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Before Max could brace for it, Shay reached out with both hands and pushed down on her shoulders. Unprepared, she went easily, and Shay kicked off toward the beach to avoid the inevitable retaliation.
Max was still cawing like a gull when she emerged from the sea, hair and eyes wild. Shay cackled and slipped her jean shorts on.
“Come on, you owe me ice cream.”
Shay had to blink away emotion when Max pulled a crumpled ten-dollar bill from her pocket even after Shay tried to pay—“A deal is a deal”—and accepted her cone so she had something to do with her hands.
They walked the pier and licked at the ice cream dripping down over their fingers and hands and forearms.
When they got to the end, they leaned against the railing, looking out at the endless stretch of ocean that lay before them just like the endless stretch of road had hours earlier.
“Hey,” Shay said, bumping her shoulder into Max’s before placing a sloppy kiss on top of her sea-salt hair. “I like what I have, too.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Raisa
Now
Max held out the envelope.
Raisa was so surprised by the gesture that she took it without thinking about evidence gloves or bags or proper procedure.
“Can you make sure that gets delivered to Conrad?” Max asked.
The paper felt heavy in Raisa’s hands. She couldn’t promise that, not after that near confession. Max was already standing, though, wiping at the seat of her jeans.
When Raisa looked up, Max shrugged.
“I don’t actually care all that much if he knows peace before he dies,” Max said. “Make whatever decision you have to.”
And then she turned and walked away, sliding behind the wheel of a car that wasn’t the one she’d been leaning against. The trained agent in Raisa made note of the license plate along with the make and model, but Max seemed smart enough to know Raisa would do that.
She’d probably ditch the thing once she got to the city limits.
Raisa knew she should be calling Kilkenny, knew she should be rousing the guards, even to simply detain Max until they located Victoria Greene or Langston or whatever she was calling herself these days. Maybe she was still alive. Maybe these minutes mattered.
Instead, all Raisa could think about was Max’s fierce stare when she’d said,“I’m sorry she lost her sister. But I lost mine first.”
Raisa now knew better than most the complexity of what that meant.
For three months, Raisa had been living in some flight-fight-or-freeze panic triggered by the memory of Isabel. The idea that Isabel’s fingerprints had been all over her life had thrown her completely, and here they were again. This time, though, her connection to Isabel had helped Raisa solve a murder that would bring Kilkenny a kind of closure he’d never had.
For ten years, he’d blamed himself for Shay’s death, for dragging her into the crosshairs of a serial killer. And yet it had never been his fault.
Maybe he wouldn’t ever be able to get rid of the guilt completely—hating yourself became addictive. It insulated you from the pain of moving forward. But now that she knew more about him, she realized the perfection that had seemed so intrinsically part of his nature was actually him trying so hard and so constantly to not make another mistake that he probably hadn’t breathed freely in a decade. He wore his tailored suits like armor and delivered his careful word choices like any slip might be the difference between life and death.
Was it strange that they might have Isabel to thank for that—in part, at least? Had they both completely misread her expression in court that day? She had said she wanted to screw with Kilkenny’s life, but Isabel, above all else, was a liar.
Maybe she really had wanted to pay him back—in the literal sense—for saving her life.
Raisa felt her world tip back into place, a click that rearranged her spine and her mind. Just a little bit.
She pushed herself off the hot concrete and headed for the prison’s lobby. At the front desk, she asked for a pen and paper and found a quiet place to work on the letter Max had handed her.
The message was coded—with the Alberti Cipher, which she didn’t bother to decrypt. Instead, she went through her process with the more complicated one. She needed a key word for the Vigenère code, but she barely had to think about it.
Conrad wouldn’t have to, either.