Page 263 of Chameleon Killer

On one monitor, the enhancement remained frozen on Mallory's discovery.

E. BREWSTER.

On another, Carter's blood stained the newsroom carpet.

On the third, a traffic camera showed an empty intersection where Elliot's sedan had passed forty-one seconds earlier.

He had taken her to force my hand. He believed that gave him control. Perhaps once, I would have admired the strategy.

Now I merely found it inefficient. Brewster wanted the Auditor. He wanted the monster he had spent years constructing.

He wanted proof that every compromise, every concealed fact, every line he had crossed had been necessary because something worse existed on the other side.

He wanted me to justify him. That was the final corruption of his obsession. He no longer needed to catch me. He needed me to be worse than he was.

Mallory would object to being used as bait. Violently, most likely. The thought almost made me smile. Then I remembered her disappearing into the trunk.

My smile vanished.

There would be questions later. Mallory always had questions. If I was correct about her, she would have one particularly important question for me when this ended.

I did not yet know how I would answer. But first, I had one of my own for Brewster.

How much of himself was he willing to destroy in order to prove I was the monster?

I shut down the monitors. I no longer wanted to watch. The FBI profiler had spent years trying to find me.

Tonight, I would save him the trouble.

Chapter

Twenty-Six

MALLORY

Awareness returned in pieces. Pain came first. A vicious pulse behind my left eye synchronized itself with my heartbeat, every throb sending something hot and sharp through my skull.

Then sound.

An engine followed by tires against pavement. The soft mechanical hum of a car moving at speed.

Then smell. Oil. Rubber. Carpet. Something metallic.

I opened my eyes.

Darkness.

For one deeply stupid second, I thought I had gone blind. Then the car hit a pothole. My shoulder bounced against metal and my head followed.

Pain exploded.

“Fuck.”

The word came out slurred.

I was in a trunk.

I was in an actual trunk of an actual car and—I just went still because the world started spinning. The very last thing I wanted to do was throw up all over myself in the trunk of the person who had kidnapped me.