Absent Feeling, page 9
There didn’t seem to be any meaning, though, except to draw her onward through the corridors in a trail of dangling inkblots that served as signposts. Amber could feel her excitement building now because she’d worked it out. All she had to do was follow those inkblots, and they would lead her straight to the killer.
Amber was running now, following the inkblots at speed, determined not to lose her chance to catch the killer. It didn’t matter to her now that Simon wasn’t there because she had all the training that she required to take down a bad guy.
Amber kept running until she came to a room with paper walls, each one daubed with a different inkblot. Amber looked around, trying to make sense of it all, then she saw the one that she was looking for: the same inkblot that she’d been following all this way. It was spread out, larger than she was, across one paper wall.
Amber walked up to it, putting her hand against it, feeling it there, throbbing like something almost alive, the pulse of a heartbeat seeming to run through it. Amber closed her fingers around the paper, tearing it away, determined to get at whatever lay beyond.
There was another room there, and in it was a man with no face. He stood there, larger than Amber, his blank features seeming to stare at her in spite of him having no eyes. He had no mouth, but still, Amber heard him laughing at her.
There was a knife in his hand. He started towards Amber, and now she was running back through the maze of paper walls, while the thudding of her own heartbeat increased until it was as loud as a drum …
Amber woke then, gasping for air and sweating. It took her a moment to remember that she was in a motel room somewhere in Guisborough, partway through a case with Simon. It took her a moment longer to realize that the thudding sound she could hear wasn’t her heartbeat. Instead, someone was knocking on the door to her room.
“Amber, it’s me! Open up!” Simon called out through the door.
“Hold on, I’m coming.” Amber grabbed her clothes and dressed as quickly as she could, then hurried to the door.
Amber threw the door open, giving Simon a questioning look. Even as she did so, Amber could feel a sense of dread rising in her. There was something in Simon’s expression that told her that this was serious, and Amber couldn’t think of many reasons why he would wake her up like this with so much urgency.
Even so, she had to hear it from him.
“What is it, Simon?” she asked. “What’s so urgent?”
Simon’s expression was grave. “There’s been another murder. Local PD are waiting for us at the scene.”
*
Amber felt a little sick as she and Simon pulled up in front of a quiet, little, suburban house. She’d wanted to keep going last night. She’d wanted to keep working, to try to find an answer.
“If we’d kept working, this might not have happened,” Amber said, unable to keep the guilt she felt at that out of her voice.
“You can’t think like that, Amber,” Simon said, although Amber thought that she could detect a flicker of the same emotion in his voice. “If we’d kept going, there’s no guarantee that we would have found anything, or that we could have stopped this. Blame the killer, not yourself.”
That was easier said than done, especially as the two of them went to run the gauntlet of the press that was there to cover the latest murder.
“Could the FBI have done more to stop this from happening?” a reporter called out to them as they pushed their way through.
“Why haven’t you made any progress so far?” another shouted.
“What are you doing to keep the people of Guisborough safe?”
It was all Amber could do to keep from replying. She felt … well, she felt as though she and Simon should have done something by now, should have been able to stop this from happening. She felt as though there was something there that she should have been able to work out by now, something that might have let them catch the killer already and that might have saved the life of this latest victim.
Simon’s hand on her shoulder kept Amber moving forward, though, up to a line of police tape and beyond it. Detective Heart was waiting for them there, not looking happy about the situation.
“What do we have?” Simon asked.
“The victim’s name is Ysabel Jones,” the detective said, motioning for them to follow him inside. “Thirty years old, worked for an agency supplying nursing staff to psychiatric institutions.”
“The Guisborough Wellness Institute?” Amber asked because the link seemed too obvious to ignore.
“We don’t know yet,” the detective said. “With agency staff, it can be hard to keep track of where they have and haven’t worked.”
“Is the coroner here?” Simon asked.
“Been and gone with the body,” Detective Heart replied. “Says that we’ll have to wait for the autopsy for the official cause of death, but that it looks the same as the others. Multiple stab wounds inflicted from the front along with several defensive wounds to the hands and arms.”
That part intrigued Amber because it implied that Ysabel Jones had seen her attacker coming. Why had the killer done this that way? Why hadn’t he ambushed her and stabbed her without giving her the chance to fight back or run?
“Did he want to speak to her?” Amber wondered aloud. “Is there some personal motive to this that means he wants to threaten his victims before he kills them or wants some kind of information from them?”
“We can’t know that for sure,” Simon said. “Although it’s intriguing that he attacked them from the front, as if he wanted to make sure that they saw him coming.”
“Who cares about why he’s doing this?” Detective Heart demanded. “What matters is that we find a way to stop him. That you find a way to stop him. Isn’t that the point of the FBI being here?”
Amber could hear the bitterness in his voice. He obviously thought that she and Simon weren’t doing everything that they should be in order to crack this case.
“Show us the crime scene,” Simon said, firmly. He clearly didn’t want to have a whole conversation about the FBI’s role there and whether they were doing everything they could.
Detective Heart looked as though he might say something else, but instead he nodded and gestured for them to go through into a living room whose furniture was overturned with the force of the fight that had been there. There was white carpet on the floor. At least, it had been white, but now, blood spread out across it in a pattern that Amber knew all too well.
It was the same as the inkblots that had been left at each of the crime scenes.
Amber had a moment to take in the shape of it before the full horror of all that blood hit her. All of that blood had spilled from a woman’s body as someone murdered her. It was a sign of the pain and violence that had been inflicted in this place. She had to fight against that horror, trying not to be overwhelmed by it.
A Rorschach card sat in the middle of that pool of blood, the same pattern on it, as if the killer didn’t trust just the pool of blood to get it across. Amber felt sure, once again, that the design was significant to the killer in some way, because otherwise, why wouldn’t he just use the ten standard Rorschach designs?
“Have the forensic teams managed to pull any DNA or fingerprints from the scene?” Simon asked.
Detective Heart shook his head. “If it were that easy, we’d already be going to pick up the killer.”
He was obviously expecting more from them than that, expecting them to be able to work out a way into this based on the scene.
Amber went over to the inkblot card, picking it up carefully by the edges so that she could look at it more closely. She felt certain that this held the answers she was looking for. She just couldn’t see how, right then.
“Is there any disturbance elsewhere in the house?” Simon asked.
“The lock on the kitchen door was picked, but other than that, he didn’t leave any trace of himself. He seems to have entered quietly, talked to the victim, and then attacked her.”
Suggesting that he’d planned all of it carefully. Amber found her gaze being drawn back to the bloodstain. She could see the smears on the carpet now, showing where the killer had carefully rearranged the design there.
“Amber?” Simon said, but Amber was too busy looking at it. “Amber? I think we’ve see everything that we need to see here.”
He was obviously giving her an excuse to get away from the bloodstain. Amber was only too happy to do so, moving back out into the hall. The only question now was how they proceeded from here? There had been another murder, but did it give them anything new?
Amber realized that she was still holding the inkblot card. She felt certain now that it was the key to all of this, but she still wasn’t sure what it meant.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
As she tried to look over the files on the case again, Amber was all too aware of the time pressure on both her and Simon. The murderer behind this had killed three times in three days. Who was to say that he wasn’t already plotting a fourth kill? It was a race now to get ahead of him.
She and Simon sat in the offices of the local PD, with Simon sitting across from her, obviously trying to do more research. Amber hoped that he was getting more from his side of things than she was managing just looking at the files.
All those told Amber was that the three kills were all almost identical. They all featured multiple stab wounds, all with the same pattern left in the blood at the same, all with the same inkblot pattern left near the corpse.
“I’ve been looking at Ysabel Jones,” Simon said. “It looks as though Detective Heart was right: she’s spent her entire career since college as a psychiatric nurse, working for various different agencies.”
“But can we say for sure if she worked with Raymond and David?” Amber asked.
Simon shook his head. “It’s hard to say. I’ve sent an email to the Guisborough Wellness Institute 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 could easily have worked over in another section of it.”
“Which would mean a killer just targeting all the staff there, rather than people associated with one particular patient or event?” Amber guessed. It would mean that anyone there could be a target, and that the killer might keep striking again and again until he was stopped.
“Exactly,” Simon said. “The ideal situation for the investigation would be if this is all connected to one specific event.”
“Because we can trace whoever was involved in that, and it will either give us the next victim or the identity of the killer.” Amber understood that part.
“There’s only one potential problem. If the killer has a list of victims he’s trying to work through, then there’s a risk that when he finishes that list, he’ll disappear.”
Amber wasn’t sure if that was a problem if it meant that no one else would die. She was determined that they would find whoever was behind this, even if he tried to run. Of course, either way, there was no reason to think that the killer was done yet.
“We have 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 …”
“Then he could already be stalking his next target,” Simon finished. “I know. The problem we have now is that this latest death doesn’t give us anything new. We’ve already looked at the Guisborough Wellness Institute and already talked to the most likely suspect from there.”
Amber knew that, which was why she wanted to take a different approach. She took out the inkblot that she’d taken from the latest crime scene, staring at it, and starting to search once again for any example online that might be the same.
She’d found before, though, that there weren’t any examples that matched it exactly.
“What are you doing, Amber?” Simon asked her.
“I’m trying to look deeper into this inkblot pattern,” Amber explained.
“The Rorschach card?”
“That’s the thing,” Amber said. “It’s not one of the standard Rorschach patterns. There are ten of those, and this is something else. I’m searching for other examples of inkblot patterns, trying to find anything that matches in case it tells us where the killer might have found the pattern.”
“So, you don’t think it’s just a random pattern?”
Amber shook her head. That was the one thing that she was certain of in all of this. “It’s the same pattern at all three scenes, and he’s gone to the trouble of manipulating the blood spatter at the scenes into the same shape. It’s important to him. He’s trying to tell us something.”
Amber could see Simon looking up the standard Rorschach cards.
“The pattern is similar to card six,” Simon pointed out.
Amber took a look, just to see if she’d made a mistake when she was looking through the Rorschach designs. She could kind of see why Simon thought the two were similar, but to her, there were significant differences.
“They’re not quite the same,” she pointed out. “The shape isn’t identical, and it’s one of the designs that is all in black and grey, whereas the killer’s card is red.”
“Maybe that’s just to mirror the blood,” Simon suggested. “I still think it’s close enough that we need to consider the possibility that he’s just working from this existing design.”
Amber wasn’t convinced, though. She went back to focusing on the inkblot design. There was something about its shape that seemed very deliberate, very precise.
“What I don’t get,” Simon said, “is how he’s so precise about everything in these crimes, but the actual method of killing is so violent.”
“What do you mean?” Amber asked. She was only half focusing on what Simon was saying now. Instead, she found herself thinking about the design of the inkblot. Assume for a second that it was deliberate, then the pattern had to be important to the killer, right?
“This is a killer who breaks in quietly, who watches his victims, who doesn’t leave a trace behind.” Simon sounded almost impressed by the level of skill that the killer had shown in that. “Most killers make mistakes, but with this one … it’s like he planned all of this for a long time beforehand.”
“So, this is someone meticulous,” Amber said. The killer certainly seemed to be meticulous about the patterns he left at the scene. What could the pattern of the inkblot be? What could it represent? Amber screwed her eyes up, trying to work out what she could see in the pattern, looking at it the way that someone might have looked at a normal Rorschach test.
“Except at the moment when he kills,” Simon said. “Then there’s something brutal and violent about it, like he isn’t in control anymore.”
“So, he reaches that moment and then he snaps.”
“But that’s just it,” Simon said. “He must know that’s going to happen. He goes into the houses of these people, he confronts them, and something about that confrontation means that he goes berserk, stabbing them again and again. Then, in the aftermath, he’s calm again, able to arrange the scene exactly the way he … Amber, are you listening to me?”
Amber nodded. “It’s a killer who’s meticulous but then goes wild.”
“Are you still looking at inkblot patterns?” Simon demanded.
“At the killer’s inkblot pattern. Something he designed to be exactly this shape. I’m sure that’s the puzzle at the heart of all of this, and if I just—”
“Amber, what if there isn’t a puzzle?” Simon asked it quietly, but his voice was firm.
That made Amber frown in puzzlement for a moment or two. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that not everything is a puzzle. I mean that you’ve latched onto that pattern because you’re convinced that it holds the key to all of this, but what are you expecting from it? That the killer has worked his identity into it somehow?”
“At the very least, it means something to him,” Amber insisted.
She saw Simon nod from the other side of the table. “But that’s the problem with a Rorschach pattern: everyone sees something different in it. What you see in it won’t be what I see, and it definitely won’t be what some insane killer sees.”
“What if there’s more to it than that?” Amber asked. “What if he’s put something in here for people to find? What if it is a puzzle?”
Simon looked sympathetic, but even so, he reached out to take the inkblot from Amber. “Not everything is a puzzle, Amber. Not every case we work will have some grand, interlocking puzzle at its heart.”
“Then what’s the point of me even being here?” Amber asked. She’d asked it before, but she still didn’t feel certain about the answer. As far as she could see, her presence there was only useful because she was better at solving puzzles and codes than most people. Wasn’t that the reason she was there as a consultant.
“Amber, you’re not just here for that,” Simon said. “I told you before, it’s about the way you’re able to look at the evidence to see something new.”
“So let me look at this piece of evidence,” Amber said.
Simon shook his head, though. “We need to widen our focus. This has to do with something psychological, not a puzzle. Maybe we need to widen our search parameters when it comes to the patients of the Guisborough Wellness Institute.”
“Now who’s going over the same thing as before?”
Amber needed some air. She’d worked well alongside Simon previously, but now it felt as if he was shutting her down by not letting her pursue the approach that all her instincts insisted was the right one. She got up.
“Look, I’ll be back in a couple of minutes,” she said.
“Amber, we need to focus.”
“And I need to clear my head. Just … give me a minute, Simon.”
Amber got up and headed for the door. The worst part was that she couldn’t go all the way outside because the press were out there, waiting for anything that they could glean about the investigation. She had to settle for standing in a corridor instead, taking a few deep breaths as she tried to get herself back in the game.
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