Page 47 of Absent Remorse

“And why did you run when we came to arrest you? Why did you make us chase you across the city?”

“You’re asking my client to justify your actions in chasing him?” the lawyer asked. “I’m pretty sure that’s your job, Agent.”

“Myjustification is easy,” Simon said. “Your client killed four people. What was it? You got tired of conning them, Adam? You even killed people with the same initial as you. Was that a part of it for you? Was that why you picked them out, or was there more to it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Trench said. He looked almost panicked now, as if taking in the full danger of the situation for the first time. Was that because he didn’t have anything to do with this, or was it because he’d finally realized that his plan to kill as many people as possible was falling apart, and his puzzle wasn’t as impenetrable as he thought?

Amber didn’t know the answer to that. The evidence pointed to him, but would the killer have this level of surprise? Wouldn’t the man who had constructed the puzzle and spent so long trying to force the world to pay attention to him through it want to boast about what he’d done? Wouldn’t he come out and try to grab whatever fame he could for himself and his puzzle?

Agent Palliser stepped into the interrogation room. Amber braced herself because she knew that she shouldn’t really be in there. Palliser had made that much clear already.

“Ms. Young, can I speak to you outside for a moment?” she said.

Amber swallowed. She suspected that this was going to be bad, but she didn’t really have a choice. She looked around and saw Simon looking on with a note of worry, but he was also caught up in the middle of an interrogation, and Amber didn’t want him to break that off just to back her up.

Amber nodded and headed out of the interrogation room. She half-expected Agent Palliser to chew her out for being in the interrogation room when she wasn’t an agent. Instead, though, Palliser stuck out a hand.

“Congratulations, Ms. Young,” she said, shaking Amber’s hand. “It looks like your efforts have caught a killer. I hope I can admit when I’m wrong. I thought that the business of you trying to solve the puzzle cube was a distraction, but you proved me wrong.”

“Th . . . thank you, ma’am,” Amber said, because that caught her by surprise. The last thing she’d been expecting was praise from Simon’s boss.

“I’ll make sure that your trainers at Quantico hear about it,” Agent Palliser said. “Who knows, if you manage to sort out your scores on the shooting range, you might even make an agent.”

Amber realized that while Simon’s boss was praising her, this was also a dismissal. It was her way of saying that Amber had done her part, and it was time for her to leave.

“Thank you,” Amber repeated. “If it’s all right, I’d like to stay until this is done and Adam Trench is charged.”

She saw Agent Palliser hesitate. Obviously, Simon’s boss had been expecting her to take the hint and leave. Still, she nodded.

“All right, but I can’t allow you to go back inside the interrogation room. If that lawyer starts to latch onto the involvement of a non-agent in the investigation, he could make it sound like we haven’t conducted this properly.”

Amber suspected that there hadn’t been anything normal about the way they’d had to go about the case, solving a killer’s puzzle to try to find him, but she was willing to go along with Agent Palliser’s restriction if it meant getting to see this through. Amber went through to a room on the far side of a one-way mirror from the interrogation room.

“Give it up, Trench,” Simon said. “You’re not fooling anyone with the denials. The evidence from the puzzles points right at you, you connect to one of the main patterns in the killings, and I bet once we start going through your life, we’ll start to find connections to the victims.”

Simon made it sound simple, but there had been nothing simple about any of this … except perhaps at the end.

That was a strange thought, one that made Amber take the key out of her pocket. She hadn’t had a chance to put it into evidence with the rest of the puzzle yet. She found herself staring at it, thinking about the obvious clue on it of the train and the number. The moment she and Simon had seen it, they’d been able to work out what it meant.

They both had. This hadn’t been some sudden leap of intuition on Amber’s part that had cut through an otherwise complex and difficult layer of the puzzle. It had just been … obvious.

That had made them feel like they had the answers at the time, but now Amber found herself starting to worry. This was a killer who had set incredibly difficult puzzles on the other layers, and also someone who had purposely included elements of misdirection in his puzzle designs.

Was it possible that this was also a misdirection? Was it possible that Adam Trench was expressing disbelief not because he was trying to con his way out of the situation, but because he genuinely had nothing to do with it? Had the killer merely picked him as a fall guy, having somehow learned about his background as a conman and the go bag that was in the railway locker?

Was it possible that the real killer was still out there and that there were still aspects of this puzzle that Amber hadn’t understood? While Simon continued the interrogation, Amber wandered out, still looking at the key, still trying to make some kind of sense of it.

She headed out of the office, out into the open air, hoping that would make it easier for her to think. There were too many people around inside, too many others who thought that Adam Trench was the answer to all of it. Amber needed to put that aside for a moment and just focus on the key, the clue.

What information was there on it? There was the picture of a train, but maybe that was just designed to push anyone looking towards the railway station? What else, then? There was the number, 104. Amber had assumed that it had been a locker number, but what else could it be? A room number? An apartment number?

What else was there? Amber couldn’t see anything else on the key beyond the maker’s name, and that …

Wait. Amber had assumed that “Staveley” was a maker’s name just because the design sat in the spot that a maker’s logo would usually have occupied, but was that even a make of keys? It wasn’t one Amber had heard of.

Taking out her phone, she looked for it. She couldn’t find a Staveley who made keys, not even a small locksmith of that name. So, maybe it meant something else. Maybe it was another clue.

On a hunch, Amber searched again, this time on a map of the city. Her heart pounded with anticipation as she saw that there was a Staveley Avenue. More than that, there was a railway crossing on it. Was it possible that this key meant 104 Staveley Avenue, not a locker in the train station?

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