Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
brEWSTER
The unsub had made a mistake. Finally! I continued to stare at the monitor long after Mallory stopped speaking.
Beside me, Carter hadn't moved or said anything.
Neither had Agent Ruiz at the communications station. The only sound inside the van came from the low whir of equipment and the faint static bleeding through one of the open channels.
On the center monitor, Mallory sat alone at the desk. Her hands were folded loosely in front of her.
Waiting.
But, the bastard had made a mistake.
I repeated that silently because I needed that win and to view it as a tactical one. Particularly because he’d let us listen..
Not all of it. Maybe not even most of it. The signal had dropped twice, video had lagged behind the audio for nearly six seconds at one point, and whatever routing architecture he'd built into the system had turned us into spectators.
But we'd heard enough. More importantly, I'd heard him.
After three years of chasing evidence, behavioral residue, written communications, reconstructed timelines, and the occasional recording too degraded to be useful, I had finally heard the unsub’s voice.
He was calm, educated, and very particular in his language choices.
Probably between thirty-five and fifty-five, although vocal age estimates were notoriously unreliable. Midwestern inflection flattened by either education or intention. No obvious speech impediments. No significant regional markers. Controlled cadence. Minimal filler language.
And absolutely no anxiety.
He'd known we were there.
That conclusion had arrived sometime around the second interruption.
The first could have been coincidence. The second had been deliberate. The third had been a message.
Carter shifted beside me. I glanced at him. He wasn't watching any of the information flowing onto the screen I’d taken over. He was watching Mallory.
Of course he was.
She leaned closer to the monitor inside the room. The camera angle showed three-quarters of her face. Enough for me to let us see concentration rather than fear.
The concentration bothered me a great deal. Fear would have meant she was keeping her distance, emotionally if not physically.
The speaker crackled. Mallory's voice came through first. “I don't trust you.”
Carter exhaled quietly beside me.
Then the unsub answered. “You will.”
Every muscle across my shoulders tightened.
Mallory's lips moved on the screen. The audio lagged. “I believe you.”
My attention snapped fully to her.
The unsub’s voice followed. “Trust develops through consistency.”
I reached for the keyboard and marked the timestamp.
“Again,” I said into my phone.
Ruiz responded. “We're still recording.”
“I know. Mark it.”
Onscreen, Mallory leaned back. Her expression was unreadable from the camera angle. “That's not the same thing.”
“No. But you're learning the distinction.” The unsub answered immediately.
“Any distortion?” I asked, keeping my voice low. Though clearly he was observing us.
“Just fuzz from the signal bouncing,” Ruiz reported.
I studied Mallory, she was falling into the trap I’d warned her about. The unsub wasn’t trying to convince her he was trustworthy. If anything, he was laying the groundwork that allowed her to reach that conclusion on her own.
Question. Verify. Reward. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. It was such a classic piece of operant conditioning that I wanted to put my fist through the monitor. I’d worked too hard and sacrificed too much to let him win now.
“She didn't say that.” Carter's voice was quiet.
“What?” I glanced at him. His attention remained on the screen.
“What?”
“She didn't say she believed him.” His yes were narrowed and his expression intent.
Frowning, I shifted so I could watch him and the screen. “You just heard her.”
“I heard something.” The skepticism rifling over that last word gave me pause.
Carter finally looked at me and his expression shifted. For most of the evening, he’d been angry but controlled. When the unsub pushed Mallory on any personal issues, Carter tightened up. When she answered, he focused on her only.
Now the anger was gone. Why? “What exactly are you suggesting?” I asked.
His gaze returned to the monitor. “Her mouth.”
I looked. Mallory was speaking again. This time the synchronization was close enough that I didn't immediately see the problem.
“I don't know whether you're telling me the truth.” Her lips matched. Mostly.
The unsub answered. “You know enough.”
Carter leaned toward the screen and touched two keys on his keyboard.
“What are you doing?”
“Backing it up.”
I frowned. “We can't interfere with—”
“Not the live feed,” he snapped. “I’m recording it in here too. This is he local buffer.”
Impressed, I kept my opinion to myself for now. Ruiz confirmed via my headset that it wasn’t interfering, so I kept my eye on the screen that had captured Carter’s attention.
The live feed continued to play on the right monitor, but Carter was watching the left. He played it once, then again.
Mallory's face turned slightly toward the camera. “I don't know whether you're telling me the truth.”
Carter pointed. “There.”
“What?” I saw nothing.
“At the end.” Carter replayed it.
I watched her mouth rather than listening. Truth. The word matched. Probably. “It's a compressed video.” The guy was letting us watch, he didn’t have to do it in high def.
“No.” Carter's certainty irritated me.
“Frame loss can create apparent desynchronization.”
He shot me a glare. “I know what frame loss looks like.”
“Do you?”
His eyes cut toward mine. For a second neither of us spoke. Then he said, “I’m the news director for a nationwide network channel.”
He had a point, so I just nodded.
Carter enlarged the image. The resolution degraded immediately.
“Audio's cleaner than video,” Ruiz said over the line. “We can't establish sync at this quality.”
“Can you establish that it isn't synced?” I asked him, keeping an eye on Carter.
“No.”
Carter made a humorless sound. “Convenient.”
“It's technology, Carter, not a conspiracy.” I got the irritation, I did, but we could only do so much.
His gaze remained on Mallory. “With this guy, I'm not sure there's a difference.”
I couldn't argue with that. The live monitor changed. Mallory had leaned forward again.
The unsub said something too low for the system to immediately resolve. Static chewed through the first few words.
Then his voice cleared. “Elliot wants control.”
I stopped breathing. Mallory's expression changed. Not dramatically. Her head tilted slightly. The corner of her mouth tightened. Then she said, “He does.”
Carter looked at me. I ignored him.
Onscreen, Mallory continued. “He thinks that's the same thing as protecting me.”
My jaw locked.
The unsub answered. “And you allowed him to have it.”
A pause.
Mallory looked down. “Not anymore.”
Something inside me went perfectly quiet.
Carter said nothing.
He didn't have to. I could feel his attention on me.
“That's enough,” I said.
Ruiz’s voice came over the headset. “Sir?”
“Flag that segment.”
“Just do it.” I wasn’t going to explain it. Not right now.
Carter folded his arms. “You going to profile that too?”
“I don't need to.”
“No?”
“He's isolating her from law enforcement.”
“Interesting interpretation,” he released a faint huff.
I looked at him. “You have another?”
“Several.”
“I'm sure you do.”
His expression hardened.
I returned my attention to the screen. Mallory was smiling. Not broadly. Barely a smile at all. But I knew that smile.
I'd seen it when she'd found something everyone else missed. When someone surprised her. When an answer opened another question rather than closing one.
The unsub had learned how to draw it from her. That bothered me more than anything else I'd heard.
Flint could stand beside her. Protect her. Feed her coffee and give her somewhere to sleep and pretend that their proximity meant something.
It didn't.
The unsub had reached somewhere that I’d been trying to get to and I thought Carter almost had. The unsub had her mind.
And Mallory valued that territory above everything else.
“He's enjoying this,” I said.
Carter didn't answer.
“He doesn't need this meeting. Nothing he's told her required face-to-face contact.”
“They aren't face-to-face.” Carter’s dry, deadpan answer dared me to deny it.
“You know what I mean.”
“Do I?”
I turned toward him. His attention had narrowed onto the monitor again.
“What?”
“Something's wrong.”
“You said that before.”
“No.” Carter leaned closer. “Something is wrong.” He pointed at Mallory. “She isn't reacting to him.”
I stared at the screen. “She clearly is.”
“To the screen.”
My attention sharpened.
Carter continued before I could answer. “Every time he speaks, there's a delay.”
“Network latency.”
“Not that kind.”
“How would you know?”
“Because Mallory interrupts people.”
I almost dismissed it. Then I didn't.
Carter looked at me. “When someone says something she disagrees with, she doesn't wait politely for them to finish. She steps on the end of the sentence.”
I knew that. Wait, I did know that. God knew that I’d experienced it with her. That shifted my entire focus.
“She hasn't interrupted him once,” Carter said.
I looked back at the screen. Mallory waited. The unsub spoke. She waited. Then answered.
Again and again and again.
Perfect conversational spacing.
Too perfect.
“Ruiz.”
“Already looking, sir.”
I could hear the click of his fingers moving over a keyboard. “Separate the incoming audio from the video stream.”
Ruiz grunted, but only said, “They're already separate.”
“Then compare packet timing.”
A few seconds passed. Then several more.
“What?” I demanded as Carter’s focus lasered onto me.
Ruiz didn't answer.
“Agent.” Grinding the address out worked better than a snap.
“The audio isn't coming from the same source.” His response wasn’t hesitant so much as guarded.
Silence filled the van and I blew out a breath. Carter straightened. I might have the headset on, but I had one side turned out so he could hear that part.
“Explain,” I ordered.