Page 26 of Absent Remorse

Not that anything made any difference. He was used to the ways that his insomnia worked, and typically, it wouldn’t be appeased by anything as straightforward as more entertainment.

Yet, he’d found himself hooked on crime podcasts. This one, on serial and multiple killers around the country, even the world, was hard to stop listening to.

“So, Danny, what you’re saying is that this latest puzzle-based killer just reflects a trend among those with aberrant personalities?”

“That’s right, Sophie. Some psychopaths, particularly with concurrent traits of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, have a distinct need to show that they’re better than others. This can manifest in notes sent to the police, taunting them for not catching them, but with this killer, the reports suggest that he sent a puzzle to a reporter with theWashington News, challenging the FBI to try to solve it to uncover his identity.”

“That sounds … why haven’t the FBI simply solved the puzzle?” the female presenter said. “With their resources, shouldn’t they have done it by now?”

“The note with it says that it’s the most difficult puzzle in the world. Although I’ve heard that they’ve brought in the same expert who helped them with the Puzzle Killer, as you might remember from episode 27.”

“It still seems as though they might have been better calling in the NSA, or something.”

“I guess the FBI thinks it knows what it’s doing. Or maybe the NSA has other priorities.”

Or maybe the kind of physical puzzle that a killer might send wasn’t the same as the kind of signals intelligence that they were used to. Maybe it wasn’t a code that enough computing power could simply unravel. Maybe this expert really was the best option. Aiden could still remember the episode they were talking about, which had come in the wake of the Puzzle Killer murders. In that episode, they’d done a lot to dissect and praise the abilities of formerWashington NewsPuzzle Editor Amber Young. If she’d been able to find answers on that case, then wasn’t there a good chance that she would be able to do the same here?

Aiden suspected that, whatever happened, it would be entertaining, providing more than enough materials for several episodes to come. A part of him even idly wondered who the killer would murder next.

He still couldn’t sleep, so he got up, going over to his laptop and looking for information on the case. He looked through the message boards dedicated to the topic, deciding that if it was keeping him from sleeping, he should at least know more about it all.

It didn’t take Aiden long to learn about the three victims so far. Three young women, all in their twenties, all of whom knew one another. Two connections, two intriguing points to run down. Aiden felt a moment of connection to it all, but it was only the briefest of moments. After all, he was a man, in his own well-secured, brownstone home, not a young woman out on the street where any killer could get to her. There was no fear in him, only a kind of detached fascination with it all.

He sat there, the only light in the room that of his laptop’s screen, looking at the details of the case, trying to think it through to see if he could come up with answers faster than the FBI could. That was always the fascination, with true crime like this, trying to understand what was going on, trying to find the truth where others couldn’t.

He found images of the puzzle, because it turned out that the reporter to whom it had been sent had written a brief piece on that fact, complete with pictures. Yet, those pictures seemed to be of a simple, blank cube of metal.

Aiden could already feel the possibilities flashing through his mind as he stared at it. If he had the cube in front of him, he would probably try searching it for tactile clues, or try different methods that might reveal invisible writing. Admittedly, he couldn’t think what those methods might be immediately, but he was sure that he could look them up on the internet.

He tried to look up more than that, seeing what he could find of the social media presence of the three victims, then finding himself looking into Amber Young, the former puzzle editor who was meant to be the one cracking all of this. Was she really up to all of this when Aiden had managed to get as far as he had just on the basis of a picture and a couple of searches? Aiden was half convinced that he should be the one there working with the FBI, rather than having to go into work tomorrow to finish the accounts of one of his more prestigious clients.

Aiden would rather think about this. In fact, he was still thinking about it when he heard a sound from somewhere downstairs.

Aiden frowned and set aside his laptop, heading downstairs to check what was going on. He turned on the lights as he went, looking around for whatever could have made the sound.

When he saw the sight of his front door hanging open, Aiden knew that he’d made a mistake. Someone was in here with him. He needed to get upstairs again, get to his phone, call the cops, and find something that he could use as a weapon.

Aiden heard a sound behind him, turned, and found himself facing a man in shapeless clothing, a hat and glasses obscuring the upper part of his features while a face mask covered the lower half. Aiden stared at him in surprise and then gasped as the man thrust out with something that felt like a punch to the chest.

He looked down with horror as he saw the knife sticking out of his chest, pain starting to flood through him as he fell to his knees.

The killer was already stepping past him, heading for the door.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Amber woke suddenly to the sound of someone knocking on the door to her apartment, hard. It was the kind of urgent knocking that suggested someone had been at it for a while. The kind that might have presaged a SWAT team breaking down the door, except that Amber couldn’t imagine why anyone would.

She realized after a second or two that she’d fallen asleep on her couch, her laptop in front of her on the floor, her pictures of the symbols scattered over her couch, with Amber’s drawings of potential links between them sitting next to them.

Her phone was there among the rest of it and pinged with a message even as Amber tried to blink the sleep from her eyes. Amber grabbed it, trying to make some sense of what was happening. She realized as she looked at it that it was 6am. She also saw that she’d missed half a dozen calls from Simon. What could be so important that he was trying to contact her so early in the morning?

As another knock came at the door, Amber hurried to it, stepping around the piles of puzzles that dotted her floor. She reached the door, looked through the spyhole there, and opened it hurriedly.

Simon was standing there, looking worried. One of Amber’s neighbors came out and was looking across the hall at them.

“Some of us are trying to sleep here!”

Simon flashed his badge then, and the neighbor darted back inside his apartment, probably wondering exactly what Amber had done wrong to warrant the FBI’s attention.

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