Page 25 of Absent Feeling

Hewas obviously expecting more from them than that, expecting them to be able towork out a way into this based on the scene.

Amberwent over to the inkblot card, picking it up carefully by the edges so that shecould look at it more closely. She felt certain that this held the answers shewas looking for. She just couldn’t see how, right then.

“Isthere any disturbance elsewhere in the house?” Simon asked.

“Thelock on the kitchen door was picked, but other than that, he didn’t leave anytrace of himself. He seems to have entered quietly, talked to the victim, andthen attacked her.”

Suggestingthat he’d planned all of it carefully. Amber found her gaze being drawn back tothe bloodstain. She could see the smears on the carpet now, showing where thekiller had carefully rearranged the design there.

“Amber?”Simon said, but Amber was too busy looking at it. “Amber? I think we’ve seeeverything that we need to see here.”

Hewas obviously giving her an excuse to get away from the bloodstain. Amber wasonly too happy to do so, moving back out into the hall. The only question now washow they proceeded from here? There had been another murder, but did it givethem anything new?

Amberrealized that she was still holding the inkblot card. She felt certain now thatit was the key to all of this, but she still wasn’t sure what it meant.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Asshe tried to look over the files on the case again, Amber was all too aware ofthe time pressure on both her and Simon. The murderer behind this had killedthree times in three days. Who was to say that he wasn’t already plotting afourth kill? It was a race now to get ahead of him.

Sheand Simon sat in the offices of the local PD, with Simon sitting across fromher, obviously trying to do more research. Amber hoped that he was getting morefrom his side of things than she was managing just looking at the files.

Allthose told Amber was that the three kills were all almost identical. They allfeatured multiple stab wounds, all with the same pattern left in the blood atthe same, all with the same inkblot pattern left near the corpse.

“I’vebeen looking at Ysabel Jones,” Simon said. “It looks as though Detective Heartwas right: she’s spent her entire career since college as a psychiatric nurse,working for various different agencies.”

“Butcan we say for sure if she worked with Raymond and David?” Amber asked.

Simonshook his head. “It’s hard to say. I’ve sent an email to the Guisborough WellnessInstitute to check if anyone remembers her working there, but even if they do,will that prove that she worked alongside the other two victims? She couldeasily have worked over in another section of it.”

“Whichwould mean a killer just targeting all the staff there, rather than people associatedwith one particular patient or event?” Amber guessed. It would mean that anyonethere could be a target, and that the killer might keep striking again andagain until he was stopped.

“Exactly,”Simon said. “The ideal situation for the investigation would be if this is allconnected to one specific event.”

“Becausewe can trace whoever was involved in that, and it will either give us the nextvictim or the identity of the killer.” Amber understood that part.

“There’sonly one potential problem. If the killer has a list of victims he’s trying towork through, then there’s a risk that when he finishes that list, he’lldisappear.”

Amberwasn’t sure if that was a problem if it meant that no one else would die. Shewas determined that they would find whoever was behind this, even if he triedto run. Of course, either way, there was no reason to think that the killer wasdone yet.

“Wehave to assume that he’s going to kill again, though,” Amber said. “And soon.If he keeps to the pattern of one person a day …”

“Thenhe could already be stalking his next target,” Simon finished. “I know. Theproblem we have now is that this latest death doesn’t give us anything new. We’vealready looked at the Guisborough Wellness Institute and already talked to themost likely suspect from there.”

Amberknew that, which was why she wanted to take a different approach. She took outthe inkblot that she’d taken from the latest crime scene, staring at it, andstarting to search once again for any example online that might be the same.

She’dfound before, though, that there weren’t any examples that matched it exactly.

“Whatare you doing, Amber?” Simon asked her.

“I’mtrying to look deeper into this inkblot pattern,” Amber explained.

“TheRorschach card?”

“That’sthe thing,” Amber said. “It’snotone of the standard Rorschachpatterns. There are ten of those, and this is something else. I’m searching forother examples of inkblot patterns, trying to find anything that matches incase it tells us where the killer might have found the pattern.”

“So,you don’t think it’s just a random pattern?”

Ambershook her head. That was the one thing that she was certain of in all of this. “It’sthe same pattern at all three scenes, and he’s gone to the trouble of manipulatingthe blood spatter at the scenes into the same shape. It’s important to him.He’s trying to tell us something.”

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