Page 53 of Chameleon Killer

At one point she climbed onto the edge of the sofa to reach the top of the board, and my sweatpants began a slow retreat down her hips.

She caught them with one hand without interrupting her sentence.

I looked resolutely at my laptop.

By nine, the board had filled with names, arrows, dates, and blocks of color. By nine-thirty, the pattern looked cleaner than it ever had in the newsroom.

Mallory stood back, marker pressed against her lower lip. That expression usually meant she had found something she disliked.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s too clean.”

I glanced at the board, canting my head to the side to try and see it as she did. “That’s generally considered a positive development.”

“Not with people.”

“Not everyone dislikes organization.”

“Maybe not, but most resist it or at least pretend to resist it.” She waved the marker toward the rows. “Real patterns fray when you push at them. What makes a pattern is often the exception, so you will find exceptions even in the strictest patterns.”

She wasn’t wrong. Spend enough time studying human behavior and you learned that average was just the polite midpoint between several alarming extremes. “And this one?”

“It’s behaving.” She sounded so offended by the fact that I almost laughed.

“Let me ask you something.”

She glanced over her shoulder.

“Has anyone ever accused you of being suspicious?”

“Constantly.”

“Good, you’re too good at it for it to be a recent development.”

With a distracted hand wave that said, “whatever and shut up” in the same moment, she paced back and forth in front of the whiteboard. I could practically see the wheels turning in her head.

The Auditor’s victims aligned with near-mathematical precision.

Until Colin.

Mallory wrote his name beneath the others.

COLIN THORNE

Then stopped. The marker remained against the board, but nothing followed.

I rose and moved to stand behind her. The hesitation told me she needed a little help. “Go on.”

“Attorney.”

“What kind?”

“Civil litigation. Media law. Defamation. First Amendment work.”

“Criminal history?”

“None.”