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Then Victoria pushed that fear aside with a laugh.
"Nice try," she said aloud, just in case whichever of her friends was trying to prank her was listening in, waiting for a reaction. "But I know an impossible math problem when I see one."
This was clearly someone's idea of a sick joke. In the middle of a situation like this, take a very old, very well-known problem, then see if they could trick Victoria into walking out onto all the town's bridges while she was scared for her life that there was a killer out there. Probably, they would video the whole thing and put it up online just to enjoy Victoria's discomfort. Probably, they were laughing at her right now.
A part of her wondered who among the people she knew would do something like this. Under the circumstances, it wasn't funny trying to dare her to go walking the bridges at night. It wasn’t the kind of thing Victoria thought that most of her friends would ever do. Only the part where they'd picked such an obviously wrong problem made it slightly funnier. That, and the fact that Victoria so obviously didn't match up with the two young women who'd died, made it clear that whoever was trying to prank her with this hadn't done a very good job.
Victoria stuffed the envelope into a drawer. Maybe she'd hang onto it until she found out exactly who had sent the thing, then decide what she wanted to do about it. Maybe she’d pin it up where people could see it in a couple of days or make a post of her own pointing out just how stupid the attempt had been.
For now, though, she wasn't going anywhere. Victoria picked out a book from her ever-expanding to-be-read pile and settled in, determined to ignore her so-called friends' idea of a practical joke.
CHAPTER NINE
Amber was cramming. She tried to learn as much as she could about Verdice's bridges as quickly as she could, getting all the information she could find, treating it the way she would have if she were planning to put together quiz questions about them or if she thought that the subject might come up in some kind of puzzle competition.
It was nice to be able to use her research skills to do something on this case, at last. To have the feeling that the skills she’d built up might make a difference. The more Amber could learn, the more she hoped that it might help her to find a way to understand what the killer was focused on here.
So she learned. She learned that the earliest had been built a couple of hundred years ago, before even the rest of the town, while the most recent had been completed just a decade back to try to ease traffic through the heart of the town. She learned about the large local manufacturing plant that had funded one of the bridges in the early twentieth century before going bust and about the time an eighth bridge had collapsed, sometime in the sixties.
She looked at the bridges on a map, trying to see if there was any obvious reason why the killer might have murdered Mia on one bridge and Kelly on another. It suggested that this wasn’t about an obsession with a single bridge. She briefly entertained the idea that maybe the killer might be working his way around the bridges of the town in some kind of sequence, but it clearly wasn't geographical since the two bridges were nowhere near one another. Amber didn't think that it was chronological either, based on her research, since the first bridge had been the newest one and the second was among the older ones.
Amber kept checking for possible patterns, for any information when it came to the bridges that might help her make sense of these crimes. If she could find a pattern, then she might be able to work out where the killer was going to strike next.
But no matter how hard she looked, she couldn't find any connections between the bridges or any reason why the killer might have chosen those two specific locations. So far, nothing seemed to be adding up. She knew that the killer had to have some kind of connection to the bridges; otherwise, why choose them as the locations for the murders? But what that connection was, she couldn't say.
As she scrolled through her research notes, only one thing stood out to Amber. Both bridges had been relatively isolated at the time of the murders. Mia's murder had taken place early in the morning when few people would have been around. Kelly's murder had also taken place at a time when the bridge was deserted. That didn't help to establish a pattern, though. It only pointed to a careful killer who didn't want to be disturbed while he went about his work. One who was careful.
Did that mean that they could stop the murders just by having police officers guard all of the town's bridges until they were able to locate the killer? Amber wasn't convinced that was anything more than a temporary solution. There was too much of a risk that the killer would simply wait them out if he saw the police in place. The police couldn't guard the bridges forever, so if the killer simply waited until they went back to their normal duties, he would be free to kill again. It might stop the killings for a while, but it didn’t help them to catch whoever was doing this.
There was also a risk that stopping him from using the bridges would simply drive him to kill elsewhere. Serial killers like to stick to their patterns, but shutting down the preferred pattern wouldn’t necessarily stop the killing. Forcing one to break his might produce an even worse killing spree, one that might cost more lives.
Amber leaned back, trying to think of the best way to proceed with all of this. As she thought, it occurred to her that she hadn't heard anything about Joseph since she'd arrived. Was he okay? His sister had said that she would call if there was any news, but maybe Amber should check-in.
Did she want to check in? What if it was bad news? What if he'd been hurt worse than they all thought because of her?
Amber knew that she couldn’t think like that. She put in a call to Joseph's phone. She wasn't entirely surprised when she heard Denise's voice on the other end of the line rather than Joseph’s.
"Hello? Amber?"
"That's right," Amber said. She braced herself for what she might hear next. "Are you still there with Joseph?"
She had to be if she was answering his phone, but that meant that she'd been there with her brother for hours, sitting by his bedside, waiting for him to wake up. It meant that Joseph was still hurt enough that he couldn’t answer the phone.
It was where Amber suspected that she should have been, but she couldn't, not when there was a murderer there.
"I've been here off and on since I saw you earlier," Denise said. There was no note of accusation in her voice, but Amber suspected that there should have been.
"How is he?" Amber asked, afraid as she asked it of what the answer might be.
"No change. The doctors say that they've reduced the sedation and that he should wake up naturally at some point, but he hasn't shown any sign of doing it yet."
Amber's worry only grew. Joseph hadn't woken up yet? The doctors had said that he would, but what if he didn't? What if Amber was over here in Verdice, chasing a killer, and Joseph died while she was gone? Would Amber be able to live with herself if that happened?
"I... I should get back there," Amber said. It was an offer rather than a declaration of what she was going to do. She needed to know if she was wanted there.
"Aren't you in the middle of a case?" Denise asked a worried note in her voice.
"Yes. There's a serial killer, and-"
