Page 31 of Absent Reason

It was easy to see the signs that the police and the forensic units had been there. The main room had clearly been searched thoroughly, but that had been for anything the killer might have left behind. If there had been forensic traces, they would have found them, but Amber was looking for something... else. She just wasn't sure what yet.

She had to force herself not to think about the fact that a woman had died in this room, that a sadistic killer had hanged Victoria Crossing here.

Amber had to push those thoughts away. It was important to have sympathy for the victim, but thebestthing that Amber could do for her was to stay objective and find the person who had done this. That meant not giving in to the horror she felt about the death here. It meant searching carefully, without emotion.

She tried to see everything with fresh eyes, looking for any signs of anything related to the Konigsberg bridge problem. Her eyes fell on a bookshelf in the corner of the room, and she walked over to take a closer look. There were a few books on mathematics, but nothing that stood out to her. When Amber checked the indexes, she couldn't find any mention of it in there.

But then, why would there be? This was just a hunch based on the combination of the bridges, the shape of the town, and the link to the mathematics department. And if it had anything to do with this case, it would be the killer with an obsession, not the victims. She needed far more than that to go on, though.

Amber continued to make her way through the apartment, trying to think. If there were anything related to the bridge problem, it would be from the killer, and the only circumstance in which he might send his victims something like that was if he were making a threat or... maybe setting a problem?

If that were the case, though, why hadn't anything related to the bridge problem been found on the other victims?

Maybe Amber was reaching too much here with this conjecture. She had no reason to suspect that the killer had sent his victims anything, let alone something about the bridge problem.

But what if he had? What would it look like if the killer had sent the victims something?

If so, then the fact that there was nothing found on the other victims meant that the killer had to have removed anything he'd sent.

So now, Amber was using the absence of evidence as evidence?

She knew how far down the rabbit hole she was going with this chain of reasoning, but she still found herself following the train of thought all the way to the end. Her only chance of finding anything was if all of this was true and if the killer somehow hadn't been able to remove what he'd sent this time.

What would Amber do if she'd been sent something odd? What would she do if a killer sent her a threat or a warning, something like that? She would either throw it away because she didn’t think it was real, call the cops or put it somewhere safe for later.

Amber knew that there hadn't been a call to the cops, or the Verdice PD would already have flagged it. Amber checked the trash, but it was completely empty. Obviously, forensics had already been through it just to make sure that there was nothing there to find.

Where did that leave?

Amber started to look around the apartment, this time looking for anything hidden, anything the killer wouldn't have been able to find in a hurry.

At the same time, she knew that she was grasping at straws with this. There was no reason to think that the killer had left anything or that he wouldn't have taken it with him if he had.

Even so, Amber made her way through to what must have been Victoria's bedroom. The room was tidy, with a neatly made bed and a small bedside table. Amber walked over to it and tried the drawer, but it was locked.

Amber focused on it automatically. A locked drawer was interesting. Amber had to find a way to get it open.

She scanned the room for something she could use to pick the lock but came up empty. Then her eyes landed on a nearby lamp. With a quick glance around the room, Amber grabbed the lamp and started to strike the locked drawer with the base.

"Amber?"

"In here," Amber said, continuing to attack the drawer with the lamp.

Simon came in and looked at her with horror.

"Amber, what are you doing?"

"I... it would take too long to explain."

Plus, she wasn't convinced that shecouldexplain it in a way that made any sense. She'd stacked conjecture atop conjecture, and now it led here to a point where she was breaking a murder victim's bedside table with a lamp. She could say that she was searching every corner of the apartment in general, but this was several steps beyond that.

"Amber-"

The lock gave way, even as Simon said it, and Amber opened the drawer, finding nothing but some old receipts and a couple of hair ties. For a moment, Amber froze, realizing everything that she'd just done. She'd made assumptions, leaped to conclusions, and now there was nothing here.

“Amber, what are you doing?” Simon asked.

Amber still wasn’t sure that she could explain. She was about to close the drawer again when something caught her eye - a corner of a piece of paper sticking out from beneath the hair ties.

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