Chapter 27
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
brEWSTER
The briefing room smelled like burnt coffee and recycled air—sterile enough to pretend nothing human ever happened here. Glass walls. Steel chairs. A screen mounted too high and too bright, as if clarity could be engineered by fluorescent light.
On the other side of the table, Washington had sent Deputy Director Warren Kline, Assistant U.S. Attorney Marjorie Feld, and Paul Reeve from DOJ Oversight—three suits with varying degrees of ambition and only a passing familiarity with blood on concrete.
Kline sat centered, hands folded like he’d already decided where the story ended. Reeve leaned back, eyes tracking optics more than evidence. Feld didn’t lean at all—pen poised, attention narrow, dangerous in her stillness.
They’d also sent Dr. Evan Roth, a behavioral analyst fresh enough to still believe people were predictable if you plotted them on the right axis. He kept glancing at the timeline like it was personally disappointing him.
Agent Hale sat off to my left, silent as ever.
He wasn’t watching the screen. He was watching the room.
Same rank. Same clearance. Same steady presence he’d had when he’d ordered me to take a walk the day Mallory went live.
He didn’t speak unless it mattered—and when he didn’t speak, it mattered more.
They’d brought me in to listen.
That was what they told themselves.
I took my seat without taking up space. Hands folded. Expression neutral. The kind of posture that made people talk more, not less. When men wanted to sound competent, they filled silence. When they wanted to sound certain, they overexplained.
I gave them silence.
The behavioral team stood at the front—two BAs and one of their supervisors, a woman with sharp eyes and a careful cadence. She clicked the remote and Colin Thorne’s name appeared on the screen beside a grainy still from a parking structure camera.
The room tightened around it anyway.
“We’ve reviewed the scene staging,” she began. Professional. Controlled. A practiced voice for practicing horrors. “The moral logic tracks.”
No one flinched at that phrasing anymore. Not after Masters. Not after the others. The Auditor had taught people how to speak about death like it was a spreadsheet.
“The victim fits the profile of prior targets,” she continued. “Public-facing by proximity. Gatekeeper role. Access to institutional friction. Someone who could slow oversight, bury an audit, stall exposure.”
A beat.
“The method does not.”
She clicked again. Photos appeared—document placement, angles, the ledger positioned with an almost religious precision. Familiar. Ritual.
Except—
Except.
“The staging is consistent,” she said. “The symbolism is consistent. But the delivery compresses the cycle.”
Five to seven days. That had been the rhythm. Not a rule, but a pattern the Auditor had kept like a heartbeat. Two days wasn’t escalation.
Two days showed impatience.
“This is faster than expected,” the second BA added, as if saying it gently might make it less true. “And it’s… cleaner.”
Cleaner didn’t mean humane. It meant controlled. It meant someone was optimizing.
I kept my face still and watched the table instead.
It wasn’t the screen that mattered. It was the reactions.
Kline leaned forward like he wanted it to be simple. Clean escalation. Clean narrative. The kind that let him say we acted and move on. A narrative the public could digest without choking.
The analyst scribbled “DEVIATION” in a notebook like naming it made it solvable.
The supervisor’s eyes flicked to me, then away. Feld’s didn’t. She watched my hands instead, like she already knew my face wouldn’t give her anything useful.
I didn’t.
I let them carry the weight of it.
They were calling it deviation.
I called it necessary.
Necessary things always looked wrong from the outside.
The supervisor cleared her throat. “To be clear—we’re not saying it’s not him. We’re saying the signature is consistent while the method suggests—”
“Pressure,” I said, finally.
Every head turned.
Not because I’d said something profound. Because I’d said something they could use.
She nodded once. Grateful. “Yes. Pressure. External stressors. Disruption.”
Disruption.
Their word for Mallory McBryan.
They didn’t say her name in that room, not with me sitting there. Not when Washington had already started circling the question of whether my proximity was operational or compromised.
They didn’t need to say her name.
I could feel it in the air, like ozone.
The screen changed again: timeline markers. A neat graphic of the Auditor’s “cycle,” as if murder obeyed formatting.
Masters. Then Thorne. Two days.
Compressed.
Reactive.
A thread pulled too hard.
The supervisor’s voice stayed even. “We’re concerned this indicates a shift into overt targeting. Less about moral instruction, more about leverage.”
Leverage.
Yes. Leverage.
Because Thorne hadn’t been leverage on the Auditor’s board.
Thorne was leverage on Mallory’s.
I watched the suit who’d leaned forward earlier. His pupils tightened. He liked leverage. Leverage meant strategy. Strategy meant a plan. Plans meant the illusion of control.
He wanted this to be the Auditor losing discipline.
He wanted to believe the killer was unraveling.
And I wanted to know why.
The supervisor paused. “Agent Brewster?”
I waited a beat too long on purpose. Let them sweat in the space where my answer should be.
Then I leaned forward, elbows on the table, voice low enough that it forced them to listen.
“What if someone wants us to think he’s escalating?”
Silence.
Not the polite kind.
The kind that snaps tension into place.
The analyst’s pen stopped moving. One of the suits blinked too slowly. The supervisor’s expression held—professional, measured—but her eyes sharpened by a fraction.
She didn’t ask me to clarify. She already understood what I’d done.
I’d given the room a different suspect without naming one.
A manipulation without a face.
A problem that couldn’t be fixed by arresting the right man and holding a press conference.
The second BA shifted, uncomfortable. “You think… copycat?”
I let the word hang there, ugly and convenient.
“Maybe,” I said.
The suit closest to the head of the table seized on it. “Or an accomplice. Someone in his orbit.”
Orbit. Like the Auditor was a sun and bodies were just debris.
I kept my gaze on the screen. “Or someone building a narrative.”
The supervisor’s eyes narrowed slightly. “A narrative for who?”
I didn’t look at her when I answered.
“For him,” I said. “And for us.”
Because the Auditor wasn’t just killing. He was speaking. He liked to be understood.
That was the part people kept missing.
They thought understanding made you soft. Sympathetic. Corrupt.
Understanding was how you predicted the next move and how you survived.
“He doesn’t rush,” I said, more to the table than to any one person. “He doesn’t need spectacle. He doesn’t need noise.”
I watched the suit’s face tighten at the last word. He wanted spectacle. Spectacle made headlines. Spectacle made funding. Spectacle made fear a commodity.
“The Auditor’s not sloppy,” I continued. “He’s deliberate. When he wants attention, he takes credit. When he wants fear, he makes it louder. When he wants control—”
I stopped there.
Because control was what had been forced.
Forced by Mallory going live. By Washington posturing. By the task force trying to box a man who didn’t fit.
Forced by me.
I didn’t say any of that.
I didn’t mention proximity. I didn’t mention access. I didn’t mention opportunity, or the simple truth that some deaths weren’t about what the victim had done.
Some deaths were about what they unlocked.
The supervisor leaned on the table. “So your assessment is… what? That this isn’t him?”
I kept my face unreadable.
“My assessment,” I said, “is that we should be cautious about assuming this change is organic.”
A reasonable statement. A responsible one.
A perfect shield.
Because I wasn’t asking this question because I was unsure.
I was asking it because the room needed a different shape—and I needed to see who noticed when it changed.
The suit at the head of the table tapped a finger on his folder. “We don’t have time to chase hypotheticals,” Kline said, already done with it.
Of course he said that.
Washington hated questions it couldn’t answer on a schedule.
“The public narrative is already forming,” he added, and there it was—the real fear. “If we start floating alternative theories, we look fractured. Weak.”
I didn’t argue hard.
I didn’t need to.
I let him have the soundbite. Let him think he’d shut me down.
Pushback meant predictability.
Predictability meant control.
The supervisor opened her mouth, then closed it again. Feld didn’t interrupt. She filed it away. She’d seen enough cases to know I wasn’t overthinking. She also knew Washington would call it that because admitting uncertainty made them look mortal.
The suit’s gaze cut to me. “Agent Brewster, we need you aligned.”
Aligned.
Like I hadn’t been the spine of this operation since the day they decided Mallory McBryan was both asset and liability.
“I understand,” I said, calm as frost.
And I meant it.
I understood exactly what they needed.
A divided task force.
A manageable narrative.
Mallory exposed—but not abandoned.
The Auditor was watching the wrong people.
Hale met my eyes once. Not agreement. Not accusation. Just acknowledgement.
Hale lingered as the others filed out—slow enough to be deliberate, not slow enough to be obvious.
“You’re not wrong,” he said quietly, eyes on the screen like the case might still be listening.
I waited.
“Just make sure,” he added, “that when this breaks, it breaks where you expect.”
He didn’t wait for my answer. Didn’t need one. He left with the door swinging shut behind him.
The meeting ended the way these meetings always ended—action items, reassurances, controlled optimism. Men in suits leaving with the belief that they were steering the ship because they’d said “course correction” out loud.
I waited until the room emptied.
Until the glass walls reflected only me.
Then I stood.
I didn’t go back to my team. I didn’t call Mallory. I didn’t call Hale, or Washington, or anyone who would ask me to be human about this. I went to the quiet room down the hall—the one with the locked file cabinet and the terminal that didn’t connect to anything public.
I pulled up Colin Thorne’s file.
His name stared back at me in a clean font.
A man reduced to facts.
I clicked through the photos again. The ledger. The placement. The timestamps. The way the parking structure camera cut just before the ledger entered the frame.
Deliberate.
I stared at the sequence until my eyes started to burn. Not because it was graphic. Because the killing was neat. Because the decision had been easy.
I shut the file and sat back, letting the chair creak in the empty room. They always assumed control slipped by accident. They thought the problem was that the Auditor was losing control.
They thought the danger was an escalating killer, an unraveling pattern, a public narrative spinning too fast to contain.
They were all looking for chaos. That was what made them easy to manage. The problem wasn’t that the Auditor was losing control. The problem was that someone else had decided it was time to take it.
Once control changed hands, it didn’t matter who thought they were in charge. It only mattered who was willing to burn everything down to prove it.