They took the man they’d caught back to the building, with Amber rubbing her now bruised skull, hoping that she wasn’t suffering from some kind of concussion.
“Where’s the missing woman?” Simon demanded as soon as they were through the door of the house.
“What woman?” the man demanded. “I don’t know anything about a woman.”
“What’s your name?” Simon tried.
“Mike.”
“Mike what?” There was no give in Simon’s tone now, with a note of steel there that Amber wasn’t used to hearing from him. She was just glad that it was directed at their suspect, rather than at her.
“Devonish. Mike Devonish. Look, I don’t want any trouble.”
“You’re already in trouble,” Simon assured him. “Where’s the missing woman?”
Mike shook his head, his mane of dark hair flowing around his face as he did it. “I don’t know anything about a missing woman.”
“Then what are you doing here?” Amber asked. She could already kind of guess the answer. It was the same answer that they’d gotten in the boat-maker’s shed.
“I live here,” Mike said. He looked away for a second. “I… I’m looking after the building until the renovations restart. I’m one of the contractors here.”
“That’s not it,” Simon said. “You’re holding something back. Try again unless you want me to bring you in for murder.”
Amber saw his eyes widen at that, the possibility obviously both frightening and unexpected. That made her frown, because wouldn’t the killer know more about what was going on, and what might happen if he was caught? Maybe he was just a good actor.
“What murder?” Mike said. “I haven’t done anything. I… look, I’m just crashing here after my wife threw me out. I am one of the contractors, and I know that these renovations won’t restart for a couple of months because the finances got all tangled up, so I figured where’s the harm? I kind of am looking after the whole place.”
“I’ll need your boss’s details to confirm that you actually work here,” Simon said.
Mike didn’t look happy about that. “My boss? He’d fire me if he knew.”
Amber winced at that, because her own boss was just as likely to fire her when he heard about all of this.
“I need to confirm that you are who you say you are,” Simon insisted. “And not the killer who’s been kidnapping women and leaving them to die in places like this. The best way I can do that is to contact your boss.”
“You could use his driver’s license for his identity,” Amber suggested, not wanting to get someone fired. “And maybe social media to check that he’s been working on this place. My guess is that there will be pictures of him somewhere doing the work. A lot of companies like to show work in progress.”
She didn’t like the thought of potentially getting someone fired just to eliminate them as a suspect. It didn’t seem right.
“It might work,” Simon said. “But I still want to search the house to make sure that the missing woman isn’t here.”
He handcuffed Mike to a length of pipe, obviously determined to make sure that he wouldn’t run off again. He and Amber set off through the house, going to check upstairs.
The whole place was wrapped in plastic sheeting to avoid damage from the renovations, but that just made it seem eerie to Amber, wreathing the place in a shroud of plastic that lent a kind of unreality to it all, distorted the light coming through the windows and muffled her footsteps.
She started to pull that plastic sheeting aside as she went upstairs, leading the way in her eagerness to make sure that there wasn’t a woman lying there in danger.
Simon put a hand on her shoulder, holding Amber back.
“I should go first, Amber. This is still an unknown situation, and I can’t have a civilian walking into potential danger blindly.”
“But Mike is securely handcuffed back there,” Amber pointed out.
That didn’t seem to change Simon’s mind.
“There could still be others in the house, or a trap waiting for us. Just because the killer hasn’t left any at previous scenes doesn’t mean that this one is safe.”
“I don’t think he’d do that once we’ve solved the puzzle,” Amber insisted.
“He might see it as another layer of puzzle to get through, or he might just do it because he’s a killer and he hates that we saved one of the women he was trying to murder.”
Simon seemed to be determined to scare her, which seemed a bit much, given that he was the only reason that Amber was there.
“I’m here because you needed my help,” Amber pointed out. It was hard to argue back even that much, when normally she preferred to avoid any kind of conflict.
Simon gave her a long look. “Amber, I’m grateful for your help. I just don’t want you to be in any danger. Like when you ran after Mike back there.”
“He was getting away.” Amber had just reacted instinctively, the way she assumed that anyone would have.
“And when you caught up to him, he flung you into a wall,” Simon said. “How are you feeling after that? You haven’t shown any signs of being hurt, but do you need medical attention?”
Amber hadn’t been aware that he was watching her closely enough to know how she was. She put a hand to her head. It felt bruised, but there was no blood and she felt ok.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“But you might not have been. Imagine if you’d hit your head a little harder, or if Mike down there had pulled a weapon on you. You could have been killed, Amber.”
Amber knew that he was trying to get across the seriousness of the situation to her and honestly, it was working, because she was suddenly terrified of everything that might have happened when she made her lunge for the fleeing suspect. Even so, she wasn’t going to show Simon that, because Amber suspected that he would make her wait outside if she did. She was a part of this now and she had to see it through.
So she followed Simon carefully through the rest of the house, making sure that she stayed behind him where it was a little safer. He had his gun out, stopping at each room they came to, tearing aside the plastic and sweeping the room as if expecting the killer to be lurking in one of the corners.
“Do you think Mike is the killer?” Amber asked.
“Honestly, I doubt it,” Simon said. “But I need to check out his story before I can just let him go.”
“I can do that part,” Amber said. She got out her phone, trying to find anything she could about Mike Devonish. She might not have the resources of the FBI, but she was able to find some social media photos of him at work and a company logo somewhere in the background.
“He’s definitely a contractor,” Amber said. “He does most of his work for a company called Cavendish.”
Amber looked them up too. It wasn’t hard to find pictures of them starting work on this house, along with a small blog post by the owners about the delays. Everything seemed to be consistent with what Mike Devonish had said.
“The company is definitely working on this house,” Amber said. “And there were delays. The owners wrote a whole series of posts about waiting for their dream home to be finished.”
“Which suggests that Mike is exactly what he says he is: a squatter,” Simon said. “We still need to finish checking the house. The killer could still have left someone here.”
“With Mike here?” Amber asked. That didn’t seem likely. A woman left to die would shout for help. Mike would have heard her.
“It’s a good point, but I want to be absolutely certain,” Simon said. He kept moving through the house with Amber in his wake.
They checked each level of the house systematically, leaving no corner of it unexamined. By the time they were finished, though, the conclusion was obvious.
“We’re in the wrong place,” Amber said. “I got the puzzle wrong.”
“But it led us to a place,” Simon pointed out. “One in D.C. What are the odds that a random selection of words on that system would do that?”
Amber didn’t know, but she guessed that it had to be millions to one when every three meter square of the planet had such a designation.
Amber got out the puzzle, staring at it, hoping to fathom how she could have gotten it wrong. She stared at the pictures. Green, Factory, Meat; the words seemed obvious from the clues. Maybe there was another layer to this. Maybe the inclusion of lines by three English poets meant something after all.
“There has to be some extra layer of complexity that I’m not getting,” Amber said. She stared at the puzzle, trying to will it to give up its secrets. “He’s outwitted me with something here.”
“Maybe complexity isn’t the answer,” Simon suggested. “Wasn’t the whole point with the pictures to create confusion by doing something simpler?”
“That’s a good point,” Amber said. “The only question is what simplicity means in this case.”
Was it something about the language used? No… Amber could feel the beginnings of an idea starting to come to her, the shape of it not yet defined.
“What if…” she began. “What if the killer has gotten us used to using three words he gives us to find his victims one way, has shown us that it’s that way, and now he’s switching it up to fool us?”
“What do you mean?” Simon asked. He looked a little confused by the whole thing, but it had been his comment about simplicity that had started to give Amber the idea.
“A lot of puzzle solving is down to patterns,” Amber said. “Cryptic crosswords have conventions that people use to give them clues. If you mess with those conventions, even if it’s a simpler word to find, then it makes things harder for whoever is trying to solve the problem.”
“And that’s relevant here because…”
“Because I think the killer is doing something similar. What if the words green, factory, and meat aren’t signifiers for the location, but descriptions of it? The way that you thought boat maker’s rest was a boat house.”
“But you showed us that wasn’t the case,” Simon pointed out.
“Not on that one. But now that the killer has gotten us to dismiss that kind of thinking out of hand, maybe that’s exactly what he’s gone back to in order to try to fool us. He’s switched up his methods with each of his puzzles so far, so what if he’s switched everything completely this time?”
Amber started to look online for anything that might tie the three words of the puzzle together in the D.C. area. She searched and found something that seemed to fit it all far too perfectly to be a coincidence.
“There’s a meat processing factory on Green St. that looks as though it went out of business a couple of years ago.”
It was exactly the kind of disused industrial facility the killer seemed to like, and it fit the clues perfectly. Amber pulled up images of the place just to be sure, and froze, staring at one that had obviously been taken nearby. There was a small patch of parkland across the street and there in front of it was a statue of a woman holding a writing tablet and wearing a flowing gown. Amber’s quizzer’s brain recognized the symbols of Calliope, the Greek muse of poetry.
“She’s there,” Amber said. “She has to be.”