Page 257 of Chameleon Killer

The executive conference room door opened. Flint Carter stepped into the corridor. He checked his phone. Mallory had been alone for almost fifteen minutes.

He seemed more than a little aware of it. His pace increased. I switched back to her feed. Still frozen.

Elliot had come prepared. This was not an emotional confrontation after the diner. Nor was it a desperate attempt to persuade her.

He had anticipated surveillance and used equipment to defeat it. Equipment he’d likely used when he dealt with Reardon. All he’d done was wait for Carter to leave her.

Had Elliot come straight back here? Had he anticipated Mallory needing to do research?

I had made an error. Not in believing Elliot Brewster fit all the parameters. No, my audit there had been quite thorough. No, I’d made an error in the timing.

I had expected him to move, but I hadn’t foreseen him moving this swiftly. Once upon a time, Elliot Brewster had wanted to catch me. He worked as profiler, local law enforcement had reached out to the FBI and he’d come in.

In the nature of things, he had his role to play—the law—and I had mine—I violated it. We were both armed with the best of intentions.

He hunted. I evaded.

If one were to label it, we played a game. As with any game, there were rules. The legal rules were not what was important. It was the behavioral ones.

The profiler in Brewster wanted to understand me so he could identify me. Then using those tools, gather the evidence to prove what I had done. To achieve all of this, he required answers.

In a way, there had been an intellectual purity to his work. A purity that required him to stare into the abyss that made up the souls of men and believe he could identify what stared back.

White male. Forty to fifty-five. Educated. Highly intelligent. Professionally successful or capable of appearing so. Organized.

Socially functional but emotionally isolated. No significant intimate relationships. A career that provided autonomy, mobility, and access to information.

Likely experience in law enforcement, medicine, law, finance, or another profession where rules and systems mattered.

Patient. Controlled. Narcissistic. Compelled to demonstrate intellectual superiority.

He had been wrong about some of it. Right about enough. That was always the danger of such men put onto the hunt for men like me.

Yet, profiles were never meant to be identities. They were a guide, a grouping of probabilities assembled from behavior to narrow possibility.

Brewster had known that once.

Somewhere along the way, though, he had changed.

It had happened so gradually, I was ashamed to admit it had taken me far too long to notice. His questions became assumptions. His assumptions became conclusions. Contradictory evidence stopped modifying the profile and instead became something that required explanation.

If I behaved outside his expectations, I wasn't disproving his theory—I was adapting.

If evidence contradicted his conclusions, I wasn't innocent of that particular act—I was misdirecting him.

If another killer entered the pattern, I hadn't been wrongfully credited with the murders—I had inspired them.

Each contradiction became further proof. It was an elegant trap. He had constructed a profile so complete that eventually there was nothing I could do that wouldn't fit inside it.

Including not being the man he thought I was.

Then Mallory entered the equation. And Brewster stopped wanting the truth. He wanted to be right.

In the past several weeks, he’d begun to decompensate. That was the word he would use. His objectivity deteriorated. His emotional regulation became inconsistent. Professional boundaries blurred beneath the weight of personal investment.

He would have recognized every warning sign in someone else. In himself, he merely identified them as necessary, a part of the job.

Denial, after all, was not merely a river in Egypt.