Chapter 27
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
MALLORY
Six months later
Flint still hated the whiteboard. This one was bigger. “You realize,” he said from behind me, “most people use walls for art.”
“I have art.”
“You have a photograph of a city comptroller accepting an envelope in the parking garage of a steakhouse.”
I looked at the photograph in question. “It’s nicely framed.”
“It’s evidence.”
“It can be two things.”
Flint sighed. I smiled. Some things survived trauma. Apparently, irritating Flint Carter was one of them.
I uncapped the red marker and drew a line from the photograph to the name of a construction company that had received four city contracts in eighteen months despite having no employees, no equipment, and an office address belonging to a UPS Store.
Behind me, Flint made another sound.
I glanced over my shoulder. “Problem?”
“You’re using red.”
“Yes.”
“We agreed red was confirmed.”
“It is confirmed.”
“No.” He walked toward me, coffee mug in one hand. “We confirmed Daugherty met with Sorrell twice. We confirmed Sorrell’s company received the contracts. We have not confirmed the envelope contained money.”
“I didn’t say it contained money.”
“You put a red line between them.”
“Yes.”
“Which implies—”
“Nothing. It connects two confirmed facts.”
His eyes narrowed. I smiled sweetly. He took the marker out of my hand.
“Hey.”
“Yellow.”
“Red.”
“Yellow,” he repeated firmly. “Until we know what was in the envelope.”
“You’ve become incredibly rigid since leaving corporate media.” Lips pursed, I considered him. “Maybe you should talk to someone.”
“I’ve always been rigid.”
“That is absolutely not how I would describe you.”
His eyebrows lifted.
Then I realized what I’d said.
He smiled.
“Don't,” I ordered.
“I didn't say anything.” Too innocent. Way too innocent.
“You were going to.”
“I was thinking loudly.”
I pointed at him. “That's my line.”
“I stole it.”
I gave a mock, if dramatic sigh. “Journalistic integrity is really going to hell around here.”
He changed the line to yellow. I allowed it because relationships required compromise. Also because he was right.
I hated that part. But only a little.
Our office occupied the second floor above a bakery in Logan Square, which meant every morning began with the smell of bread, sugar, and coffee drifting through the floorboards.
There were worse ways to go to work. There were also substantially more lucrative ones.
Our office had four desks despite there being only two of us. One belonged to the college intern who came in three afternoons a week and possessed the unnerving ability to locate public records that government agencies seemed convinced no one would ever find.
The other was theoretically for growth. Mostly it held boxes. Our equipment was good because Flint refused to compromise on that. Our furniture came from an office liquidation sale. The coffeemaker had been my contribution.
Flint hated it. I loved it.
Again, compromise.
The lettering on the glass door still looked new.
CARTER McbrYAN
INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM
The name had been Flint’s idea. I'd argued for McBryan Carter. He'd pointed out that sounded like a law firm. I'd countered that Carter McBryan sounded like a country singer.
Eventually we'd flipped a coin.
He won.
I remained suspicious.
The network had offered both of us an extraordinary amount of money to stay. Then they'd offered me even more to stay without Flint.
That conversation had lasted forty-three seconds. The negotiations over ownership of my reporting had taken substantially longer.
Attorneys had become involved. Then more attorneys.
Alisha had described the whole thing as fun, which was how I learned there was something fundamentally wrong with her.
Eventually, we walked.
Technically, Flint had walked first..
I'd been in the middle of telling an executive vice president exactly where he could put the proposed eight-part streaming special when Flint slid his resignation across the table.
I had stopped mid-sentence.
He'd looked at me.
I'd looked at him.
Then I'd laughed.
I handed over my resignation the following morning—mostly so no one could say I was just copying him.
We launched Carter McBryan three weeks later. Our first story had received eleven thousand views. Our second got thirty-seven thousand. Our third resulted in the resignation of a deputy commissioner.
That helped.
So did the lawsuit threat.
Nothing generated subscriptions quite like someone powerful announcing publicly that you were a liar. Alisha really liked that about us.
Flint set my coffee beside my laptop. “Drink.”
I looked at it, then him. “Was that an order?”
“Yes.”
“Who are you and what have you done with my Flint?”
“Your Flint?”
Fuck.
His smile appeared slowly.
I reached for the coffee. “Don't make it weird.”
“Wouldn't dream of it.”
He leaned down and kissed the top of my head. The casual affection still caught me sometimes. Not because it was unusual anymore. Because it wasn't.
We’d sold both our places three months ago and bought one together. Neutral territory, though Flint objected to that description on the grounds that relationships weren’t military campaigns.
I’d pointed out that he’d clearly never been in one with me before.
We flipped a coin over closet space.
I won.
He remained suspicious.
Turnabout was fair play.
I watched him cross toward his desk. His shoulder moved almost normally now. Almost.
The bullet had passed through high enough to miss bone and anything immediately life-threatening. The concussion from striking the floor had actually kept him hospitalized longer.
He still had physical therapy twice a week. He still occasionally woke at night when the shoulder cramped. And sometimes I woke because his hand was searching the bed for me.
He never mentioned that. Neither did I. I just caught his hand.
The official investigation into the shooting had eventually identified the man who attacked Flint. He had a record, several outstanding warrants, and a remarkably detailed text-message history demonstrating that he'd been paid to delay Flint Carter.
Delay.
The prosecutor enjoyed that word almost as much as I did. Elliot Brewster's financial records had supplied the rest. Not everything. Enough.
Guy Reardon's second toxicology sample was recovered from federal evidence storage exactly where Brewster had said it was.
The results established the presence of a stimulant inconsistent with Guy's treatment record.
The chain of custody established who had handled it. The recovered hospital records established more.
Brewster's computer supplied the rest. Guy. Colin. Surveillance. Unauthorized access. Manipulated evidence. Years of files on the Auditor. Files within files.
Profiles revised so many times that eventually they seemed to describe less a person than the man Elliot Brewster had needed him to be.
There were hearings. Investigations. Internal reviews. People resigned. People were fired. Everyone insisted appropriate procedures had now been implemented.
I remained skeptical. Some things also survived trauma.
Then there was Simon.
I looked at the whiteboard. His name wasn't on it. It hadn't been on any whiteboard for six months.
That didn't mean I didn't think about him. The FBI questioned me for fourteen hours over three days.
CPD did another nine.
Alisha attended every minute.
They called me in once a week for three months. We were now down to just once a month. I offered them subscriptions to the blog. Not for free, because that wouldn’t be ethical, but just in case they wanted to keep tabs without wasting anyone’s time.
My story never changed because I didn't change it. Elliot abducted me. He took me to the warehouse. He used me to draw Simon there.
Simon arrived. Elliot held a gun to my throat. Elliot fired. Simon fired back. Elliot died. Simon put his weapon down. I picked up Elliot's.
Then came the question everyone cared about. What happened next?
I told them. I called 911.
Before that.
I looked toward the warehouse telephone.
Before that, Ms. McBryan.
I turned away from Simon. There was always a pause after that answer. Sometimes a very long one.
Finally, they’d ask, Why?
The first time they asked, I didn't have an answer. The second time, I had too many. By the twentieth, I understood the problem wasn't my answer. It was that everyone asking wanted one they could use.
Trauma. Fear. Confusion. Concussion. Manipulation. Gratitude. Attachment.
Any of those would have worked. Any of them could have turned what I'd done into something that happened to me.
So eventually I gave them the truth. Because I chose to.
Boy, they didn't like that. Neither did I. That didn't make it less true.
They asked whether Simon had threatened me.
No.
Whether he'd ordered me to let him leave.
No.
Whether he'd attempted to manipulate me into doing so.
Not at that moment.
Whether I believed he would have killed me if I'd tried to detain him.
I didn't know.
Whether I could have stopped him.
Maybe.
Whether I'd deliberately allowed a confessed killer to escape.
That one had taken me a while. Alisha had objected to the wording. The FBI had rephrased.
I finally answered anyway. I had a gun. He didn't. He stood there waiting. I turned my back.
Nobody asked the next question. Maybe because they didn't need to. Maybe because they already knew. I could have told him to stay. I hadn't.
That was mine.
Not Simon's.
Not Brewster's.
Mine.
I'd stopped trying to turn it into anything else.
“Mal.”
I blinked.
Flint stood beside his desk, watching me.
“What?”
“You disappeared.”
“I’m right here.”
“You know what I mean.”
I did. I picked up my coffee.
“Simon?”
The name didn't hurt anymore. That concerned me sometimes. “Yes.”
Flint waited.
He'd gotten very good at that. Maybe he'd always been good at it and I'd only recently learned how much silence he was willing to give me.
“I was thinking about the interviews.”
“The FBI?”
I nodded.
“You told them the truth.”
“Yes.”
“Still bothering you?”
I considered that. “No.”
His expression told me he didn't entirely believe me.
So I amended it. “Not the way it used to.”
That he accepted.
I turned back toward the board. “What bothers me is what happened afterward.”
“We've discussed this.”
“I know.”
“No sightings.”
“No.”
“No messages.”
“No bodies definitively connected to him.”
“Definitively being the operative word.”
“Yes.”
I traced one finger along the rim of my coffee cup. Six months. Simon had vanished. The FBI still called him the Auditor. CPD did too.
Most of the press had adopted the name. There were podcasts. Documentaries.
Books already announced by people who had never spoken to Simon and had apparently never met a fact they couldn't stretch into three hundred pages.
I had been offered an obscene amount of money to write one. I'd declined. I didn't know Simon well enough to write his story.
That sentence alone would probably have given Elliot an aneurysm.
“Mail came,” Flint said.
I glanced toward the door. “Anything good?”
“Two invoices, three solicitations, one handwritten complaint about your parking, and something from a source in Springfield.”
My interest sharpened. “Which source?”
“Delaney.”
I put down the coffee. “Why didn't you lead with that?”
“Because I wanted you to drink something before you developed a new obsession.”
I crossed the room.
Flint picked up a thick envelope.
“State contracts?”
“Looks like.”
“Prison system?”
“Maybe.”
I reached for it.
He pulled it back.
I stared at him.
“Coffee.”
“You cannot hold documents hostage.”
“Watch me.”
“These are fighting words, Carter.”
“Half the cup.”
“Extortion.”
“Hydration.”
“Coffee isn't hydrating.”
“Then you don't get to count it toward your daily fluid intake anymore.”
I narrowed my eyes.
He did the same.
I returned to my desk and downed half the coffee. He followed me, then handed me the envelope.
“Asshole.”
“Love you too.”
The words slipped between us so naturally I almost missed them.
Almost.
I looked at him.
He was already opening his laptop.
I smiled. Then I opened the envelope. Inside were copies of invoices, procurement forms, emails, and what looked like internal accounting records.
My pulse began to climb.
There it was. That feeling. The little shift in the universe when apparently unrelated facts brushed against each other and whispered that something wasn't right.
I spread the pages across the table.
Flint came over. “What do you see?”
“I don't know yet.”
“Good answer.”
I elbowed him.
He grunted, then reached for the first invoice.
We worked without speaking for several minutes. Dates. Payments. Names. Contracts. Nothing meant anything alone.
Context mattered. So did interpretation. That was the dangerous part.
I picked up a marker and went to the whiteboard.
“Yellow,” Flint warned.
I looked at him.
“We don't know yet.”
I stared at the red marker in my hand. Then at the board. Slowly, I put it back. I chose yellow.
Flint said nothing. He didn't need to.
I drew the first line.
For most of my career, I'd believed journalism was about finding the truth.
I still did.
What had changed was my understanding of how easy it was to mistake certainty for truth. How seductive a narrative could become once you invested enough of yourself in proving it.
Elliot had taught me that. So had Simon. Sometimes, I wished they hadn't. But facts didn't care what I wished. They didn't care who found them. They didn't care who buried them.
And they didn't become something else simply because the person telling the story needed them to.
That was why Flint and I had left the network. Not because we stopped believing in journalism. Because we believed in it too much to keep letting someone else decide what the story needed to be before we'd finished reporting it.
I stepped back from the board.
Flint studied what I'd written. “That's going to take weeks.”
“Probably.”
“Could be nothing.”
“Absolutely.”
“We might spend a month proving there isn't a story.”
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
Then his mouth curved. “Fuck,” he muttered.
I grinned. He knew me too well. I turned back to the board. “Let's find out.”