Page 73 of Chameleon Killer

Murder wasn't what gave him influence.

Attention did.

Once he occupied enough of someone's thinking, they began organizing their decisions around him. They could continue to call it an investigation, but it wasn’t. It was just adaptation.

The evidence was merely the mechanism.

The real objective was cognitive.

Once investigators began asking his questions instead of their own, he'd already won.

I’d seen it happen time and again. The agents assigned to his case, the police detectives who got involved, all eventually organized their thinking on the path he laid out for them.

That was the infection. They stopped asking the questions to solve the crimes and started asking the questions the Auditor wanted answered. Careers had begun to suffer because of the choices those investigators made.

More than one had been reassigned or put on administrative leave. The persuasive power of the unsub who built cases that worked with facts and figures proved almost too compelling.

Now I watched Mallory erase part of the board and rewrite Guy's timeline from memory. Like so many before her, she was listening to the unsub. She was following his question, not the evidence.

Of course she was, her obsession had been clear from the beginning. Deliberate, focused, and intense, she thrived on digging all the way to the bottom of a story no matter the cost.

She also understood the power of information and investigation. The Auditor valued intelligence and Mallory possessed that kind of intelligence in dangerous quantities.

The interaction followed a familiar trajectory. Intelligent people challenged the Auditor. Challenged and fascinated him. He’d begun a correspondence with her far earlier.

Then he set out tests. Tests she’d quite probably passed because with each contact, the Auditor escalated and so did Mallory. She had her teeth into this hunt and she wasn’t going to let go.

Flint wasn't watching the board. He was watching Mallory watch the board. Every time she hesitated, his eyes shifted before hers did.

He wasn't leading her thinking. He was following it closely enough to recognize when she'd found something. That kind of synchronization took time.

Flint stood right at Mallory's shoulder, protective and reliable. He was ready to shield her, but he was also backing her up—as a sounding board.

The Auditor wouldn't overlook that. Why couldn’t they understand that I knew the Auditor? I knew him better than they ever could.

He rarely reacted emotionally to obstacles.

He studied them. Measured them. Determined whether they altered the outcome.

If they did...They disappeared.

The Auditor wasn't interested in admiration. Admiration was passive. He wanted engagement. He wanted someone intelligent enough to argue with him.

Currently, Mallory wasn’t reporting on him. She'd started thinking with him. That was the danger.

Correspondence became dialogue. Dialogue became collaboration. Collaboration became dependency. Somewhere along that progression, investigators stopped trying to catch the Auditor.

They started trying to understand him. Very few realized the distinction before it was too late.

Satisfied that I’d seen enough, I stepped into the conference room. “Morning.”

One word. No questions. No accusations. Just enough of a stimulus to interrupt the pattern.

Both of them reacted.

Mallory twisted and looked at me first. Half a second. Long enough to register surprise. Not long enough to suggest guilt.

Her shoulders remained loose. Her breathing didn't change. Whatever she was thinking, she wasn't afraid of me.