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Raisa thought of Delaney, tracking their sister across the country through similar reports. “I know.”
“So, there’s Emily Logan, of course,” Gabriela said, pointing to the girl’s name, before looking back at them. “You’ve heard of her, right?”
“Hmmm.” Of course she and Kilkenny had wondered about Emily’s death being related to their case, but she had no interest in encouraging the delusions of an armchair sleuth.
“That was the most obvious one,” Gabriela said, now a completely different person. Where before she had been curled in on herself andshy, almost, now she was eager and energetic. “Stabbed to death in bed, not unlike your parents.”
“Well, sure,” Raisa agreed dryly.
“There are two more deaths that I think fit Isabel’s preferred killing style as well,” Gabriela said, fully stepping away from her board so they could see her work.
The first one was Peter Stamkos, who had apparently been a single father raising an eleven-year-old girl. Washington State CPS had been called to investigate after an anonymous tip came in that the state took seriously. He killed himself the day after the visit and left behind a letter that was a full-on confession.
“Did you get a copy of the letter?” Raisa asked before she remembered that she was dealing with a hobbyist and not an actual detective. It still would have been nice to see. Isabel had a signature symbol that hadn’t been widely publicized and had let them identify several “suicide” deaths as her work. If this really was a protégé—someone who might have been in contact with Isabel herself—they might have left something similar behind.
“I wish.”
Raisa hummed and her eyes dropped to the next name.
Lindsey Cousins.
It wasn’t shocking, but her stomach gave a strange jolt that Gabriela had so casually figured out the connection.
“Between the three of them, she’s my biggest stretch,” Gabriela said, chewing on her thumbnail while staring at the whiteboard.
That was ... ironic. “What made you include her?”
Gabriela tapped a sentence written beneath Lindsey’s name:There’s only about eight-hundred drowning fatalities annually in the U.S.; that number goes down by 85 percent if the person is wearing a life vest.
“She wasn’t wearing a life vest,” Helen had said. Lindsey always wore a life vest.
“That sounds like a tragedy,” Raisa said, as carefully as possible.
“As do a lot of Isabel’s kills,” Gabriela pointed out.
That was true. Isabel seemed to like getting away with the murders at least as much as she liked the actual killing. And she’d found the easiest way to do that was to make her kills look like accidents, overdoses, suicides, things of that nature.
The case that had brought Isabel crashing back into Raisa’s life two years ago had been an outlier—a double homicide that had been brutal and bloody and staged to look just like their parents’ deaths.
The murders had been so different from Isabel’s previous “work” that they had confused everyone on the team. On one hand, the killer had clearly been practiced. And posting a video of the scene to social media afterward was a decision more arrogant than you’d expect from a novice serial killer. Yet the FBI had been unable to uncover any similar crimes that could be attributed to theUnsub—beyond the very massacre it was paying homage to.
They’d come to realize that the only time Isabel wanted to really put on a show was when the kills were personal. Once the FBI knew what to look for, they were able to identify the string ofaccidents, overdoses, and suicidesin Isabel’s wake.
What Gabriela was describing did sound a lot like Isabel’s longtime MO.
“How did you connect these three?” Kilkenny asked.
“Emily’s obvious, right?” Gabriela said, tapping the girl’s name. “The other two ... I don’t know. I just keep an eye out for strange deaths. Like, for example, there are plenty of people who die in car accidents, right?”
“Sure.”
“But a lot of those have a reason, like they were on a highway or it was bad weather,” Gabriela said. “I came up with a formula that kind of gives a value to each component of a crash or accident. Then I run any odd crime through there, and if it pops up with a low number, it means the death was statistically unlikely to have been caused by natural circumstances.”
Raisa blinked at her. “You created this?”
A shy grin broke out over her face as she noticed how impressed they were. “I’m studying to go into law enforcement. It’s really kind of like how actuaries work? For life insurance companies and stuff like that. But I don’t want to be an actuary—I just was inspired by some of their concepts.”
“So your formula spit out these three—or two, I guess. Peter and Lindsey,” Kilkenny summed up.