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Amber saw Simon swallow back abrief look of anger.
“Amber, I’m sorry. I think all ofthis might be my fault.”
“Your fault?” Amber said, notunderstanding.
“Like I said, I helped to put Colmaway last time. He might only be targeting you because you’re my partner.”
“Or he might have seen me in thenews and decided that I was the kind of opponent he could play a game against,”Amber pointed out.
“Well, then, if I hadn’t broughtyou in on that first case…”
“Then a lot of killers would stillbe out on the street,” Amber countered. “Simon, we have to live in the here andnow.”
Something about those wordsresonated somewhere inside her mind. The here and now. It was relevant,somehow. Not to Colm O’Rafferty, but to their actual case.
“Simon, the code. The killer leftit, presumably hoping that someone would read it. So the key to it couldn’t besomething too obscure, right? Something that would be easy for the local PD tocheck.”
“I… guess so.” Simon was probablyused to Amber changing direction at breakneck speed by now when an answerstarted to come to her, but even so, he sounded hesitant.
“So what’s readily available?”Amber asked. She used her laptop to check the local newspaper, seeing if it hadan astrology section. It did, with a series of symbols across the top of thepage that presumably represented the situation of the planets on thatparticular day. Only it wasn’t that day she wanted, was it? It took her amoment to look back through the newspaper’s archives, looking for the day whenAlice Chan had been killed.
She took the set of symbols fromthat day and tried plugging it into the cipher as a key. For a moment, itdidn’t seem to work well, but then Amber realized that the cipher was shiftingalong a sequence of symbols each time one was used. Slowly, in her head, themeaning of the cipher started to come into focus.
“I’ll take the warrior Aries next,and none of you can stop me. I stopped before, but I won’t stop now. The starsdemand it.”
There it was, the real meaning ofthe text, or at least most of it. The wheel below the text still made no senseto Amber.
“So, this guy is planning to killsomeone who’s an Aries next?” Simon said.
“And presumably someone who livesup to the warrior type that an Aries is meant to be,” Amber agreed.
The only problem with that was thatit was so vague that it didn’t really narrow down the population of potentialvictims. Maybe that was what the wheel below was for, but if so, Amber didn’tunderstand. For the moment, at least, she pushed thoughts of Colm O’Raffertyfrom her mind. Another killer had declared who his next victim was going to be,and Amber needed to work out who before they ran out of time.
CHAPTER TEN
Colm O’Rafferty had decided themoment when the game would end, now. He’d decided how it would all play out,and no one would stop him. Not the FBI, not the Marshals Service, and not AmberYoung.
He sighed as he sat in anothersafehouse. He’d changed the location of his again after killing Sinead Ballor,just to make sure that there would be no way to trace his movements back tohim. Especially now that he’d shown his face to the authorities, he expectedthem to expend every effort to capture him.
They wouldn’t, of course, and thatwas both a point of pride for Colm and… honestly, a little disappointing. Hecraved challenges. He craved opponents who were worthy of him. Of course, hewasn’t stupid enough to want opponents who were better than him, becauseultimately, he wanted to win, but he wanted them to come close enough that hehad to express the full range of his intelligence to beat them.
Sinead Ballor had been adisappointment in that regard. She was supposed to be a skilled puzzler, almostas good as Amber Young herself, but she’d fallen foul of the simplest of trapswhen Colm had put her under pressure. She hadn’t worked out his modificationsto Amber’s puzzle box design, and the mistake had cost her life. Still, atleast she’d gotten some of the way through it, and that had been satisfying, asfar as it went. Almost as satisfying as watching the light fade from her eyesas she died.
Colm paced the interior of theabandoned space he’d turned into his current home. He had a number of computerscreens set up there. Some were for simple things: puzzles that were meant tobe too difficult for most people to handle, a half dozen games of chess whereColm’s opponents were slowly falling into the traps he’d set.
Others were for watching. He waswatching Agent Mallory blunder around, trying to protect everyone Amber caredabout. He was watching the people hunting for him. Above all, he was watchingAmber’s progress.
Colm wasn’t sure what to make ofAmber now. When he'd first seen her name and her picture, he'd felt hope forthe first time in a long time that he might finally have found someone whomight be able to keep up with him, who might even be able to put him on theback foot in the game for a while before he crushed them.
Instead, she’d been too slow atevery turn. Too slow to work out that her precious diary had been taken. Tooslow to work out his clues, so that she wasn’t in time to save her friend, heraunt, her competitor. Had Colm chosen so poorly in his choice of sparringpartners?
Colm moved over to one of thecomputers, putting the final coup de grace to one of his opponents when theyfinally made a move in one of the chess games. He went from the screens to astack of books, picking one at random. It didn’t matter which one. Allknowledge fit together eventually.
Colm left his current hiding place,stepping out into the town of Keystone. He wondered if Amber knew who he was,yet. If she would recognize him even if he walked right up to her and spoke toher. The thought of that was almost amusing, so Colm started to make his waythrough the streets, keeping a cap pulled down over his face, his head down andhis shoulders hunched under a surplus army jacket. It wasn’t the kind of thinghe would normally have worn, but then, that was the point.
Colm headed over to Amber’s currentlocation, a restaurant where she was spending time with her partner, AgentPhelps. Just the thought of that man made a hint of anger stir in Colm’s chest,but Colm set it aside for now. For him, anger was like any other emotion: atool to be used, not something that ruled him the way it ruled lesser people.
And they were lesser. All ofthem, even Amber.
