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“I have a couple of soldiers, abouncer at a club, a woman who trains out of a local boxing gym…” Simon said.“A bunch of others too. Even with such a specific date, the description is sogeneral that in any reasonably large population, it fits too many people.”
“Can we get protection for all ofthem?” Amber asked.
“I already asked Detective Arquet,”Simon said. “The best the local PD is able to do is to send squad cars by theirplaces at regular intervals to check on them. It’s not exactly the same thingas waiting there, ready to catch the killer in the act.”
It wasn’t, and that only frustratedAmber more. What was the point of the killer sending a clue like this if itwasn’t going to be enough to definitively identify the next victim?
If this had been a puzzle, Amberwould have considered it fundamentally flawed. A puzzle had only one answer, orat least a defined set of answers. It might be fiendishly difficult, but it ledin only one direction. This… this was both specific enough to raise her andSimon’s hopes and vague enough that there was no chance of finding the realanswer.
Of course, the killer wasn’tsetting a puzzle; he was simply leaving a clue to taunt and infuriate them. Itdidn’t have to be specific; it only had to make sense to him.
“Maybe we can get the local PD togo around all the potential victims we find and have them warn them to be extravigilant, to stay with people, that kind of thing?” Amber suggested. “Thekiller seems to strike when his victims are alone, so maybe we can buyourselves some time to find him.”
“Maybe,” Simon said. “I’ll askArquet to arrange it. After that, though, we should probably call it a night. Idon’t think we’re going to find any answers tonight, and it’s still an hour’sdrive back to DC.”
Amber looked out of one of thewindows of the police department, taking in the darkness beyond. She knew Simonwas right. With a case this close to DC, they hadn’t booked into a motel, so itmade sense to head back soon. Still, Amber wanted to make at least someprogress on the case before it got to that point.
“I want to try to find a new wayinto this first,” she said. “Maybe we could go take a look at Alice Chan’splace before we head back? See if there’s anything there that might point us inthe right direction?”
She saw Simon nod. “All right. Ifthey searched it, I guess the Keystone PD will have gotten a key, so I’ll driveus over.”
***
Alice Chan’s apartment wasn’t farfrom the local college, although it was off campus, as if she hadn’t wanted tobe around whatever partying and social activities were there. Amber thoughtabout the discipline it must have taken to be such a successful swimmer, butalso about how isolated living out here must have made her.
The building was an old brownstone,with metal fire escapes running up the side and a series of nameplates at thebottom next to a door buzzer. Those plates said that Alice lived in apartment3.
“This place is pretty quiet atnight, and I don’t see much in the way of security,” Simon observed as theywalked up to the door. “It would have been easy for the killer to watch AliceChan here before he made his move. It would almost have been easier for him tokill her here, too.”
“The noise might have attractedattention from her neighbors above and below,” Amber pointed out, but shesuspected that it was more than that. “Besides, the staging of the kills isobviously very important to this killer. He took the time to get Katrina andAlice into the perfect positions to reflect their star signs.”
“So he had to wait to take Alice atthe pool, because it was the best place to drown her?” Simon said. “He couldn’thave just done it in a bath in her apartment?”
“Maybe he wanted to make sure thatshe’d be found,” Amber guessed. “It seems obvious that he wants the attention.The code says that much.”
“Let’s just hope that trying tograb that kind of attention makes it easier to catch him,” Simon said.
Amber could only agree. She took amoment to look up at the stars. She had a hard time believing that such distantballs of heat and light could have any influence on the lives of people down onEarth, but it didn’t matter what she thought about astrology, only what thekiller thought. And perhaps the victims. It still seemed significant to Amberthat both victims had been, not just personifications of their star signs, butalso heavily into astrology themselves.
She and Simon headed into thebuilding, then up to Alice Chan’s floor. A small child poked his head around astairwell door, but quickly darted back as he saw them. It didn’t take long toget to apartment 3, and Amber fitted the key into the lock.
The apartment was small and neat,furnished with what looked like second-hand pieces of furniture that Amberguessed Alice had picked up when and where she could. The main living area hada threadbare rug under it, and one of the mugs on the coffee table was slightlycracked.
“I guess Alice didn’t have a lot ofmoney,” Amber said.
Simon nodded. “If she was stillmaking her name as a swimmer, she wouldn’t have made much money from it yet.She would have had to put everything into her training.”
“But she still found the money tovisit Alonzo Ruiz,” Amber pointed out. That suggested just how much astrologymattered to the dead swimmer.
There was a small kitchen area, butAmber’s eyes were drawn to a couple of doors leading off from the main livingarea.
“You check in here,” she said toSimon. “I’ll take the bedroom.”
“I’ve got it,” Simon said.“Although if the local PD have been here already, I’m not sure how much therewill be.”
“Maybe they missed something,”Amber said.
She went through into the bedroom.There was more of a sense of Alice’s personality in there, from stars and waterdroplets painted onto the walls to a whole mood board in one corner that seemedto be dedicated to Alice’s dreams for the future. There were a couple ofnewspaper clippings about her successes there, but also images of otherswimmers lining up at the Olympics, obviously designed to remind her of hergoals. Scraps of paper had numbers on them, and for a moment, Amber thoughtthat she might have hit on some kind of code, but then she realized that theywere swimming times, either specific goals or ones Alice had hit.
