Page 34 of Absent Remorse

“Yes, ma’am,” Simon said, but Amber could see that Agent Palliser was already walking away.

Amber bent her head to the task of trying to reconstruct the puzzle pieces that had come apart when she solved the second layer, but even so, she couldn’t help looking up as Simon entered his office.

“I guess you heard all that?” he said.

Amber nodded. It was hard to keep the pain she felt right then off her face. The things Agent Palliser had said had been harsh, but what hurt the most was that at least some of them had been true. She and Simon were causing damage as they investigated, and people had died because they hadn’t found the answers quickly enough. Worse, Amberdidn’thave that extra something that her instructors said she needed to be an FBI agent. She wasn’t sure if she could kill someone, even if that was what it took to save a life. She couldn’t even hit a practice target with a gun.

“I heard it.” It was all she could do to keep tears out of her eyes right then.

Simon put a hand on her shoulder. “Amber, you wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe you could help to solve this.”

“But I haven’t solved it yet. A single puzzle shouldn’t take me this long. Maybe Palliser’s right. Maybe I should go back to Quantico.”

“You don’t really believe that, and nor do I,” Simon said.

Amber wasn’t sure what she believed right then. “Do you think she’s serious about sending me back there?”

Simon’s expression was grave. “Maybe. She’s under a lot of pressure from outside over this. Where are you with the puzzle?”

Amber gestured to the floor around her. “That’s just it. I’m still where I was before we left to talk to Ilya St Claire. Ithinkall of this fits together, and Ithinkthe knives are a part of it—the killer’s way of giving us a new piece of the puzzle with every murder, but I don’t see how they can fit.”

“The blades would get in the way,” Simon said.

“Exactly,” Amber said.

“Keep trying,” Simon said. “Or failing that, keep experimenting with moving the ball bearing to the different symbols. Maybe the order isn’t as straightforward as one to eleven. Maybe there’s a code to it.”

Amber nodded, although even as she did so, her mind told her just how many possible combinations there would be. Assuming it was as simple as moving to the symbols in the right order, and assuming that the sequence used all of the symbols, then that was still an eleven-digit passcode. On a computer, she was sure that an NSA mainframe could have deciphered it by brute force relatively quickly, but physically like this, trying the billions of possibilities involved would take a lifetime.

No, she had to find a way to work this out, and she felt sure now that the remains of the second layer provided a clue to it. Maybe the symbols on it matched up to the ones on the seemingly blank pyramid, and when the layer was put back together, it would provide the order?

Amber didn’t know, but shedidknow that she had to at least start trying to reconstruct the fragmented layer. She started to take pieces, comparing them, treating them the way she might have treated a jigsaw puzzle with no clear border. She looked for sections that seemed to fit together well, looked for places where the patterns from one clearly fed into the patterns from the next.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Simon asked. He didn’t seem to be chasing down potential links between the victims now. Maybe he’d realized that it had only gotten them dead ends so far, deliberate blind alleys put in place by the serial killer to disguise his steps.

“You’ve put together a jigsaw puzzle before, right?” Amber said.

“Not a three dimensional one.”

That was a part of what made it harder. They weren’t trying to make a flat surface, but instead trying to recreate the cube that had been there before.

Or were they?

“I think … I think we might be trying to make a pyramid out of it,” Amber said. She looked at the pieces, and now that she’d said it, she could see the way some of them had broken, leaving points that could only be the corners of the pyramid. The angles were simply wrong for a cube.

It felt as if she could almost,almostsee how it fit together.

“Look for any pieces that seem as though they have patterns that fit together,” Amber said. “Look for ones that line up exactly. We’ll try to fill in the base of the pyramid and then build up the sides.”

It was desperately slow going, even with Simon’s help. Amber felt as if trying to discern between different swirling patterns was almost impossible.

Still, she could see it starting to come together, but there were still gaps there, some of which looked as though they might be in the shape of the knife hilts, but with the blades still there, they wouldn’t fit.

“Maybe that means …” Amber tailed off as she considered that fact. She lifted up one of the knives, examining it. She wasn’t an expert on weapons, but she knew that knives were typically either glued into their handles or riveted to them. This one, no, all of them, had sections of handle that seemed to have been screwed into place with ordinary screws.

“We need to get these handles apart,” Amber said.

“Amber, those are evidence,” Simon said.

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