Page 186 of Chameleon Killer

Simon.

I didn't smile. That would have been cruel. I wasn't trying to hurt him. I was trying to understand why his questions had become so narrow.

“Did he talk about me?”

I almost blew out a long breath, because there. Finally. We had a real question. Not Reardon. Not toxicology. Him—Brewster.

Alisha spoke before I could. “My client will not answer that.”

Brewster didn't look at her. He kept watching me. “Did he?”

I stared back, letting the silence balloon until the pressure threatened to suffocate all of us. “No comment.”

His thumb pressed against his finger again. Once. Hard. Leaving the skin white with the intensity of the pressure. “What did he say?”

“No comment.”

“Did he accuse me of anything?”

“No comment.”

“Did he tell you I concealed evidence?”

“No comment.”

“Did he say I knew why Reardon died?”

The room seemed to contract by several feet. Brewster had just supplied the question. I hadn't. Simon hadn't either. Not exactly.

I let my head tilt. Slowly. “Do you?”

For the first time all night, Brewster lost his rhythm. Only for a fraction of a second.

But I saw it. So did Flint. His hand closed over my thigh beneath the table. Not hard.

It was warm and firm. An order. Stop. I had marked the target, better to let it stew than to turn it into a war.

I didn't look at him while Brewster recovered. Flint wasn’t wrong.

Brewster tried to shift the tone. “I'm asking whether he told you that.”

“And,” I countered. “I'm asking whether you know why Guy died.”

“Ms. McBryan,” one of the federal agents near the wall said, “Agent Brewster isn't the subject of this interview.”

I glanced toward him. “Maybe that's the problem.”

Brewster's eyes flashed. It wasn’t just anger this time, it was something sharper. Flint’s fingers dug into my thigh and I finally looked at him.

He gave the smallest shake of his head.

Enough.

The instinct to push battled with the trust I had in the man whose hand I covered with my own.

Trust won.

I sat back.