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“I want to know, but I’m not humoring you,” Raisa corrected. “Bias in investigations leads to a lot of killers walking free.”
“Hmm,” Max agreed. “You know, I’m talking like I knew this whole time. I didn’t. I didn’t know until they caught Nathaniel. And we knew him, you know? Beau was friends with him. And so I thought,Jeez, he was stalking Shay that whole time. It made sense.” She paused. “Like it fit perfectly that he would have killed her. So Beau and I shut the fuck up about knowing him, just in case that would throw something off with his trial, and we went on with our lives.”
“What changed?”
“I went to visit Nathaniel,” Max admitted. “I wanted to see him really there. Behind bars. On a long march to death.”
“Did he tell you?” Raisa asked. “Did he tell you he didn’t kill Shay?”
Max shook her head and swiped at her nose. “No. Not that first time. He asked about Tori, but it didn’t register. Not really. Who would have thought there were two killers?”
“But you went back?”
“Two more times,” Max admitted. “I could tell he wanted to confess something—he kept hinting at things. Like talking about Tori, how I should look into her research more. Talking about how he and I had things in common. Something about what he was saying must have, I don’t know, clicked in my subconscious, because I went back.”
Raisa couldn’t imagine what that must have been like for Max when she’d believed Conrad had brutally murdered Shay. Conrad, who had spent time with their family, who’d likely been to their house.
“On the last visit, he said—” Max paused, heaved in a breath. “He said, ‘You know I would never hurt Shay.’”
That wasn’t exactly a confession, not from a serial killer who had maintained his innocence up until a few days ago. But Raisa could see how it might have stuck in Max’s mind.
“I would have attacked him if the guard hadn’t stepped in,” Max continued, calm as anything. “I thought he was just being a dick, like, mocking me. It took a while for the rage to go away. But when it did, I don’t know, it changed the way I heard the words. Then I kept thinking about the stuff he’d said about Tori.”
“Did you go see him again?”
“No. But I started looking into Tori’s research, just like he’d suggested.” She huffed out a humorless laugh. “I was always good at digging. And I got obsessive about it. I found her marriage certificate.”
“That’s ... advanced,” Raisa said, surprised and impressed.
“Not really. It’s public information,” Max said with a careless shrug. “What was impressive was the name she put on there wasn’t Langston. It was Carter. Victoria Carter.”
That was probably what had stymied Kate if she’d made it that far.
“How did you get from Carter to Langston?” Raisa couldn’t help but ask.
Max smirked a little, clearly proud of herself. “She didn’t file a medical change under that name, so I figured it wasn’t hers for very long. Turns out she got married in Vegas and then divorced three months later.”
“And that led you to Victoria Langston,” Raisa said.
“Yeah, it took, like, a year of searching, but I found her,” Max said. “And there were enough photos of her from her grad school yearbook to confirm it was the same person.”
“You were determined,” Raisa said.
“Not much else to think about. And once I found her name, it was easy from there. She had all these grad school papers about the origin of serial killers. They included some real questionable ethics, about how we should go back to the early days of psychology, when you could just mess people up for the sake of knowledge.” Max glanced up. “They’re there. Online, digitized. Whatever. She must have done it herself. So fucking arrogant.”
“Did you suspect her then?” Raisa asked.
“I mean, of being interested in serial killers? Sure,” Max said, lifting one shoulder. “Of being a terrible psychiatrist, yeah, absolutely.”
“So what made you realize she killed Shay?”
“Beau’s phone,” Max said, her lips twisting. “He gave it to me unlocked one day. Told me to send myself any pictures of Shay on there that I wanted. Those were the days of dumb-phones, but even shitty photos are better than nothing.” She shrugged as if it weren’t a big deal, even though it clearly had been. “He still had Shay’s text messages saved, and I started reading through them.”
She rolled her eyes. “Which is a violation of privacy, sure. But I found the final piece there. It was a while back, like two months before Shay’s death. No one would have connected it to her disappearance. No one except for me, in that exact moment of time.”
“What was it?”
“A text where Shay mentioned that she’d run into Tori,” Max said. “She reminded Beau of how Tori had come to Billy’s funeral, and just how nice that had been. They met up for wine, and Shay had gotten too drunk and nearly passed out in a cab on the way back to her hotel.”