Page 203 of Chameleon Killer

“I know.”

I flexed my hands on the steering wheel. “We thought we were hearing him.”

“I know.”

“We weren't.” That pissed me off on a very primitive level.

“Probably not.”

I glanced toward her. “Probably?”

She gave me the same look she'd given Brewster approximately a thousand times.

“I never heard a voice,” she said. “That means I can’t confirm or deny that the voice you heard wasn’t his.”

Annoyingly fair. “That sounded like him,” I said.

“How would you know?” The implied how the hell would I know? echoed beneath her words.

“We wouldn't.” Because at the moment, neither of us could confirm having heard from the unsub. Auditor. Simon. Whatever name he wanted to use.

Traffic moved.

Mallory turned back toward the window.

“We don't know if the voice was generated from someone real,” she said. “Or assembled. Or whether he was speaking somewhere and they changed it. Or whether Simon even built the feed.”

“But we know someone did.” Because someone had gone a long way to set up that encounter, to facilitate a meeting between her and the unsub right under the nose of law enforcement.

And me. I had to admit, he’d done an excellent job of fooling me too.

“Yes,” she said with a sigh. “Simon seems to be a very clever man. Maybe too clever.”

Frowning, I looked at her.

“Flint, stop.”

“Stop what?”

“You’re reacting every time I say his name.”

Was I? I hadn’t paid attention to my reactions. “Simon.” I tested the sound of it. The name sounded different when she said it. Too personal. Far more personal than The Auditor. That pretentious as fuck name was preferable to Simon.

I grimaced. She was right. I was reacting. I didn’t like it. For every rational and irrational reason. I disliked that she knew it because… “He gave it to you.”

No amount of effort kept my voice even on that one.

Mallory let out a quiet sigh before she said, “Yes. He did.”

Yeah, I really didn’t like that at all. “Do you think it was his real name?”

“No,” she said without hesitation and I shot her a quick look. “He said his name was Simon, that part is true, but I don’t think it’s anymore his real name than the Auditor or unsub would be.”

“Then why give it to you at all?” It came out a hell of a lot more harshly than I intended. As she glanced at me, I raised one hand from the wheel in a gesture of supplication,

“I’m sorry—I said I wasn’t going to interrogate you.”

“It’s okay to be curious,” she said in a far more generous tone than I deserved.