Page 28 of Absent Remorse

“So, what do you think this means?” Amber asked.

“I’m not sure,” Simon said. “It’s possible that we’re missing something here. Maybe this is about some deeper link. We already know that the first three victims knew one another, so maybe Aiden Merr is connected to them too. If he is, then maybe there’s an explanation for all of this that we can use to get to the killer.”

“And how do we find that connection?” Amber asked. She wasn’t convinced that a normal connection between the victims did anything to explain the puzzle angle, but if there was the same kind of connection here, she wouldn’t be able to deny its significance.

“I’ll check into him online,” Simon said. “But we also need to look around the house, try to get a sense of who Aiden Merr was, and try to find anything that might explain why the killer chose him as a victim rather than someone else.”

“All right,” Amber said. They started to move around the house together, checking it as they went. Something occurred to her. “The door didn’t look as though it had been broken open. Someone got Aiden to open the door?”

“From the initial reports, the techs think he picked the lock.”

“I guess a lock is just another kind of puzzle,” Amber said.

“So, Aiden Merr. He’s a PR consultant, and a pretty important one, looking at his social media. There are pictures of him with political figures, business leaders, that kind of thing.”

“But is he friends with any of the dead women?” Amber asked.

Simon shook his head. “I can’t see their names on his feeds, or any mention of First Hit Fitness. It’s possible that he just didn’t talk about it.”

“But a guy like that would talk about everything online,” Amber guessed.

“There are pictures of him at a different gym. That doesn’t mean there’s no connection, though.”

It was obvious that he wanted there to be a connection that he could find, something that would point to some underlying shady deal or angered mutual acquaintance that was getting all of these people killed.

Amber still didn’t think it was likely, though. “For this killer, it seems to be all about the puzzle. I’m not sure that looking for a connection gets us anywhere.”

A thought came to her, one that made sense of the sudden break from the pattern she and Simon had been so sure was there. It was also a thought that worried her because it pointed to a killer who was even more dangerous than they’d thought.

“What if it was never a pattern?” Amber suggested.

“What do you mean?”

Whatdidshe mean? It took Amber a moment or two to get her thoughts in order given the speed with which all of this had hit her. She was still trying to make sense of the fact that a serial killer who had seemed to be killing a clear victim type was now switching to someone else entirely. To someone like Simon, who knew about killers, that might not make sense, but to Amber, there was another explanation.

“Puzzle setters sometimes lay false trails to make a puzzle more difficult,” Amber said. “They establish expectations and then they break those expectations. They deliberately set up the illusion of other possibilities in order to distract attention from the real answer.”

She’d done it plenty of times when crafting puzzles for the newspaper, making otherwise straightforward problems difficult by giving the readers more opportunities to wander down blind alleys.

“So, you’re saying that he’s just picking his victims at random?” Simon said.

“Not at random,” Amber replied, shaking her head. “Everything so far has been connected to the puzzle. The first three victims’ locations gave clues to the layer with the clocks. Now that we’re past that layer, he’s giving us something else.”

“The only thing he’s given us this morning is another dead body with a knife sticking out of his chest,” Simon pointed out. Amber could hear the frustration there in his tone.

It mirrored some of what she felt right then, but she also felt something else: the flickering of a connection, the beginnings of an idea.

“The knives,” she said. “Do you have the one the coroner gave us?”

Simon held up the knife. Amber felt herself examining the whorls of it, the seemingly indecipherable patterns that decorated it.

“Before, the previous layer was a clue to the one underneath,” Amber said. “What if that’s true here too. Think about all the broken parts of the puzzle, with all the designs. What if it’s all one grand jigsaw puzzle, and the knives are a part of it?”

“That sounds … like a bit of a stretch,” Simon said.

“But that kind of leap is exactly the kind of thing the killer might be looking for us to do,” Amber said. “Come on. You can keep looking into Aiden Merr back at the office. I think I might be able to make more progress with the puzzle.”

She hoped that she could. It still seemed like the only way to find the killer, and every second of delay was one more when someone might die.

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