Chapter 12
Chapter
Twelve
MALLORY
By the time Brewster was ready to leave Flint’s office, the newsroom had gone from hitting the snooze alarm to fully caffeinated.
Phones rang. Producers shouted questions. Assistants and interns moved at speed to get everything done. Three televisions carried three variations of the same breaking-news banner while an anchor at the assignment desk practiced pronouncing the name of a town in eastern Europe.
Normal had returned around us.
Inside the office, nothing felt normal.
Brewster paused with one hand on the door. He had spent twenty-three minutes studying the copies of Guy Reardon’s hospital records and another six telling me why the gaps might not be gaps at all.
Administrative delay.
Third-party billing.
Protected psychiatric care. He never regained consciousness so would he need psychiatric care?
A transfer entered under a different provider number.
He’d given me possibilities faster than I could write them down.
Too fast.
“I’ll make some calls,” he offered.
“I already did.” He was a resource, of course. But he was not my only resource. Dropping that breadcrumb didn’t require a lot of effort.
His expression didn’t move. “To whom?”
“The hospital.”
“And?”
“They referred me to legal.” I gave a little shrug, because that was easy to call.
Clearly, Brewster agreed with me as he said, “That’s standard.”
Lips quirked, I folded my arms. “The insurance company referred me to fraud prevention.”
“That’s also standard.” Yes, he was pleased with those answers. Foreseeable or not.
Since he’d taken the bait, I took a swing. “Is everything standard when you don’t want to answer a question?”
His eyes held mine.
For one second, I saw Elliot rather than Agent Brewster. Tired. Frustrated. Too invested in what I thought of him.
Then he put the profiler back on. “Sometimes a bureaucratic failure is just a bureaucratic failure.”
“Hmm,” I commented noncomittally. “And sometimes it’s evidence.”
“Yes.” He opened the door. “Which is why you should let me handle it.”
There it was. Not us. Not even the Bureau. Me. As in him.
Yeah. I wasn’t willing to indulge that game any longer. If he wanted to treat me like a recalcitrant teen then he could live with the result. “I’ll let you know what I find.”
His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
I didn’t need to be a profiler to recognize irritation.
“Mallory.”
“Elliot.”
Whatever he’d intended to say disappeared behind a slow, measured breath. “Don’t contact the hospital again until I’ve spoken with the case agent.”
“Aren’t you the case agent?”
“I’m the profiler attached to the task force.”
Right. “That distinction seems to only matter whenever it’s convenient.”
“It matters legally.”
“Well that definitely answers one of my questions.”
His gaze sharpened. “Which question?”
Projecting just the faintest aura of smugness regardless of whether I actually felt any worked to soften up harder targets. “You won’t answer the ones you can’t control.”
He actually snorted. “That isn’t what I said.”
“No,” I said, agreeing with him. But rather than just accept my comment, he frowned slowly. My respect for him climbed back up a notch. He didn’t trust my graciousness. Smart. “You may not have said that, but it’s absolutely what you meant.”
For a moment neither of us moved as we stared at each other. We’d had sex in the kitchen at the safe house. Intense. Intimate. Inappropriate.
It hadn’t seemed to mean much at the time, to either of us. Yet the memory arrived uninvited and unwelcome. I’d let exhaustion, grief, and familiarity blur a boundary I should have never crossed. There had been no real discussion afterward.
As far as I could tell, Elliot had simply chosen discretion—at least when he wasn’t trying to control me. For me? It had been a mistake that I didn’t want to repeat. Particularly not while he was at the heart of this story.
And would be for as long as he kept running interference.
Another reason to avoid him, since every disagreement now seemed to indicate that I was reacting personally and not professionally. I didn’t want to examine my motives too closely, not with Elliot—Brewster, I reminded myself sternly—standing so close.
The intimacy between us seemed to balloon outward with abrupt force. The last thing I wanted was to advertise our choice. It was bad enough that I questioned my own judgment, I didn’t want everyone else—Flint—questioning every decision I’d made before and since.
Impartiality was easier to defend when you hadn’t already compromised it.
Brewster watched me long enough that I wondered which part of that thought had reached my face.
“I’ll call you,” he said in a tone I couldn’t quite decipher. It wasn’t eager or apologetic, but there was a suggestion of…
“I may not answer.” The response spilled right off my tongue. Should I have waited longer than a breath to respond? More? But he seemed to have expected it.
“I know.”
He left before I could decide whether the words were resignation or warning. The office door swung shut behind him.
Through the glass, I watched him cross the newsroom. People moved around him without acknowledging the tension he carried. At least, not directly to him. Instead, they glanced after him, then at each other.
Flint emerged from the corridor leading to the control room. He didn’t intercept Brewster. He didn’t look at him at all. His attention remained on me.
Brewster noticed, because of course he did. They appeared to be on a collision course as their paths crossed near the assignment desk. Neither man slowed. Neither spoke. Yet the space between them seemed to tighten as they passed.
Then Brewster disappeared into the elevators. Flint waited until the doors closed before entering his office.
“Well?” he asked and while he didn’t make a show of it, I could practically feel him looking me over as if he could decipher everything that went down in here.
I handed him the records Brewster had accessed and printed off for me.
He looked at the pages rather than me. “That bad, huh?”
Raising my eyebrows, I paused mid-pace back to my cold coffee. “What?”
“You alphabetized the records,” he deadpanned. “Well, you put them in order by provider—“ His tone grew even dryer as he paged through. “Then date, record type, and…”
I held up my hand. “I get it, but I like order.”
“Yeah, you’d have liked to throw something more.” Humor kissed the words as he circled his desk to review what few answers Brewster provided.
“I wasn’t going to throw anything.” Okay, that might have come out a bit snottier than I intended it too but I wasn’t prone to temper tantrums.
“Of course not,” he said without glancing at me. “Not in my office.” His mouth shifted at one corner, but the expression didn’t become a smile.
I stared at him. He ignored me.
Well, he ignored it until he set the papers down on the center of his blotter then glanced at me all business again. “What did he say?”
“That missing records aren’t necessarily missing.” I couldn’t even repeat the comment without rolling my eyes.
“Pithy.” Flint snorted. “Did he explain why ‘missing’ records aren’t necessarily missing?” He air-quoted the first missing and delivered the second in a snark-filled tone.
Yeah. Flint got it.
Blowing out a breath, I folded my arms. “He gave me six possible explanations.”
The corners of his mouth twitched again as he shook his head. One finger pressing down on the stack of papers, he met my gaze. “How many did you ask for?”
“None.”
Flint nodded once. The response was so slight I almost missed it.
“What?”
“He came prepared.” Flint focused on the stack of papers, flipping through them again.
“No,” I disagreed. “He thinks quickly.”
“You realize that both can be true,” it came out more of an idle observation than a real question. But I could feel the weight of his regard whether he looked at me or not.
I looked at the records again. Brewster had identified every plausible explanation before I’d finished describing the gaps. That didn’t make him guilty of anything except competence in doing his job.
The idea of using his competence against him was absurd. It was evidence. His discomfort and subtle irritation with me pushing him away wasn’t either.
“He offered to make calls,” I said, testing the statement’s veracity against my own observations.
“Helpful.” Flint wasn’t looking at the papers anymore.
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” It was more of a rheotorical question. Flint didn’t believe him. I didn’t even have to ask him. It was clear in his approach and the way he was using softball questions to test me. “And it would be, if I believed he intended to tell me everything he learned.”
Or anything for that matter. Brewster was extremely frugal in the way he measured out the information he was willing to share.
One fruitless grain after another.
Circling the desk, Flint came to stand on this side of it so he could lean back against the desk. He was closer to me, but he’d left more than enough space between us.
Lately he had become very good at giving me space. Speaking of that, I’d become too aware of what he did when he did too.
“What happened before you got to the records?” he asked.
“Meaning?”
“You were in here longer than it takes to discuss a half-dozen missing pages.” It wasn’t an accusation. So why did it feel like one?
“Fourteen.”
His eyebrows rose.
“Fourteen missing pages,” I clarified.
“I meant the number of explanations.” The implied smart ass hung unspoken off the end of that sentence.
“I know.” I shouldn’t enjoy needling him so much.
His almost-smile returned. I hated that I wanted to keep it there.
So what did I do? “He knows the Auditor called,” I said.
That erased the smile. “How?”
“He profiled me.” That still rankled.
At least Flint’s snort of derision made me feel better.
“He saw the pivot in the timeline,” I said, motioning to the conference room. “After that, he concluded I had to have received new information to explain the shift in focus.”
“And you confirmed it?”
I shrugged, turning away to pace to the window and looking out at the newsroom. “Eventually.”