Page 17
Story: The Truth You Told
Was that fair to think? She should want to catch Shay’s killer over anything else—if the second killer existed. But what Raisa really cared about was Kilkenny.
It took until midnight for Raisa to jump through all the hoops required to make her computer secure, but once she did, it was easy enough to pull up the official details.
Everyone thought of Kilkenny when they remembered the Alphabet Man case, but he hadn’t actually been the agent in charge—even before Shay had been killed.
The man leading the investigation had been Xander Pierce.
Raisa had a flash of tall, dark, and handsome in her memory, a cowboy who’d wandered in off the range to strap on a badge and a firearm. She’d worked with him only a time or two, but she had come away from the investigations respecting him. He’d called Raisa in before shit had hit the fan. The same couldn’t be said for many of the agents she’d had to deal with—ones who viewed her as a party trick at best.
Because of her particular skill set, she didn’t spend a ton of time in the field. The most she had in recent years was in Everly hunting down Isabel, and that had been because she’d technically been tagging along with Kilkenny. Most of the time, she didn’t even have to leave her apartment to do her job. Everything was digital these days—even communicated threats from criminals.
Agents who worked in the field tended to look at her as weak. Some of that was because she was a woman, she was sure. But she knew plenty of female agents who garnered respect. They were usually the ones clearing a building in a terrorist situation instead of the ones behind their computers figuring out which hate group wrote the threatening letter in the first place.
Add to all that the fact that she got shipped around the country more often than she worked out of any one particular field office, making it almost impossible to build a wide stable of allies in the bureau.
She got by fine. But she did tend to remember the agents who treated her well.
Pierce had been one of them.
He had also quickly assessed what was going on after the first victim was found in the Alphabet Man case. The tattoos, the naked body, the signs of torture—they had all pointed in one direction: serial murderer.
With that in mind, Pierce had dispatched local law enforcement and grunt agents to start scouring for more victims, both in cold-case archives and with search dogs at likely body-drop sites.
Two more were found within the week, which made Raisa think that the Alphabet Man had always wanted the bodies discovered and had simply caught “lucky” breaks on his first victims.
Morally, Raisa cared about all their names. But practically speaking, she didn’t think they mattered much at the moment. She opened a fresh notes page on her tablet and wrote down only two of them.
Tiffany Hughes, the victimfoundfirst.
Sidney Stewart, the Alphabet Man’s first kill based on time of death.
Raisa moved on to the tattoos, which were arguably the most unique part of his signature.
The Alberti Cipher was one of the simpler ones—each letter had another assigned to it to create two rows of the alphabet, one in order and one all jumbled up.Aperhaps went withT,DwithS, and so on. To encode a message, the author would simply need to know all twenty-six of those assigned pairs, but to decode it, someone would need to know which letter went with which. That was the hard part.
All Raisa kept thinking was that this case had been tailor-made for a linguist. She flipped through the file, searching for the name of a consultant.
Forensic linguistics as a science was decades old, but the FBI could often be decades behind the times. Until recently, the bureau had relied on experts from think tanks and universities, and outsourced any linguistic work that came in. With the rise in popularity of both the internet and texting—which played large roles these days in crimes ranging from bombing threats to terrorist attacks and school shootings—came two formal positions.
Raisa’s East Coast counterpart was a fast-talking New Yorker named Emerson Bird. Bird specialized in international differences in idiolects. Raisa knew some of those basics, such as that native Spanish speakers didn’t capitalize the days of the week or the names of the months. That could transfer over even if the person was writing in English, and could help narrow down a suspect list. But it wasn’t her strong suit.
She and Bird barely spoke beyond emails divvying up cases. They had one department meeting every six months or so, and then sat through an awkward lunch with each other for exactly forty-five minutes afterward. Other than that, they were never in the same place at the same time.
Bird had come on after Shay’s death, though. And if she was reading the notes correctly, the linguist who had worked on the Alphabet Man investigationhadn’tbeen brought in for Shay’s case.
Resources better allocated elsewhere,was the reasoning Pierce offered.
A budget decision.
Part of her wished she could look at the choice as suspicious, but it wasn’t. Raisa’s own involvement on task forces rested on the same calculations, and she pulled a salary instead of the per-day cost of a consultant. She’d been given that excuse multiple times during her three years with the bureau—usually when she went knocking on doors about why she hadn’t been invited onto an investigation that had gone tits up.
Light washed her laptop screen white, and she flipped the rearview mirror up to avoid being blinded by the car parking behind her. She quickly x-ed out of everything she had open on her laptop and then shut it down completely. By the time she had shoved her tablet in her bag, Kilkenny was already halfway up the town house stairs.
He’d seen her, obviously. He was even probably going to let her in. But he wasn’t happy about it.
“You can tell me to go to hell,” Raisa said as she caught up with him.
Kilkenny didn’t turn to look at her, just slipped his key in the door. “It’s not your fault.”
It took until midnight for Raisa to jump through all the hoops required to make her computer secure, but once she did, it was easy enough to pull up the official details.
Everyone thought of Kilkenny when they remembered the Alphabet Man case, but he hadn’t actually been the agent in charge—even before Shay had been killed.
The man leading the investigation had been Xander Pierce.
Raisa had a flash of tall, dark, and handsome in her memory, a cowboy who’d wandered in off the range to strap on a badge and a firearm. She’d worked with him only a time or two, but she had come away from the investigations respecting him. He’d called Raisa in before shit had hit the fan. The same couldn’t be said for many of the agents she’d had to deal with—ones who viewed her as a party trick at best.
Because of her particular skill set, she didn’t spend a ton of time in the field. The most she had in recent years was in Everly hunting down Isabel, and that had been because she’d technically been tagging along with Kilkenny. Most of the time, she didn’t even have to leave her apartment to do her job. Everything was digital these days—even communicated threats from criminals.
Agents who worked in the field tended to look at her as weak. Some of that was because she was a woman, she was sure. But she knew plenty of female agents who garnered respect. They were usually the ones clearing a building in a terrorist situation instead of the ones behind their computers figuring out which hate group wrote the threatening letter in the first place.
Add to all that the fact that she got shipped around the country more often than she worked out of any one particular field office, making it almost impossible to build a wide stable of allies in the bureau.
She got by fine. But she did tend to remember the agents who treated her well.
Pierce had been one of them.
He had also quickly assessed what was going on after the first victim was found in the Alphabet Man case. The tattoos, the naked body, the signs of torture—they had all pointed in one direction: serial murderer.
With that in mind, Pierce had dispatched local law enforcement and grunt agents to start scouring for more victims, both in cold-case archives and with search dogs at likely body-drop sites.
Two more were found within the week, which made Raisa think that the Alphabet Man had always wanted the bodies discovered and had simply caught “lucky” breaks on his first victims.
Morally, Raisa cared about all their names. But practically speaking, she didn’t think they mattered much at the moment. She opened a fresh notes page on her tablet and wrote down only two of them.
Tiffany Hughes, the victimfoundfirst.
Sidney Stewart, the Alphabet Man’s first kill based on time of death.
Raisa moved on to the tattoos, which were arguably the most unique part of his signature.
The Alberti Cipher was one of the simpler ones—each letter had another assigned to it to create two rows of the alphabet, one in order and one all jumbled up.Aperhaps went withT,DwithS, and so on. To encode a message, the author would simply need to know all twenty-six of those assigned pairs, but to decode it, someone would need to know which letter went with which. That was the hard part.
All Raisa kept thinking was that this case had been tailor-made for a linguist. She flipped through the file, searching for the name of a consultant.
Forensic linguistics as a science was decades old, but the FBI could often be decades behind the times. Until recently, the bureau had relied on experts from think tanks and universities, and outsourced any linguistic work that came in. With the rise in popularity of both the internet and texting—which played large roles these days in crimes ranging from bombing threats to terrorist attacks and school shootings—came two formal positions.
Raisa’s East Coast counterpart was a fast-talking New Yorker named Emerson Bird. Bird specialized in international differences in idiolects. Raisa knew some of those basics, such as that native Spanish speakers didn’t capitalize the days of the week or the names of the months. That could transfer over even if the person was writing in English, and could help narrow down a suspect list. But it wasn’t her strong suit.
She and Bird barely spoke beyond emails divvying up cases. They had one department meeting every six months or so, and then sat through an awkward lunch with each other for exactly forty-five minutes afterward. Other than that, they were never in the same place at the same time.
Bird had come on after Shay’s death, though. And if she was reading the notes correctly, the linguist who had worked on the Alphabet Man investigationhadn’tbeen brought in for Shay’s case.
Resources better allocated elsewhere,was the reasoning Pierce offered.
A budget decision.
Part of her wished she could look at the choice as suspicious, but it wasn’t. Raisa’s own involvement on task forces rested on the same calculations, and she pulled a salary instead of the per-day cost of a consultant. She’d been given that excuse multiple times during her three years with the bureau—usually when she went knocking on doors about why she hadn’t been invited onto an investigation that had gone tits up.
Light washed her laptop screen white, and she flipped the rearview mirror up to avoid being blinded by the car parking behind her. She quickly x-ed out of everything she had open on her laptop and then shut it down completely. By the time she had shoved her tablet in her bag, Kilkenny was already halfway up the town house stairs.
He’d seen her, obviously. He was even probably going to let her in. But he wasn’t happy about it.
“You can tell me to go to hell,” Raisa said as she caught up with him.
Kilkenny didn’t turn to look at her, just slipped his key in the door. “It’s not your fault.”
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