Chapter 25
Chapter
Twenty-Five
SIMON
Elliot Brewster had become careless. Not stupid. Careless.
Stupid men were predictable because they lacked the capacity to recognize the consequences of their choices. Careless men recognized those consequences and acted anyway.
Elliot had always been painfully intelligent. For a time, that had made him interesting.
I watched Mallory pace behind the workstation while the enhancement software continued its analysis. She had changed clothes since the diner. Black trousers. Pale blue shirt. Sleeves pushed to her elbows.
Her coffee sat beside the keyboard. She had forgotten it. That was unusual. Mallory rarely forgot coffee. The corner of my mouth curved.
Carter had been summoned upstairs twelve minutes earlier. An executive meeting he had attempted to postpone twice before Mallory finally told him to go.
He had resisted. Of course he had. A Sunday meeting with the executives couldn’t be good news, but that wasn’t what bothered Carter.
Flint Carter was predictable in entirely different ways. Mallory had kissed him before shoving him toward the door.
That had been less predictable. Not the kiss. The ease of it. Something had changed between them. I suspected I knew what. Some questions did not require investigation.
I scrolled through the feeds.
Lobby.
Parking garage.
Elevators.
Executive floor.
Newsroom.
Carter stood at the far end of a conference table arguing with three people whose titles were more impressive than their usefulness.
I muted them. Nothing they were saying mattered. Another window displayed the loading dock.
Nothing.
The service entrance.
Nothing.
The street.
Nothing.
I returned to Mallory.
She was studying one of Reardon's records again.
She had found it. I knew before the software completed its work. Not because I could see the enhancement.
Because I could see her.
She had stopped pacing.
Mallory became very still when the facts finally aligned. She had done the same thing in the room I prepared for her.
A slight cessation of movement. A narrowing of attention. Then the head tilt.
I watched her sit.
The image resolved. She enlarged it. Again and again. Then stopped.
I could not read the screen clearly from this angle, but I didn't need to.
I knew what was there.
E. brEWSTER.
There were easier ways I could have given her the name. I could have sent her the document. I could have identified Elliot outright. I could have provided dates, evidence numbers, laboratory records and the transfer history.
She wouldn’t have believed me and more importantly, I wouldn’t have wanted her to just accept my word.
Evidence handed to her by a man she associated with multiple homicides would always be contaminated by its source. Evidence I couldn’t confirm immediately. It would have been circumstantial at best.
So I had given her questions instead and let Mallory do what she did best.
Dig.
I caught the flicker from the monitor in the corner displaying the lobby. I glanced toward it, but it was normal.
The security desk remained occupied. A delivery driver stood near the entrance. Two employees crossed toward the elevators. So many people working on a Sunday.
Well, they did say the news never slept.
I returned my attention to Mallory. Then the parking garage flickered. A fraction of a second.
Less.
I frowned.
The image stabilized. Nothing had changed. I pulled the previous thirty seconds and replayed them.
No visible interruption. No dropped frames. No packet loss. Yet something had happened.
I checked the lobby. Then the service corridor. Then the elevator bank. Everything was normal.
Too normal.
I compared timestamps. Perfect synchronization. Every camera. To the millisecond. That was wrong. Network cameras drifted. Fractions. Latency. Compression. Processing delays.
I straightened.
“What are you up to, Elliot?”
I hadn't seen him enter. That bothered me. I opened another terminal and began tracing. The feeds were live, except they weren't.
Not entirely.
The lobby camera showed movement. Employees crossed. The guard shifted. A man entered through the revolving door.
Natural motion.
Except I had seen it before.
I searched backward.
There.
Nine minutes earlier.
The same woman crossed the lobby carrying the same red bag.
The same guard scratched beneath his left ear. The same man checked his watch. Loop.
Not a long one.
Nine minutes, forty-three seconds.
Enough to preserve movement. Short enough to deploy quickly. Clever. Very clever.
I moved to the internal network.
The camera system itself reported no anomaly because the cameras hadn't been disabled.
Their output had been intercepted, recorded, and repeated. Since the FBI had installed their own system as well as piggy-backed off the Network’s, it would have given them plenty of access.
The method took another minute to identify, then another. I found the intrusion only because I knew where to look after understanding what it was doing.
A local transmitter.
Close range.
It wasn't attacking the cameras individually. It was interfering with the controller long enough to substitute cached footage.
Portable.
Temporary.
And unless someone happened to be examining timestamps at the packet level, almost invisible.
Elliot had not acquired that skill overnight, which meant he’d used it before and had everything in place to penetrate the building’s security within hours of separating from Mallory and Flint.
That was useful information or would be. Later. I returned to Mallory's camera.
Live.
I hoped.
She sat before the monitor, staring at the result. Then the conference-room door behind her opened. Elliot entered.
So much for later.
Mallory didn't turn.
“You really should have stopped, Mallory.”
Her shoulders changed.
Not much.
Enough.
She knew his voice. I watched her reflection in the dark edge of the monitor.
“Interesting advice from the man who tracked me to Flint's apartment.”
Elliot closed the door.
The camera froze.
I stared at the image. Mallory at the workstation. Brewster behind her. Then nothing.
The timestamp continued advancing.
The picture did not.
“Clever,” I murmured.
I opened the audio channel. Silence. Not dead air. Manufactured room tone.
He had learned exceptionally well.
I began moving through systems. Card access. Elevators. Stairwells. Parking. Building alarms. Carter's floor.
The executive conference room door opened. Flint Carter stepped into the corridor. He checked his phone. Mallory had been alone for almost fifteen minutes.
He seemed more than a little aware of it. His pace increased. I switched back to her feed. Still frozen.
Elliot had come prepared. This was not an emotional confrontation after the diner. Nor was it a desperate attempt to persuade her.
He had anticipated surveillance and used equipment to defeat it. Equipment he’d likely used when he dealt with Reardon. All he’d done was wait for Carter to leave her.
Had Elliot come straight back here? Had he anticipated Mallory needing to do research?
I had made an error. Not in believing Elliot Brewster fit all the parameters. No, my audit there had been quite thorough. No, I’d made an error in the timing.
I had expected him to move, but I hadn’t foreseen him moving this swiftly. Once upon a time, Elliot Brewster had wanted to catch me. He worked as profiler, local law enforcement had reached out to the FBI and he’d come in.
In the nature of things, he had his role to play—the law—and I had mine—I violated it. We were both armed with the best of intentions.
He hunted. I evaded.
If one were to label it, we played a game. As with any game, there were rules. The legal rules were not what was important. It was the behavioral ones.
The profiler in Brewster wanted to understand me so he could identify me. Then using those tools, gather the evidence to prove what I had done. To achieve all of this, he required answers.
In a way, there had been an intellectual purity to his work. A purity that required him to stare into the abyss that made up the souls of men and believe he could identify what stared back.
White male. Forty to fifty-five. Educated. Highly intelligent. Professionally successful or capable of appearing so. Organized.
Socially functional but emotionally isolated. No significant intimate relationships. A career that provided autonomy, mobility, and access to information.
Likely experience in law enforcement, medicine, law, finance, or another profession where rules and systems mattered.
Patient. Controlled. Narcissistic. Compelled to demonstrate intellectual superiority.
He had been wrong about some of it. Right about enough. That was always the danger of such men put onto the hunt for men like me.
Yet, profiles were never meant to be identities. They were a guide, a grouping of probabilities assembled from behavior to narrow possibility.
Brewster had known that once.
Somewhere along the way, though, he had changed.
It had happened so gradually, I was ashamed to admit it had taken me far too long to notice. His questions became assumptions. His assumptions became conclusions. Contradictory evidence stopped modifying the profile and instead became something that required explanation.
If I behaved outside his expectations, I wasn't disproving his theory—I was adapting.
If evidence contradicted his conclusions, I wasn't innocent of that particular act—I was misdirecting him.
If another killer entered the pattern, I hadn't been wrongfully credited with the murders—I had inspired them.
Each contradiction became further proof. It was an elegant trap. He had constructed a profile so complete that eventually there was nothing I could do that wouldn't fit inside it.
Including not being the man he thought I was.
Then Mallory entered the equation. And Brewster stopped wanting the truth. He wanted to be right.
In the past several weeks, he’d begun to decompensate. That was the word he would use. His objectivity deteriorated. His emotional regulation became inconsistent. Professional boundaries blurred beneath the weight of personal investment.