tell you is that he was killed in the same way as the other victims: a single stab wound to the chest that pierced the heart.”

Which wasn’t enough to be certain, as far as Amber could see. Another killer could have struck in the same way, could have killed a victim with a single thrust.

“We’ve retrieved the knife the killer used,” the coroner said. “I thought I should pass it straight to you this time.”

The moment he held up an evidence bag containing the murder weapon, Amber knew that the crimeshadbeen committed by the same killer. The knife was of exactly the same design as the ones used in the other murders, thin bladed, with the same kind of elaborate handle worked with symbols and swirls. Again, they weren’t quite the same as any of the other knives, suggesting that each had been individually crafted for its purpose, but the similarity was far too close to ignore.

“It’s the same killer,” Amber said as she saw the knife.

Simon nodded. “Which begs the question of why there’s this sudden shift in the pattern. Yes, it’s another victim with a name beginning with A, but a man this time? And indoors? Serial killers don’t normally like to change their patterns that suddenly, or that much.”

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