“Your unsub’s made his move. You want to protect me? Fine. You want to monitor me? Go for it. But don’t confuse me for a civilian. I’m not some shaken survivor. I’m in this.”
“Youwerein this,” Brewster corrected. “Now you’re part of a crime scene.”
Flint swore under his breath, low and sharp.
I turned away from both of them. My pulse was hammering, but not just from anger. There was something else stirring—unspoken, heat-laced. Dangerous.
Flint’s voice cut the air behind me. “She’s not your tool, Brewster. And she’s not your bait.”
Brewster’s reply was steady, measured. “No. She’s the leverage.”
That scared me more than anything else he’d said this morning. Was he right? God, it was still morning. It wasn’t even seven yet.
I was halfway through my second cup of coffee when Brewster changed lanes again. That should have warned me, butI was still off-balance from the last volley—what do you like on a date?—and the ripple that still hadn’t entirely cooled between the three of us.
“You’re not safe,” he said, returning with his own cup of coffee.
He didn’t preface it. No transition. Just dropped it like a hammer between us.
I didn’t look at him this time. “No one in this business is.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
I sighed. “Then get to it.”
“The victims were all men,” he said, voice even. “But you’re still the one who got the finger. You’re still the one who got the note.”
“That’s a message, not a threat.”
“You sure about that?”
“I’m not the profile. You know that. They were all male. All public-facing. High-profile investigative types or law enforcement. You can’t just toss me into that mix and hope it sticks.”
“Except now it’s starting to.”
I turned to face him, arms folded tight across my chest. “You think he’s going to suddenly start killing women? That’s not a small escalation. That’s a whole new chapter.”
He tilted his head. “Unless it’s not.”
“What?”
“Unless the escalation already happened. Unlessyouare the shift.”
I didn’t answer.
Because the thing was—I’d wondered that too.
From the beginning, the pattern had been neat. Precise. Men in power, torn down, gutted, left in mockery of their status. But something had changed. It was hard to see it in the forensics, harder still in the victim pool.
But his tone?
The tone in the letters had changed.
They weren’t just intense or angry anymore. They were... curious. Fixated.
Yes, they’d started comingaftermy segment on the Cold Creek case. After I’d called out the pattern the local cops had buried.AfterI’d said, live on air, “someone wanted us to miss this.”
I hadn’t said it like a challenge.
