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She called herself an artist. A filmmaker. That email she’d sent had been a longer, less petulant version ofI’m telling an important story. Kate had listed all the awards she’d won at some distinguished MFA program, and had even included early reviews of the Alphabet Man project, which was set to air on one of the more prestigious streaming services.
But the world didn’t need another documentary memorializing a man who’d kidnapped, tortured, and killed twenty-seven women.
Anyone who thought that it did didn’t deserve Raisa’s time or respect.
“I promise you, you’re not telling an important story,” Raisa said, and meant it.
The serial killer Kate had picked to feature in her cash-grab documentary was a run-of-the-mill psychopath. There was nothing special about Nathaniel Conrad—a.k.a. the Alphabet Man—beyond what made any of those monsters gruesomely fascinating.
“Now, if you want to make a series on one of the Alphabet Man’s twenty-seven victims, we can talk,” Raisa continued. “Until then, stay the hell away from me.”
Raisa turned again, this time tuning out anything else Kate Tashibi had to say for herself.
Once she was out of the other woman’s sight, she tossed her coffee into a garbage can and ran the rest of the way back to her building.
The place was nothing fancy. Raisa spent most of her life shipped around the country to the task forces that needed her specific expertise, which tended to be any case involving some kind of written communication as a central component. Her apartment often served as a landing spot for a night or two a month instead of a home.
But it was hers.
Once inside, Raisa slid behind the small, uncluttered desk that overlooked the one window in her living room. Her laptop was the Bureau-issued dinosaur she barely used—preferring her tablet most of the time—so it protested when she asked it to turn on. Still, it had enough juice for a simple Google search on Kate Tashibi.
The latest news article on her project populated the top carousel of the results page.
Documentary maker Kate Tashibi promises bombshell revelations in new series on the Alphabet Man
Raisa rolled her eyes. She’d been loosely following Kate’s press coverage ever since that first email. The headlines on the articles always promised jaw-dropping surprises, and yet the stories themselves were all just teasers, lacking anything of substance.
There had been so many of these pieces in recent weeks as the Alphabet Man’s execution date neared that Raisa was starting to get a familiarity with the case even though it had happened long before her time.
Most of the details were fairly typical serial-killer stuff. Fifteen years ago, a woman’s body had been dumped in a field outside Houston. She was young and pretty and clearly had been tortured before she was killed.
The twist with the Alphabet Man, and the reason he’d been given his moniker, was that he’d tattooed a cipher onto the woman’s arm after she died. The code, called an Alberti Cipher, had been key to decrypting messages the killer had sent to law enforcement.
He had always included his victim’s name in the letters he mailed to the FBI—in theory, giving them a chance to save the person—but the message could be decoded only once they found the body.
Raisa had always found this detail particularly sadistic.
Would the name of the victim matter in the bid to save her life? Maybe not. But how could the agents not feel extra guilt for knowing a clue was in their grasp if only they could understand it?
The Alphabet Man had terrorized Houston and the counties surrounding the city for five years, the pattern always the same. Kidnap someone, write a coded message to the task force, torture the victim for three days, send more taunting letters to law enforcement in the meantime, kill the victim, tattoo the Alberti Cipher on his or her skin, and then dump them somewhere in the open to be found easily.
His body count had climbed well into the double digits. Most of his victims were white women in their twenties, but not all of them had been. Two had been men—an anomaly Raisa had never seen a goodexplanation for—and five of the women had been middle-aged or older. Three of his victims had been Hispanic and one had been Black.
The fact that he hadn’t seemed to have a type had made those years even more terrifying for Houston’s residents.
He had been vicious and prolific. And he’d never made any mistakes.
Until the last victim.
In that case, the letter the killer had sent the FBI had been encrypted with a code he’d used for a previous victim, a duplicate that had allowed the FBI team to quickly figure out the name of the woman he was planning on kidnapping.
Nathaniel Conrad, an unassuming social worker who had never appeared on any suspect list, had been found sitting outside the woman’s apartment with a gun, a rope, and a tarp in his car. That had been enough to get all the warrants the FBI needed, and they’d found a bounty of evidence—everything from DNA to souvenirs and tattoo equipment—in Conrad’s house, tying him to at least fourteen of the victims.
Conrad claimed innocence and misunderstanding, but at that point, the case was a home run and everyone knew what his fate would eventually be. Now, ten years after he had been caught and fifteen years after he’d started killing, Conrad was less than two weeks from his execution date.
Raisa closed out of the article about Kate Tashibi’s documentary that had been a nothingburger, as expected, and navigated to one of Kate’s social media pages. It was slick, a carefully curated layout that was fully dedicated to the upcoming series.
Are you ready for the truth?the caption on her latest post read, and Raisa rolled her eyes again. There was notruthhere to uncover. There was no mystery to peel back when it came to the Alphabet Man. This was clickbait, pure and simple.