Page 49 of Absent Remorse

Amber should have waited then. She should have backed off and sat there until backup arrived. UntilSimonarrived. She should have done that, but instead, she pushed forward. She needed more; she needed to see the answer to all of this.

Amber went inside, her hand closing around the gun Simon had given her. She pushed open the door and stepped into a large workshop space that was half dark thanks to the covered windows. There were machines for working wood and metal there, with pieces of puzzles spread out over benches near them. There was an office space towards the back and through an open door, Amber could see an unmade bed, suggesting someone had been sleeping there. On a bench near the middle of the room, Amber could see a series of knives set out in a row, each one with a familiar elaborate handle.

Even as Amber looked around, a man stepped into view. He was middle aged and bulky, with greasy, dark hair and jowly features. He was dressed in dark clothes that did nothing to mask how pale and unathletic he looked. The moment Amber saw him, she knew that this was the killer.

“You found me,” he said. “You solved my puzzle. Who are you?”

“My name is Amber Young,” Amber said. She drew the gun Simon had given to her, covering him the way she’d been trained to back at Quantico when she’d been learning how to arrest suspects. “And you’re the man who has killed four people. What’s your name?”

“Amber … yes. That fits. I’m Greg Sanderson. It was my puzzle. Did you like my puzzle, Amber?”

He said it as if they were just having a normal conversation, rather than Amber holding him at gunpoint.

“Just stand there,” Amber said. “We’re going to wait for my backup to come here.”

“Yes, yes,” Greg replied, as if that didn’t matter. “But did you like my puzzle? Was it the hardest one you’ve ever done? It was fascinating, wasn’t it? Doing a puzzle where the stakes were life and death?”

He said it as if it were all just a game, as if it didn’t matter that he’d killed four people. He was mad, utterly mad. Amber knew that made him dangerous.

“You’re under arrest,” Amber said. “Get down on the ground.”

“Were you the one who solved the layers of the puzzle for the FBI?” Greg asked. He still didn’t seem to care about the situation. “The first one, did it take you long to discover the trick to it?”

“The heat? I left a coffee cup too close to it,” Amber said. “After that, it was easy. I just had to look up the hieroglyphs online.”

“But even then, you would have to recognize that it was English, not another language, then rearrange the letter groups and find the meaning of the words, all to be able to even start finding the proper points to touch on the outer casing simultaneously. Even then, you would have had to stretch to touch all of the points at once, establishing their location from memory because you wouldn’t be able to touch the cube while it was hot enough to see them.”

He sounded so proud of it all, so convinced of his own genius. Amber wasn’t prepared to give him that, given all that he had done. He was a murderer, pure and simple. Amber wasn’t going to give him even a moment of praise for that.

“Get on the ground,” she repeated.

“But … the puzzle!” Greg insisted. He sounded hurt by it and also confused, like he couldn’t quite believe that Amber didn’t want to talk more about how his puzzle fit together.

“You’re under arrest,” Amber said. Or he would be as soon as Simon and the others arrived there.Ifthey arrived there. Had Simon even seen her message? He might still be busy interrogating Adam Trench, might not have had a chance to even look at his phone.

Amber could find herself having to hold Greg here for hours. She knew that she couldn’t just hold the gun on him. Amber looked around until she saw lengths of zip ties sitting in a box on one of the benches. Presumably the killer used them to secure parts of the puzzles he was making until he could fix them together more permanently.

“Turn around. Put your hands behind your back,” Amber said. “Do it, or I’ll fire.”

To her surprise, Greg did it this time. Amber started forward, towards the zip ties. She could use it to tie the killer up to hold him until help arrived. Perhaps, once she had him tied up, she could even call Simon and explain the situation, or simply call the cops. She would be able to keep Greg under control. She didn’t think that he was a physical threat to her, because he was so out of shape, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

“Don’t move,” Amber warned him as she headed towards him with the zip ties, the gun still clutched tightly in her right hand.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he replied. There was a strange note in his voice. Something like … triumph?

Amber had a moment to feel a rush of fear, wondering what she had missed, before she felt something snap tight around her foot, an immense force yanking her upwards.

A snare!

Amber had only the briefest moment to think that before the world fell away from her, leaving her dangling upside down.

She heard Greg laugh.

“How can you solve the hardest puzzle in the world but still fall into a simple trap?”

He turned around to her, reaching out for one of the knives on the table.

“It doesn’t matter. You still need to die.”

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