Chapter 13 #2
Flint’s frustration flickered through the control he usually wore so well. “I’m starting to get what Brewster meant when he said the Auditor was manipulating me.”
I refused to be insulted. “I was aware of what he meant before now.” Petty? Maybe just a little.
Blocking me again, Flint caught my wrist once more. “He gives you something no one else has, and you feel like you have to protect the information and him giving it to you so you can protect the story.”
“This is the story.” The Auditor reaching out to me was very much the story and it would play out whether I opened the envelope or not. I would not let the FBI scoop me or shut me out.
“It’s also evidence.”
“Both can be true.” Throwing his own words back in his face was not particularly kind of me. That they were his words registered in his cool eyes. Recognizing them didn’t make him like them anymore than I had.
But he did release me. I didn’t look away from him as I pulled the envelope out in one gloved hand and used a finger to slip beneath the flap. The adhesive released without even a suggestion of resistance.
With care, I opened it to look inside. There was a single sheet of paper and a black plastic access card with no identifying marks.
We both studied the card for a moment. It was shiny and almost mirror smooth.
No smudges. Didn’t mean there weren’t fingerprints, but they weren’t obvious if they were.
Also, I really couldn’t imagine him planning everything else so meticulously and screwing up now. When I unfolded the paper, I scanned the page.
The message contained four lines.
You asked the wrong man about Guy Reardon.
My heartbeat stumbled.
Flint read over my shoulder.
The second line was an address.
The third was a time.
Midnight the following night.
The fourth line contained three words.
We should talk.
Flint took the page from my hand. “No.”
I looked at him. “That was fast.”
“You’re not going.”
“I haven’t said I am.”
“You decided before you even finished reading.”
He wasn’t wrong, but I refused to admit it. Instead, I took the page back and studied the address. When I sat at my desk and entered the address into the browser, I studied the location.
It was an office building near the river, mostly vacant since a development dispute had stalled renovations two years earlier.
Public enough to reach. Empty enough to control.
“You said the wrong man,” Flint murmured.
“What?”
“The message.” He pointed to the first line. “Not the wrong question. The wrong man.”
I read it again.
You asked the wrong man about Guy Reardon.
Brewster.
The Auditor knew we had questioned Brewster about Guy’s records. Or he wanted me to believe he knew. Either seemed likely and considering the eye he’d been keeping on me, I’d have been surprised if my meeting with Elliot had gone unnoticed.
“He could have surveillance in the building,” Flint said.
“The office has been swept.” Repeatedly.
“By Brewster’s people.”
I looked up. “And by ours, don’t you have our security guys sweeping the offices twice a day?”
Flint didn’t say anything else. But his troubled expression had me leaning back in my chair as he propped a hip against my desk. It was just the two of us in the newsroom at the moment.
The news crew was down one floor in the studio for the last nightly news broadcast, everyone else was out pretending to have a life. But not us.
“You think Elliot is involved?”
It came out a little sharper than I meant it, but Flint just gave me a measured look before he responded.
“I think someone knew what happened in a closed office.”
“That’s a stretch,” I argued. “If you know me and you know the FBI profiler assigned to the case, then the two of us talking in private doesn’t mean they needed an ear in there to assume we were discussing the Auditor.”
“But the specific content?” Flint squinted.
“He doesn’t have specific content.” I tapped the page with its four lines. “He says I asked the wrong person. Not the wrong question which was what he said before. Now he’s discussing who I went to—or in this case at least who came to me.”
I glanced toward one of the cameras. The little green light never went off. It was trained on us where we sat which meant whatever was on the letter would get noticed. So would our discussion.
“Either way, the allusion to that discussion doesn’t make Brewster the Auditor.”
Thankfully, he didn’t comment on me switching from Elliot’s first name to his last.
“Never said it did.” His answer was a little too pat. He was still ticked at me.
I leaned forward to open the envelope and pull the access card out all the way. A thin strip of white tape had been fixed to the back.
One word had been written across it.
Alone.
Flint saw it and his expression immediately went flat. “No.”
“You already said that.”
“Then I’m saying it again.” It came out a pure masculine growl and my toes curled inside my shoes. There was something raw about Flint using that tone.
Rather than focus on how he was saying it, I addressed what he said.
“He wants to talk.” Not my strongest argument, but I could build up to that.
“He wants you isolated.” The immediate snap back told me that Flint was clearly not placated.
“He hardly needs to isolate me. We’re already sure he’s been in here while we were here and at the memorial service. If he wanted to, he could have killed me there or here.” That wasn’t his plan. I was almost sure of it.
“That isn’t as reassuring as you seem to think it is.” While he leaned back against my desk, it should have felt like he hovered over me. Yet, despite the surging energy of his presence, he didn’t loom.
“Flint,” I said in a softer voice. “I don’t think he wants to kill me. And I don’t fit his victim profile.”
“Maybe not this time, but that could change and you’re the one who has him talking in the first place. If you do something he doesn’t like…”
The tension between us had been growing for days, fed by too little sleep and too many questions. Now it tightened into something with edges that cut.
“You don’t get to decide for me,” I said, and I was damn proud of how even I kept my voice.
“I know.” As temperamental as he sounded, I doubted the veracity of those two words.
“Then stop acting like you do.” Okay, now I was snapping. Dammit.
“I’m acting like the person standing closest to the blast radius.”
I pushed my chair back and stood. “I’ve never asked you to do that.” Even if I had been grateful that he had my back.
“No.” His voice dropped. “You just keep making sure I’m there.”
Of all the things he’d said, those particular words silenced me. The truth in them slapped me harder than any tone he’d used.
I had gone to his apartment instead of mine. Worked in his conference room. Used his office for the conversation with Brewster. Told him about Elliot when I hadn’t told anyone else.
Every time the ground shifted, I reached for Flint and then resented him for standing where I’d placed him.
His gaze held mine.“You want me close enough to catch you,” he said. “But not close enough to stop you from jumping.”
My throat tightened. “That isn’t fair.”
“No.” He looked at the card in my hand. “Neither is this.”
All around us in the empty newsroom, monitors glowed over abandoned desks and the larger screens on each wall the top kept playing out their silent films of disaster and paparazzi around the world. The city reflected against the windows, making the dark outside look crowded with ghosts.
I looked down at the invitation. The Auditor had arranged the place, the time, and the terms. He expected me to believe I was choosing whether to participate.
Conditioning? Or a trap?
Didn’t have to be one or the other, because it absolutely was both. The answer didn’t change my determination or my need for answers.
A killer who had spent years speaking through evidence and had finally decided evidence was no longer enough. He wanted to talk to me. In person.
It could be the story coup of a lifetime.
It could also get me killed.
I slipped the access card into my pocket. It wouldn’t be the first story that I put my life on the line to get.
Flint’s eyes followed my action.
“That isn’t a yes,” I promised him.
“It isn’t a no either.” He looked away, jaw working once before control settled back into place. “When are you calling Brewster?”
“Soon.”
“What are you telling him?”
I folded the message and returned it to the envelope. “Not everything.”
Flint’s gaze snapped back to mine. I expected an argument. Instead he nodded slowly, as if I had confirmed something he had already feared. “That,” he said, “is exactly how this starts.”
I didn’t ask whether he meant the Auditor’s influence, the destruction of my objectivity, or the distance growing between us.
I was afraid the answer was all three.