Chapter 9 #2
“It pushed you closer to Brewster.” I capped the marker harder than necessary. The click cracked through the room.
No doubt, Mallory heard everything in that sound. Thankfully, she chose not to comment.
“It also pushed you back into the news, made you visible, so the Auditor would reach out to you again.”
She looked back at the board. “Colin’s death didn’t fit the pattern because it wasn’t about his guilt.”
“It wasn’t about yours, either.” No way in hell would I let her blame herself. “It was all about getting the result his killer wanted.”
She nodded.
Then both of us looked at the empty space beneath his name. The name we hadn’t written.
Guy Reardon.
For several seconds, neither of us moved.
Guy fit if you stood far enough away.
Corporate executive.
Money.
Power.
Secrets.
A career spent inside an industry that could convert human misery into ratings before the blood dried. Constructing a moral indictment wouldn’t have been difficult.
But the Auditor didn’t deal in general sins. He chose specific wrongs, specific victims, and specific profits. He could point to the exact transactions.
Mallory lifted the black marker.
GUY REARDON
Under CRIME, she wrote:
Corporate manipulation?
I made a doubtful sound.
She glanced at me, then crossed it out.
Suppressed stories?
“Did he?” I asked.
“Every executive suppresses stories.”
I just gave her a look and she sighed before she crossed that out too.
Profited from corruption?
“All of us profit from the stories. They’re our bread and butter.” Point. Counterpoint. Deconstruct. Pare it all down.
Mallory lowered the marker. For a moment, she looked smaller inside my shirt. Almost fragile. Though, I had no doubt she would have objected violently to fragile.
Guy had complicated her worldview in death. She had disliked him, distrusted him, and relied on him. He had funded investigations quietly, approved budgets after everyone else refused, and forced stories onto the schedule while pretending they hadn’t been his idea.
He had steered her. That could have been manipulation. It could also have been protection. With executives, it was usually both. It was why he and I butted heads so much.
“What was the accusation at Guy’s scene?” I asked.
She closed her eyes as though she needed to retrieve it. “Complicity. Concealment. Misuse of public trust.”
“Too broad.” Like Colin. “Figures?”
“No.”
“Dates?”
“No.”
“Named victims?”
“No.”
There it was again.
Mallory opened her eyes. “Guy didn’t fit either.”
“We already treated him as an imperfect match because he was corporate.” I exhaled slowly.
She plucked the red marker from my fingertips. “He was a counterfeit.”
She boxed Guy’s name beside Colin’s.
The last two victims. Both with vague accusations, both seemingly attributed to the Auditor, but it wasn’t enough.
Mallory drew a line between the boxes.
I took her black marker and wrote: SAME KILLER?
She added beneath it, in red: SAME PURPOSE?
We stared at both questions. The implications expanded faster than the evidence.
If Colin and Guy hadn’t been selected according to the Auditor’s original victimology, someone had killed them for another reason.
Someone who knew the Auditor’s methods well enough to reproduce them.
Someone who trusted the FBI, the press, and the public to see the signature and stop looking. The fuck of it all, that someone had been right.
“We need the autopsies,” Mallory said.
“We need more than that.”
“Scene reports. Toxicology. Coroner’s photographs. Chain of custody. Anything that shows differences the Bureau didn’t release.”
“Mal, they aren’t just going to hand over the active case files.” We had a lot of pull, but this was just too damn high profile.
“We request them.”
“They deny us.”
“We appeal.”
“That takes months.” I didn’t need to remind her, she knew. But she just wanted to keep chipping away until the barriers gave.
“Then we find people who already have access.”
I looked at her.
She looked back. “No.”
“I didn’t say anything.” But then, I didn’t have to, did I?
“You were about to say Brewster.” Her disgruntled expression was a balm. He’d been way too close to her and far too interested in keeping me out. So, the idea she wanted nothing to do with him was no skin off my nose.
Except… “He has the files.”
“He also has boundary issues and a federal badge.”
Excuse me. “What did he do?”
“Leave it alone.”
“Mallory.”
“Flint.”
There were circumstances in which Mallory could be persuaded by reason. This wasn’t one of them. I leaned against the board. “You don’t have to trust him.”
“We have to trust whatever he gives us.” And whatever it was Brewster had done had cost him her trust.
“Then we verify it.”
“What if he asks why I want the files?”
“You’re a journalist. If he has to ask, he hasn’t been paying attention.”
She rolled her eyes.
I sighed. “Fine, then we just tell him. If you don’t want to, I’ll do it.”
“You’re going to tell him that we think the last two victims were killed by someone imitating the Auditor?” Challenge flashed in her eyes and I preferred that to the earlier distress.
“Yes.”
Making a face, she shook her head. “He’ll take the theory, bury us under security, and cut us out.”
“Probably.” I spread my hands. “But we’d be together, two against one.”
“Still no.” She folded her arms. The motion pulled the T-shirt tight across her chest before the fabric dropped loose again.
I redirected my attention to the board with the speed of a trained professional. “You have another route?” I asked.
“Medical examiners.”
“All of them?”
“Start local. Colin and Guy were both here.”
“Guy died after eleven days in intensive care.”
“Which means hospital records, surgical notes, toxicology, imaging, neurologic assessments.” She counted them off on her fingers. “More documentation, not less.”
“Protected documentation.” HIPPA laws existed. She knew that.
“Everything is protected until someone decides it isn’t.” The voice of an angel delivering the reasoning of the devil on my shoulder.
I studied her. “The voice sounds like you, but the reasoning sounds alarmingly like me.”
“I’m wearing your shirt. Maybe it’s contagious.”
My gaze dropped to the cracked station logo across her chest.
NO MATTER WHO SAYS THEY LOVE YOU—CHECK IT OUT.
The shirt had been a retirement joke for leaving “journalism” to work for the bosses. News Director took me out of the field. Didn’t think I’d miss it.
On Mallory, it looked less like a joke and more like a warning label. A warning label that I might gleefully ignore.
She caught me looking.
I could have jerked my gaze away. I didn’t. Something warm and dangerous shifted through the room. She turned back to the board so quickly that I almost smiled.
“Who handled Colin’s autopsy?” she asked briskly, all business.
“Cook County.”
“And Guy?”
“If the death was ruled a result of the assault, then the Cook County examiner would review it. The hospital may have run additional studies.”
“I know someone in the ME’s office.” Was she being defensive?
“You know everyone.” For that matter, I knew more than a few myself.
She reached for the pocket of the sweatpants, found nothing, then swept her gaze around the living room and toward the kitchen as if her phone might have materialized.
Her expression darkened. “It’s charging on the nightstand,” she said with an almost sigh.
“I’ll get it.”
“I can—”
But I was already moving. The bedroom looked different with her things in it.
Her black dress hung from the back of the door. One heel lay on its side beside the chair, the other upright, as if they had disagreed about how the evening ended. Her phone rested on my nightstand, connected to the charger.
I didn’t own a nightstand. The stack of books beside the bed had apparently been promoted.
I picked up the phone and wrapped the charging cable around my hand.
When I returned, Mallory was staring at the two boxed names.
Colin.
Guy.
Separating them from the others had made the theory visible. Every investigation reached a point when the facts stopped supporting the story everyone had agreed to tell.
We had just found ours.
I handed her the phone.
Three missed calls lit the screen.
Two messages from the newsroom.
One from an unknown number.
I saw her pulse jump at the side of her throat before she opened it.
“What?”
She tapped the message. No text. Only a photograph.
The whiteboard in the newsroom conference room filled the screen.
Not the one in front of us.
The original.
Victim names. Arrows. Dates. Guy’s name circled in red.
The image had been taken from the corridor outside the glass wall before we covered the board with butcher paper.