Chapter 8 #3
He brought both plates into the living room and set them on the coffee table. “For whatever you were going to do next.”
The answer caught me off guard. “When did you clear it?”
“Before the memorial.”
Eyebrows arched, I eyed him. “You knew I was coming back here?”
“No.” A faint smile curved his lips. “I just planned to make sure you did.”
“Why?” Curiosity prompted the question.
“Because I knew you weren’t done.” Simple. Matter-of-fact. Certainty. “If we weren’t here, we’d be at your place. I’ve got your back.”
The frank emotion there was almost too much. I looked away.
Flint retrieved a handful of markers from a mug on the bookshelf and offered them to me.
I chose black.
“What do you think your gentleman caller meant?” he asked. The faint thread of teasing in his voice didn’t quite disguise the tautness of irritated worry. He didn’t like the fact the Auditor reached out to me.
At the moment, I wasn’t entirely certain what to do with the emotion the contact generated so I focused on what I could do something about. I uncapped the marker. “That’s the problem.”
I wrote a sentence across the clean half of the board.
YOU FINALLY STOPPED LOOKING AT THE BODIES.
The words looked different once they occupied physical space. I underlined you twice. I thought he meant me specifically, not just us or the station.
Flint folded his arms. “He knows about the war room.”
I didn’t say anything as I studied the words.
“He knows the direction we shifted into, the questions we were asking.” The grim note in his voice wasn’t lost on me.
“We know he watches the broadcasts, and he’s hacked into our files before. He could just be following from a distance.”
“Don’t mouth words you don’t believe.” The grim note shifted to something more impatient. Impatient with me. When I glanced at him, he added, “He called within minutes of our paradigm shift.”
“I know.”
“Which suggests he’s not just watching you on air anymore.” The tension in Flint just seemed to stretch tighter and tighter the more he spoke.
“I know.”
“He’s inside the building.” He didn’t add despite all the security and the presence of the FBI.
“I know.”
“Mallory.”
“I said, I know.” I kept my focus on the whiteboard and not on Flint’s growing aggravation. Underneath all the gruffness was an element of fear. I couldn’t let that dictate what I did though, because the moment we let self-preservation derail this, we lost the story.
The marker squeaked against the board as I underlined bodies.
The dead didn’t speak. Not literally. I refused to believe he wanted me to consult a medium or something. No, when the Auditor contacted me, he was deliberate in his wording. He said no more than he needed and no less than required to get his message across.
So, the dead didn’t speak, but what did they do?
They left records.
Wounds.
Toxicology.
Trace evidence.
Medical histories.
Financial trails.
Every body was a document written in a language of life and death. A language the investigators parsed from the agents to the coroners to the profilers.
We—I—had treated them as a list.
Victim one.
Victim two.
Victim three.
Each reduced to a photograph, an occupation, a crime, and the manner in which the Auditor had punished them.
The evidence he left with them, that detailed their crimes once you deciphered it. All of it followed a pattern. It was how they identified who was a victim of the Auditor and who wasn’t.
Right. So…
“What do we actually know about the bodies?” I asked.
Still wreathed in an aura of protective irritation, Flint glanced at me. “Identity. Occupation. Some victimology. Cause of death.”
“Do we?”
“We know what the authorities released.” Then he added, “And what you could confirm and verify.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
I turned to the board and wrote:
CAUSE OF DEATH
TIME OF DEATH
DISCOVERY
AUTOPSY
TOXICOLOGY
IDENTIFICATION
CHAIN OF CUSTODY
“What do we have?” I asked.
“Press releases. Statements from local law enforcement. Brewster’s briefings.”
“Which means we have their conclusions.” Something I’d recognized in all that verbal sparring with Brewster. He knew a lot more than he was willing to share.
“Not the work behind them.” Flint blew out a long breath. “We verified what we could, but we had to go through channels.”
No investigator ever revealed everything they knew. Because what we knew, we reported on.
I drew a line beneath the list. “We’ve been investigating the serial killer and the pattern of deaths.”
With care, I wrote down the last names of all the victims. At this point, I had them memorized. “We reported on the vitals, the key data, and some of who they were survived by, but we didn’t dig much deeper than that.”
I hadn’t dug much deeper. Not once I had the scent. I’d been right—but I’d also let it distract me.
“I think it's time we investigate the victims.”
Flint crossed the room without answering. He took the marker from my hand and, beneath the list of names, wrote two words in block capitals.
WHY THEM?
I frowned. “That's what we've been asking.”
“No.” He capped the marker. “We've been asking what they did wrong.”