Chapter 11 #3
Accurate. I disliked how quickly she arrived there, however. “I also wanted to talk to you.” The information was more than I should have given, but it was also not a lie.
The remark froze her place for a moment, undercutting her triumph.
She pushed away from the desk and straightened, but didn’t approach me. “Elliot.”
“Mallory.”
She sighed, and some of the sharpened distance in her expression eased. “You could have led with that.”
“I called.”
“Repeatedly.” Then she grimaced as if acknowledging that I had tried to reach her and she was the reason I’d had to come in person.
“You didn’t answer.”
“I noticed.” It came out a little grimmer than she probably intended, but I didn’t doubt that the echo of Flint’s earlier response was deliberate.
I let it pass and held my peace while she studied me. Then with effort, she blew out a breath and relaxed her stance once more so she could lean against the desk.
“What did you want to talk about?”
There were several possible answers. Her security. The calls. The Auditor’s need for continued access to her. The ease with which Carter had inserted himself into the investigation as well as taking over shadowing her.
All true. But not all the truth.
So I settled on, “You’re too close to him.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “That’s an interesting accusation coming from you.”
“It isn’t an accusation.” I relaxed my own posture and crossed one leg over the other. I’d ceded a lot of ground for her when I took a seat and I let her hold it.
“Then what do you call it?”
“A professional assessment.”
She snorted. “Of course it is.” The softness vanished from her voice.
I had restored the distance between us almost as quickly as I’d reduced it. Necessary. “You’re altering your investigative behavior in response to direct contact from an offender.”
“You still haven’t proven there was direct contact.” Her eyes flashed.
“You haven’t denied it.”
“I’ve yet to confirm it either.”
“Mallory.”
“Elliot.” The deliberate repetition should have irritated me.
Instead, it reminded me of conversations before Thorne. Before Reardon. Before each exchange between us became a contest over information.
“You know what he does,” I said.
“I know what you believe he does.”
“He creates intimacy through exclusivity. He offers information no one else possesses, then convinces the recipient that access makes them exceptional.”
Her expression shifted. The lack of guilt didn’t give her away, but the fact she didn’t deny any of it did.
“He makes people feel chosen,” I continued. “That isn’t trust. It’s conditioning.”
“And you think that’s what he’s doing to me?” She eyed me and I could practically smell the irritation rolling off of her.
“I think he’s trying.” And succeeded. More than once. But I kept the last thought to myself.
“Just because he called me?” The admission came quietly, layered without emphasis in the question she turned on me.
My body reacted before my face did. Every muscle tightened, the physical response immediate and unwelcome. Confirmation should have satisfied me. It really didn’t.
“When?” Now I needed real answers.
Arms folded, she dropped her chin. Then with another sigh, she said, “Last night.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“In the newsroom?”
“In the conference room.”
I leaned forward and set both feet on the floor. “Was Carter present?”
“No.” The answer came too fast, she barely even let me finish my question.
“What did the Auditor say?”
Mallory’s gaze hardened. “You mean what did he ask?”
There it was again. The question. So, I made a motion to her to continue as I pulled out a little beat up notepad and my pen to jot down my notes. “What did he ask?”
“Why Guy survived.”
“And?” I prompted.
“And I started looking at why Guy survived.” She didn’t attempt to soften any of it with an apology.
“You followed his direction.” I met her bland look for a bland look.
“I examined a legitimate inconsistency.” Defensive? Perhaps a little.
“One he selected for you.” If I had to hammer this home, I would. She could not trust the Auditor and each time she did what he asked, she was getting in deeper.
“One everyone else ignored.” Another challenge.
Well, both of us could do that. “Including you.”
Her jaw tightened. A strike.
I continued before she could recover. “He didn’t give you evidence. He gave you a task.”
“He gave me a question.”
“To him, they’re the same thing.”
“No.” She shook her head. “To you, they’re the same thing.”
The correction was immediate. “How long was the call?”
“You’re not getting the recording.”
So there was one. “I didn’t ask for it.”
“You were going to.” She snorted.
“Yes.”
“No.” The refusal came without hesitation.
“Mallory, that recording is evidence.”
“It’s journalistic material.”
“It is communication from an active serial offender.”
“Alleged.” Another hard and swift correction. “We don’t even know if the source is the same person. And if I give it to you, it disappears into an active federal investigation.”
The last line had been a concession, the rest a smoke screen. “It gets analyzed.”
“Behind closed doors,” she snapped off the last.
“For operational reasons.” Ones she was quite aware of.
“Convenient.” She wrinkled her nose and made no attempt to disguise her irritation. Whether she was irked with me or herself? Undecided.
Sitting had become strategically useless, so I stood. While she tracked my movement, she didn’t surrender her position.
“He contacted you because he expected you to protect the call.” Point.
“He contacted me because he knew I would understand the question.” Counterpoint and the words left her before she could reconsider them.
She believed the contact reflected her intelligence. Perhaps it did. The most effective manipulation always contained enough truth to survive scrutiny.
“You believe he chose you because you’re capable of keeping up with him.”
Her expression closed. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t need to.”
For the first time since we entered the office, genuine anger flashed across her face.
Good.
“That’s what this is really about, isn’t it?” she asked. “Not access. Not security. You’re afraid he’s telling me something he won’t tell you.”
I refused to react. “He doesn’t tell anyone anything without a purpose.”
“That wasn’t a denial.”
“No. It was a warning.”
She stared at me. Then the anger receded, but far too quickly. Her seeming loss of control had been a gambit and a change in tactics.
“You’re right,” she said.
The agreement put me on alert faster than resistance would have. “About what?” I enunciated each word carefully.
“He had a purpose.”
She moved around the desk, not toward me but toward the glass wall. The newsroom beyond it had begun to wake. More lights. More movement. Witnesses without sound.
“He wanted me asking why Guy survived.”
“We’ve established that.”
“No.” She turned back to me. “We established that he asked the question. We haven’t established why he wanted it answered.”
“He wants to redirect the investigation.”
“Maybe.” But she shook her head.
So I asked the obvious question, “What other purpose would there be?”
“That’s one of the things Flint and I were discussing.” A reminder that the conversation had begun before I arrived and would continue after I left.
“What did the two of you conclude?”
“That Guy’s hospital stay matters.”
“We have his hospital records.”
“No,” she said. “You have some records.”
The distinction was immediate enough to sharpen my attention. “What does that mean?”
“It means the file is incomplete.”
Every thought in my mind stopped at once. But it was for less than an instant. With Mallory watching, I couldn’t afford to hesitate.
“What’s missing?” I asked.
“We were hoping you could tell us.” There it was. The reason she’d agreed to speak to me in private. She wanted to take advantage of my presence to get answers to her questions.
“Show me what you have,” I said. “I’ll see which gaps I can fill.” To learn what she knew, I had to let her believe she was the one asking the questions.
For now.