Chapter 25 #3
Brewster had arranged for the attack. Hurt him because Carter had gotten between them. Or maybe because it would hurt Mallory.
Perhaps both.
He would understand that. He’d profiled her for months. Then again, Brewster had stopped seeing her quite so clearly. That was truly the problem with obsession. Eventually even the most beloved object ceased being a person.
It became about the need and she was a possession.
Proof.
I understood obsession. Better than Brewster realized. That was why I had recognized the change in him long before anyone else. He still thought his fixation remained centered on me.
It hadn't. Not for some time. It had begun in the first months of Mallory’s coverage. I had become the explanation for everything he could not control. My response to Mallory enticed him.
Mallory had become the thing he could not afford to lose. Then she chose Carter. And today she had discovered Brewster’s name attached to evidence he believed safely buried.
The equation had simplified itself.
I opened every record I possessed on Elliot Brewster.
Properties.
Vehicles.
Family.
Former addresses.
Training sites.
Case locations.
Financial records.
Safe houses.
Hotels.
Storage units.
Known confidential-source meeting locations.
Places he had visited once.
Places he had visited repeatedly.
Places he had no documented reason to visit at all.
I’d been building his sheets out for a very long time. It started as more of a need to understand the opponent. It had become a necessity, because he was the only one who gained if Thorne and Reardon died.
They were connected to Mallory. Their deaths should have driven a wedge between her and me. At the same time, they should have driven her closer to Brewster.
Thousands of points of data. Too many. So I narrowed them.
Brewster wanted me to follow. Therefore the location could not be impossible to discover.
He needed isolation.
Control.
Time.
He would also need somewhere associated with me—no. No, he needed it tied to the case. I paused on my scroll. A warehouse near the river. Closed fourteen years ago. Scheduled for redevelopment twice. Never completed.
It had appeared peripherally in one of the earliest investigations connected to my work.
Brewster had visited it three times, but only once officially.
I stared at the address. Too tangential. Not enough. He’d want it to be iron-clad.
I checked traffic cameras. The sedan appeared six blocks away. The direction was consistent, but it never appeared on the next set of cameras. Nor on any of the roads he could have turned onto.
I sat back once more. “You finally learned how to ask the right question.”
For years, Brewster had wanted me. He had chased shadows, patterns, inconsistencies. He had constructed me from what I left behind.
Then Mallory named me.
The Auditor.
An imperfect name. But hers. I’d respected the choice, because it was patterned after my work. She’d seen what I was doing. Then she asked me to give her another.
Simon—even more hers than The Auditor because she asked me to give it to her and I’d done that. Brewster never understood why names mattered.
Perhaps I hadn't either, until now. I had not intended for Carter to be hurt. I had not intended for Mallory to be taken. Those were my failures.
I experienced no discomfort with the admission. Facts did not become less factual because they were unpleasant.
I had pushed Brewster. Challenged him. Mallory had pushed him, but from another angle. Now, she could expose him.
Brewster reacted.
Cause. Effect.
I had not intended the harm, but I was still responsible for it. I retrieved what I needed.
Keys. Phone. A weapon I preferred not to use. Another I would. Then I paused.
On one monitor, the enhancement remained frozen on Mallory's discovery.
E. brEWSTER.
On another, Carter's blood stained the newsroom carpet.
On the third, a traffic camera showed an empty intersection where Elliot's sedan had passed forty-one seconds earlier.
He had taken her to force my hand. He believed that gave him control. Perhaps once, I would have admired the strategy.
Now I merely found it inefficient. Brewster wanted the Auditor. He wanted the monster he had spent years constructing.
He wanted proof that every compromise, every concealed fact, every line he had crossed had been necessary because something worse existed on the other side.
He wanted me to justify him. That was the final corruption of his obsession. He no longer needed to catch me. He needed me to be worse than he was.
Mallory would object to being used as bait. Violently, most likely. The thought almost made me smile. Then I remembered her disappearing into the trunk.
My smile vanished.
There would be questions later. Mallory always had questions. If I was correct about her, she would have one particularly important question for me when this ended.
I did not yet know how I would answer. But first, I had one of my own for Brewster.
How much of himself was he willing to destroy in order to prove I was the monster?
I shut down the monitors. I no longer wanted to watch. The FBI profiler had spent years trying to find me.
Tonight, I would save him the trouble.