Page 45 of Absent Reason

There was no answer from the darkness.

"You made a Gordian knot of a problem so tangled that no one would ever unpick it."

Amber let that sink in for a moment or two before she delivered the second part of it.

"Of course, thepointof the legend of the Gordian knot was that Alexander the Great cut through it rather than trying to unpick it," Amber said.

There was still no answer from the darkness, but Amber could guess at what the killer was feeling. He would be apprehensive now, uncertain of what she was planning next. Perhaps he even had some inkling that his own arrogance had been his downfall, that he had underestimated her just as he had underestimated the other women he had killed.

It was time to make her move. Amber walked over to the boat, untying it from the bank. She had no experience rowing, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that Amber could make it back across the river without ever setting foot on the sixth bridge again. She could get herself into a position where she could simply walk over to the seventh bridge and cross it, solving the puzzle as the killer had set it.

Amber paused before she entered the boat. She could do that. She could solve the puzzle easily.

"You didn't set your parameters clearly enough," she said. "This is the real world, not a logic problem. If you don't exclude it, then there's nothing to stop me taking a boat back across the river, or swimming, or having someone set up an extra rope bridge to cross back and get back to the seventh bridge."

Amber could have done any of those things. She could get in the boat, even now, and start to row. She felt a surge of almost savage triumph at that thought. At the idea that she could solve a seemingly impossible problem.

But she hesitated. Amber wasn't just a puzzler anymore. She was an FBI agent. The puzzle she had to solve herewasn'tthe Konigsberg bridge problem. It was the question of who had killed three women and had tried to kill a fourth.

Amber's original intention had been to make the killer angry by using the boat to solve the problem, breaking his problem the way Victoria Crossing had, turning herself into a target he couldn't ignore.

Now, though, Amber found herself wondering if the killer would do that or if he would decide to run when it was clear that he wasn't going to win. He certainly wouldn't quietly give himself up, not when he would feel that Amber had cheated against the intent of the problem, if not against the letter of it as the killer had set it. He hadn't said that Amber could only walk between bridges. He hadn't said that she couldn't take a boat or that she had to avoid getting wet. The letter of his version of the puzzle allowed this, and there was no doubt that rowing across would do that.

But Amber had already made him angry the moment that she told him what she'd been planning. Rowing across wasn't the way to do this, now.

Amber tied up the boat again instead.

"You aren't very good at setting problems," Amber said. "Agoodpuzzle should have a solution. It should be a conversation between the person setting it and the person solving it. When you try to set an impossible problem and pretend it's real, it's just you shouting over them because you know you don't have what it takes to talk properly."

Amber made her way back up the bank to the edge of the bridge. She knew that there wouldn't be any backup coming for her, not now. She'd left Simon behind, and the undercover cops near the bridges would have cleared out once they spotted Nicole.

It was just her up there. Her and the killer.

"An impossible math problem might be beautiful if you're honest about it," Amber said. "It might tell you something about the world, about whatispossible. But you didn't do that, did you? You passed one off as a real puzzle because you're so insecure that you couldn't back yourself to come up with a genuine puzzle that your victims couldn't solve. Deep down, you knew that you weren't good enough. That they were all better than you. That I'm better than you."

Amber was trying to keep the killer's attention now, trying to make sure that he wouldn't run, that he would do anything to make sure that Amber died at the end of this.

"I could have solved your puzzle," Amber said. "You were sloppy, but I'll play this fair, even if you aren't. I'll stick to the rules of theoriginalproblem. So now, I've crossed six bridges, and there's only one way for me to get back to the seventh."

One way, one that broke the rules. One that meant that the killer would try to claim Amber's life. But Amber was an FBI agent, and the goal here was to catch a killer. This was the best way to do it.

She stepped back out onto the sixth bridge in the sequence and started to walk.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Amber had to force herself not to draw her gun as she walked. She couldn't afford to spook him, couldn't afford to send him running away into the dark. She needed him to come to her, needed him to strike.

Amber continued to pad forward, resisting the urge to look around at every shadow. She knew that the killer was out there somewhere, watching her every move. Her heart was pounding in her chest, but she kept her cool. She had to stay calm and focused if she was going to catch him.

The hardest part was forcing herself not to look around. This was a killer who liked to strike by surprise, getting a noose around the necks of his victims and strangling them. If Amber was too wary, he wouldn't see his chance; he wouldn't attack her.

She needed him to attack her.

"Why do all of this?" Amber called out into the darkness. "Just because Victoria Crossing solved your puzzle?"

There was still no response from the killer, but Amber could feel his presence looming closer. She kept walking, every step bringing her closer to the seventh bridge and the end of this deadly game.

"You're a sadistic coward," Amber said, her voice ringing out in the quiet night. "You hide in the shadows, preying on women who are smarter than you. And you can't even face me like a man."

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