Chapter 11
Chapter
Eleven
brEWSTER
Sleep had become an administrative suggestion sometime around my third year chasing the Auditor.
Coffee, paperwork, and the illusion that exhaustion sharpened instincts carried most agents for a while. Eventually you stopped pretending your body agreed.
Chicago was still dark when I pulled into the underground employee lot at the Cartwright building. Flint Carter’s jeep was in the secure lot. Of course it was.
Where Mallory was, Flint would not be far behind. She’d gone back to his apartment with him. She wasn’t going home and she didn’t want an FBI detail.
She processed her stories through immersion. The deeper the mystery, the less likely she was to leave it behind in the newsroom. The hungriest of journalists lived their stories—every moment of their lives. Some chased deadlines and headlines, Mallory? She chased patterns and answers.
I shut off the engine and sat in the quiet dark of the underground lot. Security cameras were located in every corner. We’d added a few, some disguised as light fixtures to maximize coverage.
No blindspots. We couldn’t afford them. Not with the unsub’s continued interest in Mallory.
She hadn't returned my calls. None of them. Not unusual. Not lately. Ignoring several of them in a row was notable. People presumed that profilers looked for tells.
Some might, but I wasn’t one of them. My experience dictated that I look for changes. In order to notice those changes, however, you needed a baseline of established behavior. Once you had that, deviations were notable.
In this case, Mallory answered my calls when she wanted information. She ignored them when she wanted control. The fact she’d gone into near-blocking mode said something had changed.
Something significant.
I wanted to know what.
My badge took me all the way to the newsroom floors. The overnight assignment desk looked half asleep. Two producers argued quietly over a rundown. A sports anchor was visible in the kitchenette reheating something that smelled terrible.
My arrival generated a beat of notice, a glance, and then away. I was starting to be a familiar figure here. I angled toward Mallory’s desk in the big room, but slowed when I caught sight of Flint standing in the door to a conference room.
Normally, the glass walls allowed everyone to see who was in there. Butcher block paper covered every inch of the glass. Interesting choice.
The door was still open as Flint disappeared inside so I changed my approach to reach the open door. Both stood near the big whiteboard that they’d covered in questions and data points.
Neither of them noticed me immediately. They weren’t talking either. They were looking at the same section of the timeline.
Flint tilted his head and said something in a low tone that didn’t carry. She answered him in a similarly quiet voice. They didn’t so much as glance at each other, their attention was fixed—on the same thing?
They weren’t arguing, because even as she traced some path with her finger, he picked up and followed it to another area of the board. They were communicating without eye contact or even a lot of words.
The comfort between them seemed to have grown. Holding my position, I studied what they were studying. The names on the board were all victims. She wasn’t focused on any of the early targets, but on the most recent.
One crimson colored nail tapped lightly at the board just under Reardon’s name and as Flint shifted, I caught the timeline they’d begun to construct.
Her requests for comments and information had all circled around the paperwork found with Reardon and how he fit the established pattern of motives exhibited by the Auditor’s previous victims and the evidence he left with them.
The more I watched them, the less I believed this line of inquiry had originated with Mallory.
Yesterday she'd been asking why Guy fit.
Today she was asking why he'd survived.
That wasn't a refinement.
It was a pivot.
Investigators changed questions for one of three reasons: new evidence, outside influence, or hard-earned insight.
Mallory hadn't received new evidence.
Which left two possibilities.
I didn't particularly like either of them.Why else would she abandon a seemingly productive investigative path.
The Auditor understood something most offenders never did.
Murder wasn't what gave him influence.
Attention did.
Once he occupied enough of someone's thinking, they began organizing their decisions around him. They could continue to call it an investigation, but it wasn’t. It was just adaptation.
The evidence was merely the mechanism.
The real objective was cognitive.
Once investigators began asking his questions instead of their own, he'd already won.
I’d seen it happen time and again. The agents assigned to his case, the police detectives who got involved, all eventually organized their thinking on the path he laid out for them.
That was the infection. They stopped asking the questions to solve the crimes and started asking the questions the Auditor wanted answered. Careers had begun to suffer because of the choices those investigators made.
More than one had been reassigned or put on administrative leave. The persuasive power of the unsub who built cases that worked with facts and figures proved almost too compelling.
Now I watched Mallory erase part of the board and rewrite Guy's timeline from memory. Like so many before her, she was listening to the unsub. She was following his question, not the evidence.
Of course she was, her obsession had been clear from the beginning. Deliberate, focused, and intense, she thrived on digging all the way to the bottom of a story no matter the cost.
She also understood the power of information and investigation. The Auditor valued intelligence and Mallory possessed that kind of intelligence in dangerous quantities.
The interaction followed a familiar trajectory. Intelligent people challenged the Auditor. Challenged and fascinated him. He’d begun a correspondence with her far earlier.
Then he set out tests. Tests she’d quite probably passed because with each contact, the Auditor escalated and so did Mallory. She had her teeth into this hunt and she wasn’t going to let go.
Flint wasn't watching the board. He was watching Mallory watch the board. Every time she hesitated, his eyes shifted before hers did.
He wasn't leading her thinking. He was following it closely enough to recognize when she'd found something. That kind of synchronization took time.
Flint stood right at Mallory's shoulder, protective and reliable. He was ready to shield her, but he was also backing her up—as a sounding board.
The Auditor wouldn't overlook that. Why couldn’t they understand that I knew the Auditor? I knew him better than they ever could.
He rarely reacted emotionally to obstacles.
He studied them. Measured them. Determined whether they altered the outcome.
If they did...They disappeared.
The Auditor wasn't interested in admiration. Admiration was passive. He wanted engagement. He wanted someone intelligent enough to argue with him.
Currently, Mallory wasn’t reporting on him. She'd started thinking with him. That was the danger.
Correspondence became dialogue. Dialogue became collaboration. Collaboration became dependency. Somewhere along that progression, investigators stopped trying to catch the Auditor.
They started trying to understand him. Very few realized the distinction before it was too late.
Satisfied that I’d seen enough, I stepped into the conference room. “Morning.”
One word. No questions. No accusations. Just enough of a stimulus to interrupt the pattern.
Both of them reacted.
Mallory twisted and looked at me first. Half a second. Long enough to register surprise. Not long enough to suggest guilt.
Her shoulders remained loose. Her breathing didn't change. Whatever she was thinking, she wasn't afraid of me.
Interesting.
Flint reacted differently. His head turned immediately, but he didn't look at me. He checked on Mallory. Not a what do we do? But more of an are you all right?
She gave him nothing. Not a nod. Not a shake of her head. Nothing at all. Yet, he relaxed anyway. That nanosecond of interaction told me more than either of them could realize.
They had reached the point where communication and comfort no longer required signals. Not when they already possessed the kind of trust you couldn’t build overnight. However, when that trust already existed, it could deepen.
My arrival had interrupted the conversation.
Neither of them rushed to explain what they'd been discussing. In my experience, people volunteered information when they believed they controlled it. Silence usually meant they believed the information belonged to someone else.
I let my eyes drift to the board instead of either of them. “You're rebuilding Guy Reardon's timeline.”
Mallory answered. “We're trying.”
“We?” I knew who, but I still wanted to measure what they said and how they said it.
Flint folded his arms. “I'm helping.”
No defensiveness. No apology. A flat statement defining his presence and role.
Interesting.
“I see.”
Silence again. Neither attempted to redirect the conversation. Neither attempted to justify the change in focus. If they expected criticism, they weren't showing it.
I stepped closer to the board. “Previously you were trying to determine how Reardon fit the Auditor's victimology.” I let the sentence hang as I examined the information they had detailed up there. “Now you're asking why he survived.”
Neither answered. Not immediately.
Another useful datapoint. If I had made a factual error, they would likely correct it immediately. It’s instinct to correct the factually incorrect.
Shifting my attention to Mallory, I studied her fierce expression. She didn’t wear a game face so much as an assessing one. While I was studying her, she was definitely studying me.
“What changed?”
Her eyes flicked toward Flint. She wasn’t seeking permission. Maybe deflection? Then Flint answered first.
“We exhausted the previous line of inquiry.”