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If Max had been in the visitors’ lounge, there was a tiny chance she was still on the grounds. She’d come to witness Conrad’s execution—she wouldn’t just leave.
Raisa glanced up at the rows and rows of monitors that showed too many views of the prison. Now, two hours after the run-in with Pierce, Max couldn’t be seen on any of them.
“I’m going to go check the grounds outside,” Raisa said. “Can you try to get Tori Greene’s current address?”
“Yup,” Kilkenny agreed, pulling out his phone. Raisa took off.
She checked with the security desk in front to confirm that Max hadn’t come back into the prison.
After that, it didn’t take long to find the van where Max had disappeared, and when she asked, the journalist pointed her in the direction of the far end of the parking lot.
Raisa jogged over, and started scanning the cars for signs of life.
And there Max was, sitting in the shade created by a beat-up Toyota, her back against one of the wheels, an unlit cigarette clamped between her lips as she furiously wrote in a battered leather notebook. Raisa exhaled and then dropped down across from her, leaning against a much nicer BMW. She hoped the alarms wouldn’t sound.
“You’re a fed,” Max said, without looking up. She’d shown no signs of surprise at Raisa’s sudden presence, either.
“Sort of,” Raisa said, with a half smile that went to waste.
“There’s no such thing as a sort-of fed,” Max said, though there was some amusement in her voice.
“I’m a forensic linguist,” Raisa explained, and that finally got Max to look at her. While she’d been objectively beautiful on that security footage, she was magnetic in person, her eyes a shockingly pale green in contrast to her dark hair, her brows thick and expressive. Raisa felt pinned against the warmed metal.
“Sick,” Max decided, after a moment of studying her, sounding like the teenager she must have been when Shay was alive instead of the woman she was now. She went back to her journal.
Raisa decided to take the compliment. “You met with Xander Pierce this morning.”
Max snorted. “Dickhead.”
“Why’s he a dickhead?” Raisa asked.
“You know the first thing I did in my session with Tori Greene?” Max asked, dropping the name of their second killer like it was nothing.Like they hadn’t just spent the last few days desperately hunting for that answer, without sleep, without stopping to eat. Raisa could only stare at her.
“She gave me a book of sudoku puzzles,” Max continued, still scribbling away. “She didn’t ask me any questions, she just handed that over along with a pencil.”
“Okay,” Raisa said, still reeling.
“Do you know why?” Max asked, but then didn’t wait for Raisa to guess. “She said word-and-number puzzles are known to ease stress, anxiety, and depression. It was how she bonded with us assholes who didn’t want to be there. I’m sad to say it made me think she was pretty cool.” Max flicked a glance up at Raisa. “I looked it up. She wasn’t bullshitting about the benefits of word puzzles, either. There are studies on it and everything.”
“Word puzzles like figuring out an Alberti Cipher,” Raisa said, and Max touched her nose before pointing at Raisa.
“Got it in one.”
Raisa closed her eyes and pictured Nathaniel Conrad at ten years old, walking into an office with Dr. Tori Greene. Or Victoria Langston, at the time. Being asked if he liked puzzles. Would he like to try this simple cipher? Had she done it with all the children she met with? Had she done it with Isabel? The daughter of two math prodigies, a genius in her own right, would have scoffed at being given something so easy. But she would have remembered that moment.
It would have felt familiar if she’d seen the detail crop up in a serial-killer case.
“I just kept seeing all those articles about how the Alphabet Man used this stupid cipher,” Max continued. “And all I kept thinking was,Oh, that probably reduces his stress, anxiety, and depression.”
She snorted in dark amusement. “I wasn’t completely right. I thought she was the Alphabet Man. Wouldn’t that have been amusing? We’re such a fucking patriarchy we can’t even conceive of women beingkillers despite the fact that one of the defining characteristics of the murders was no intercourse.”
Raisa didn’t want to interrupt her to point out that ithadbeen a man who’d killed most of the victims.
“I know, I know,” Max said, as if she heard the argument anyway. “But still. We shouldn’t have assumed.”
“No,” Raisa said softly.
Max’s lips twitched. “You’re humoring me because you want me to tell you whatever I told Pierce.”