Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
FLINT
The crime scene tape and the blood were both gone. That should have made the executive floor feel more normal. Unfortunately, all they’d done was give it this feeling of being staged like a facade to cover the grimy reality.
Facilities had replaced the carpet outside Guy Reardon's office before sunrise.
Fresh paint covered the wall where paramedics had leaned equipment.
The cracked glass panel beside the door had been swapped out so perfectly that only someone who'd seen the shatter in the aftermath would know it had ever happened.
Corporate sent down word that the newsroom should move on from this part. They really backed up that edict by not returning any executives to this level. Sure, made total sense. The idea that we would move on from this story was ridiculous. We were in the news business, this was our job.
I unlocked Guy's office and stood in the doorway.
For two weeks, the FBI had photographed every square inch of the room. They'd dusted for prints, seized computers, cloned hard drives, subpoenaed emails, and copied enough surveillance footage to keep a team of analysts busy for months.
Which left me with one increasingly irritating question.
How the hell had anyone managed to attack Guy Reardon in the middle of one of the most secure buildings in downtown Chicago?
Every hallway had cameras.
Every elevator required badge access.
Visitors checked in with security downstairs, surrendered identification, received temporary credentials, and were escorted through restricted floors.
The newsroom itself never really slept.
Assignment editors.
Producers.
Interns.
Camera operators.
Anchors.
Not to mention all the damn FBI agents coming in and out since they’d hijacked Mallory’s schedule.
Someone was always walking past Guy's office.
Someone should have seen something.
Someone should have heard something.
Instead... Nothing. Bupkis. Total fucking mystery. No screams, struggles, or even a witness to say what happened.
Not until Guy was found gravely wounded in his own office, as though violence had waited politely until no one happened to be looking.
Then, after they were done, they stepped out as neatly as they came in.
My sources said they couldn’t even narrow down when the attack occurred to something less than a six to eight hour window of time.
There was no such thing as a perfect crime. Nor were there stories that just lined up perfectly, all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed.
I walked inside the office slowly. The FBI hadn't left much undisturbed. They’d cleared out all of his files, his hard drives, everything that wasn’t bolted down or the network’s lawyers couldn’t block.
What was left behind was an immaculate, but empty desk. They’d even taken the little lamp.
His framed MBA diploma still hung beside the window. Industry awards occupied an entire shelf, flanked by photographs from shareholder galas, advertising summits, and media conferences where he'd spent years preaching audience metrics, quarterly growth, and the business of broadcasting.
Guy loved news. Just not as much as he loved profitable news. He wasn't the journalist in the room. He was the executive who figured out how to monetize the stories and the people who reported on them.
We'd argued often enough. He wanted spectacle. I wanted substance. Mallory wanted both. She'd somehow managed to deliver both. Guy had really wanted to make a mint off of the whole Auditor thing. Now the network wanted to run in the other direction.
My gaze drifted toward the leather visitor chairs. According to the official timeline, Guy had met with someone between scheduled executive calls.
No one knew who. His secretary said he blocked out the time himself—a habit he was known for—and didn’t give her any information on it. She was also not here the day of the attack.
No one could explain how that visitor entered. Or left. The security footage offered nothing. Camera twelve outside the executive corridor had glitched for exactly eleven minutes.
Long enough for someone to appear and then disappear with no one the wiser. The glitches were a regular, albeit not quite predictable occurrence that maintenance had been working on.
The FBI labeled it unfortunate timing. Particularly because there were multiple documented cases of the cameras failing randomly around the building. Tech currently thought it was related to backups and transitioning from one server to another.
I called it all pretty damn convenient.
"You're doing it again."
I smiled before I turned around. Only one person I knew could recognize overthinking from twenty feet away.
"You've been staring at that chair for five minutes." Mallory leaned against the doorway, one shoulder resting against the frame as she balanced two coffees and a paper bag from Rossi's.
Twenty-four hours had passed since her television interview. The polished version of her—the careful makeup, the studio wardrobe, the answers measured down to the syllable—had been abandoned. This was the Mallory I knew.
Dark jeans. A charcoal sweater with the sleeves pushed to her elbows. Press credentials already clipped to her waistband. Her dark hair was pulled into a loose ponytail that looked as though she'd given up fighting it halfway through the drive into work.
She looked tired. Most people noticed and commented on her eyes first. I saw the shadows beneath them. The last few weeks had stolen hours from her. Hours of sleep. Hours of respite. Hours of her life.
Despite all of that, she looked more determined than she had before Guy was attacked. Which, I supposed I should find encouraging, but it was all rather terrifying.
She lifted one of the coffee cups. "You looked like you were losing an argument."
"With an empty chair?" I snorted as I raked a hand through my hair.
She glanced toward the visitor's seat in front of Guy's desk.
"Who's winning?"
"So far?" I sighed. "The chair."
That finally earned me a real smile. It was small, a little crooked with the right side of her mouth tilting a little higher than the left. It was personal, not professional. A genuine smile, not one she used to put on a show.
She crossed the room and handed me the larger coffee. Black filled right to the brim to maximize the space available. Exactly the way I took it. Black coffee could be found pretty much everywhere, good or bad, at least I had something to drink.
"I figured you'd be here."
They’d released it the day before and the corporate cleaners had swept in fast. “That predictable, am I?”
“Maybe,” she said without an ounce of ego. “You’re not that much of a mystery, Flint. At least not to me.”
She took a sip of her own coffee and I hid a smile by taking a drink of mine. Scalding hot so it burned its way down, strong enough to strip paint, and brewed as dark as my soul.
Damn good stuff.
After I finished that first swallow, she reached into the bag and pulled out a blueberry scone. “I made sure to grab your favorite.”
She set the bag down on the desk, then slid up to sit next to it as she served out the pair of scones. Rossi’s ran out of those within the first hour of opening. She’d had to make time to get them.
“Thanks,” I said as she nudged one over to me.
Toasting me with her coffee cup she waved off my gratitude. "Neither of us remember to eat when we’re chasing something.”
There it was, the thing Blythe had never understood. Or maybe, I was doing my ex-wife a disservice. She might have understood it too well.
"You care more about your investigations than you do your marriage."
The sadness tinging her accusation had kept it from being volatile or contentious. It was hard to feel attacked when she was the one who was miserable.
The worst part was that she hadn't been entirely wrong. I could hardly offer up a defense when I'd missed anniversaries chasing sources. More, I’d canceled vacations because city hall suddenly started talking.
I spent nights sleeping on newsroom couches waiting for one last confirmation before going to print. The story had always come first.
Until Mallory.
Not because she asked me to choose. She’d never ask that of me. I’d come damn close to asking her to choose her life over the story and there was regret in me for having done that.
She understood the pull of the story because she felt it too, which meant I never had to apologize for speaking the language that had eventually cost me my marriage.
Journalism never stopped being my first language. I'd simply met the first person who spoke it as fluently as I did. Neither of us apologized for chasing a lead at midnight. Neither of us complained when dinner became takeout over evidence boards.
Neither of us expected the other to choose between the story and understanding why the story mattered. Mallory didn't compete with me for the story, she completed it with me.
That was a dangerous thought and I buried it before it could take root.
"So," she said, setting her coffee down and taking a bite of her scone. "Tell me what doesn't fit."
I smiled. Why ask me what I was thinking? She wanted to know what I'd found.
Coffee in hand, I crossed to the whiteboard mounted beside the bookshelf. It was so damn clean, it practically gleamed.
"I'm thinking we've been asking the wrong question."
Her eyebrow lifted. "Which is?"
Setting my drink down on the shelf, I uncapped a marker.
“Everyone is asking who killed him?” I studied the blank board like the answers were right there waiting for me to scratch them off. “But what if that’s not the story?”
She watched without interrupting as I wrote Guy’s name on the board.
"Guy wasn't random."
"No." Her easy agreement should have surprised me and maybe it would have once upon a time. But I was just vocalizing what she’d seen.
I added another name. "Colin wasn't random either."
"No." Genuine regret filled that syllable and I spared her a look. She didn’t want comfort right now. Wouldn’t accept it even if she did, not when we still had a story to follow.
"Neither of them really fits the Auditor's victimology." I glanced at her now and waited.
Her eyes narrowed and I swore I saw what happened in real time as she followed the thoughts to the inevitable conclusion.
"The question isn't why the Auditor killed them." She blew out a breath.
I nodded. "The question is..."
She finished it with me. "...who needed everyone to believe that he did."
I wrote one word to the right of Colin Thorne's and Guy Reardon's names.
MOTIVE
Mallory abandoned her perch on the desk and crossed to the whiteboard. She took the marker from my hand without asking.
One by one, she wrote beneath it.
Who benefits?
Short-term. Long-term.
Who profits?
Follow the money.
Who controls the narrative?
Media. FBI. Corporate. Killer.
Who's lying?
She underlined the last one twice before stepping back.
A sense of satisfaction invaded me. Because there she was, there was my Mallory. Her tenacity was part of why she’d become the best investigative reporter I’d ever worked with, the rest was how she went after those stories.
She never chased headlines, not when she could chase the contradictions. The places where the story didn’t fit.
"The problem with that last one," I said, lifting my coffee, "is everybody lies."
She nodded. "Which means we stop listening to what they say."
I looked at the board. "And start looking at what they do."
A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. "Now we're getting somewhere."
"You take financials." I uncapped another marker and drew a line down the middle of the board.
She nodded immediately. "I'll pull every public filing connected to Reardon. Corporate disclosures, shell companies, campaign donations, board appointments. If somebody made money off his death, I want to know who."
We had interns, a lot of them. There were a lot of rocks to kick over and it was tedious as hell, but sometimes that was the only way to find the right thread.
In the meanwhile, I’d do what I could to answer the questions up there. "I'll work the people."
She looked over. "Sources?"
"Old ones." I shrugged. "Newsroom. Executive floor. Security. Facilities. Somebody saw something they don't realize matters."
"What about the FBI?"
I snorted. "What about them?"
She smiled into her coffee. "They're not going to tell us anything."
"No."
"But they'll tell Brewster."
I didn’t care for how she said his name. Hell, I didn’t like the guy in general, but I wasn’t going to make this about him. So I just shrugged. "They always do."
She tapped the marker thoughtfully against her chin. "So we let Brewster investigate the killer."
"And you and I will investigate the investigation." Us against them. The two of us working together just the way we should have been.
Her eyes lit. There it was. The spark I'd been waiting to see since Colin had been killed. "We're not chasing a murderer anymore," she said.
I looked back at the names on the board. "No." I circled Guy Reardon's name and then Colin’s. "We're chasing the reason someone wanted their murders to look like his."
Beyond hurting you. I kept that last thought to myself.
“Could get messy,” she murmured. “Network probably won’t approve it.”
No, they probably wouldn’t. “Good thing I’m the news director then.” I saluted her with my coffee and a small smile turned up the corners of her mouth as she raised her own cup.
We didn’t need to say what came next. If we were right, the story wasn't about a serial killer anymore. It was about someone who understood him well enough to weaponize his reputation.