Page 258 of Chameleon Killer

Mallory made it worse.

She questioned him. Resisted him. Stopped trusting him.

Then she did something Elliot Brewster could tolerate even less than being wrong.

She began discovering the truth without him.

A man could pursue answers obsessively and still remain rational. A man who needed another person to validate those answers as pure truth had introduced ego.

And ego corrupted everything.

Mallory had seen it. Her desire for truth overwhelmed her need to cover for others, to buy a story, or to just accept anything at face value. I should have accounted for what Brewster would do when she did.

Carter entered the newsroom. The camera showed him crossing quickly toward the conference room they had claimed as their space.

Then he stopped. Someone approached him. A man in a dark jacket. I enlarged the image.

Not Brewster.

Carter said something. The man answered. Carter looked toward the elevators. Then back.

The man produced something from his pocket.

Carter recoiled.

I zoomed tighter.

Gun.

“Flint.”

The shot was almost anticlimactic. The weapon barely moved. Carter’s body jerked and he slammed into the edge of a desk.

Employees screamed.

The gunman grabbed Carter's jacket and drove him toward the service corridor.

From the angle, it would look chaotic.

A robbery. An altercation. Maybe even wrong place, wrong time—a little harder to sell considering it was the newsroom. But it was also random violence inside a building that had seen more than its share of chaos lately.

Except random men did not enter secured media buildings while someone simultaneously looped the surveillance network.

Carter wasn’t down, if anything, he might be staggered but he was already recovering. He hit his assailant.

Good.

The gunman staggered.

Carter hit him again.

Better.

He had a powerful left.

Then the man drove the weapon into Carter's temple.

Carter dropped.