I hesitated—just a fraction. Long enough for the truth to show. “No.”
For a beat, his gaze sharpened, as if he were registering the fact that he’d come close to being excluded. Then he took another sip of his coffee.
When his eyes lifted again, they were darker. Not displeased. If anything—he seemed almostsatisfied.
“Good,” he said and there was another stroke of approval in his voice.
I bristled on reflex. “I wasn’t looking for your permission.”
“I know,” he replied, a faint note of amusement touching the edge of his voice. “That’s why I’m applauding the call.”
He leaned forward.
The movement was subtle, but it collapsed the space between us anyway. The table was still there, solid and immovable, but the distance felt negotiable now. There was something conspiratorial in the way his attention narrowed, like we were standing on the same side of a line no one else could see.
“The Unsub found a way to connect with you,” Brewster said quietly, “that had nothing to do with spectacle.”
“He did,” I said, draining the last of my coffee and wishing it were something stronger.
“What does that tell you?”
I felt his focus sharpen, tracking me the way he tracked everything—cataloging shifts in posture, micro-expressions, breath. I reached for the same neutrality I wore on air, the mask that kept reactions from becoming tells.
“That he’s smarter than we initially modeled,” I said. “And that his intelligence isn’t linear.”
“How so?” A challenge. Clean. Deliberate.
“Because he identified an indirect access point and exploited it,” I said, brushing my thumb along the edge of my phone. “He bypassed the obvious channels. No email. No message. No overt signal. He used the archive process—annotations, internal cross-referencing, QA workflows. Systems people trust because they’re boring.”
I paused as Brewster stood, reclaiming the coffee pot. The domesticity of the gesture felt absurdly intimate in the middle of this conversation. He refilled my cup without asking. Set it back in front of me.
I pressed my lips together.
“It tells me he understands institutional blind spots,” I continued. “He knows what people monitor and what they don’t. No one reads transcript annotations for threats. They’re looking for commas and clarity. Not conversation.”
“No,” Brewster said slowly, returning the carafe to the hot plate. “They aren’t.”
“It also suggests he’s familiar with investigative procedure. Forensics. Countermeasures.” I lifted my gaze to him. “Which means this wasn’t luck.” Before he could misread that as admiration, I added, “But we already knew that. Otherwise he wouldn’t still be active.”
That earned me a look—dry, unamused, edged with something like reluctant self-awareness.
“Thank you for that reminder,” he said. “I’d almost forgotten.”
“Self-pity is a bad look on anyone,” I told him.
A corner of his mouth twitched.
“And yet,” he said, eyes steady on mine, “you’re still sitting here.”
The implication lingered—unspoken, unmistakable.
So did the fact that neither of us had moved.
“Being a captive audience might have something to do with that,” I said, keeping my tone dry.
He studied me for a beat, then deadpanned, “Ouch.” One corner of his mouth tipped higher. “You wound me.”
“You’ll live.” The humor evaporated before it could linger.
