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OLIVER:Yes, we might never know. The fact that he rates highly on the Hare scale that measures psychopathic traits in individuals, though, means we can’t rule anything out. But if it was his father, it’s amazing the young Nathaniel survived. He was a small child to begin with. And then three days outside. He was lucky it was summer. He was lucky he threw up the poison. He was lucky for a lot of reasons.
TASHIBI (VOICE-OVER):Maybe so. But can the same be said for the rest of the world? It’s chilling to think how many lives would have been saved had he been just a little less lucky.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Raisa
Now
Nathaniel Conrad was not immune to prison. Just like with Isabel, his shine had dimmed.
There had been a period of time after he’d been arrested that a small, but vocal, group of people had declared him too beautiful to be guilty. When he gave interviews, he was not only gorgeous but able to fake sincerity with incredible ease. His supporters simply played videos of him as proof that he couldn’t have been butchering women for five years.
Now, he looked beaten down, his hair dishwater instead of golden, his skin sallow instead of tanned. He was missing one of his incisors and the front tooth beside it, so the smile he gave them was upsetting to look at rather than charming.
There was some magnetism left, Raisa realized as her body swayed toward him for no reason. Some people just had that within them—a current that even life inside these desolate walls couldn’t take away.
As the guard went through the motions of chaining him to the table, Raisa fought off déjà vu from the day before. The entire time Kilkenny had been helping her hunt down Isabel, he’d kept returningto Nathaniel Conrad, the similarities in their puppet-master personalities too strong to ignore. Seeing them both behind bars now drove that home.
“Agents, what a surprise,” Conrad drawled in a way that made it clear it wasn’t. Whether he was lying about Shay or not, he had been banking on the fact that Kilkenny would come down to make sure it wasn’t true.
His attention slid to Raisa. “You’re pretty.”
“I am pretty, thank you. But you don’t care about that, do you?” Raisa asked, and had the pleasure of seeing surprise flit in and out of Conrad’s eyes. There were plenty of reasons that might explain why Conrad hadn’t sexually assaulted his victims. But she’d found that most of those came from someone looking at the crime through a heteronormative lens. They talked a lot about him not wanting to leave evidence behind, as if that had never occurred to the majority of serial killers who raped their victims. Kilkenny had suggested Conrad might be impotent, and the killings could be some sort of outlet for his sexual frustration and shame. Even on some of the more open-minded message boards she’d checked out, people simply thought he was gay.
The speculation had never gone beyond the gay/straight binary.
Raisa had a broader frame of reference. She’d been friends with plenty of sex workers as a teenager living mostly on the streets and had gravitated toward people in college and grad school who were gender and sexuality majors.
If she had to guess, she’d say Conrad was on the asexual spectrum, perhaps even sex-repulsed.
“Mmm. You’re a clever one, aren’t you, Agent Susanto?” Conrad leered. “Which is something Idocare about.”
“That would be a lot more terrifying if you weren’t chained to a table, less than two days out from execution,” Raisa said, making sure to sound incredibly bored.
“Perhaps you should ask your sister how easy it is to get things done from the inside.”
He wanted a reaction, but Raisa wouldn’t give it to him. They already knew Isabel had a hand in this in some way. And like Isabel, Conrad hadn’t been able to resist giving up information just for the sake of a jab. It was both something to keep in mind and further proof that Kilkenny had been right about their similarities.
“So, you’re saying all this was her doing and not yours.” Raisa knew how someone like Isabel would react if challenged like that. But he just smirked.
“Or maybe it was Kate Tashibi,” Raisa pressed, “who orchestrated all this.”
Conrad rolled his eyes. “Ms. Tashibi couldn’t find her way out of a paper bag.”
Raisa would never call herself Kate Tashibi’s biggest fan, but the woman hadn’t struck her as incompetent or stupid. Maybe it was pure misogyny speaking. But he had just admitted Raisa was clever.
So maybe . . .
Maybe he didn’t want them to realize Katehadfigured something out on her own, and whatever had helped her crack his code, metaphorically speaking, might be different from what Isabel had discovered. Maybe more evidence existed to prove that Conrad hadn’t killed Shay, but it would give away something Conrad wanted to keep hidden.
Before Raisa could press further, Conrad continued.
“Your sister must have filled Ms. Tashibi in on the details, and so there were two people out there who knew my secret. By then, I knew my story would be told whether I liked it or not,” he said. “If I gave Ms. Tashibi her interview, at least I would know it would be a good representation of what actually happened. God forbid, I go to my grave and have my documentary end up chock-full of those terrible reenactment scenes.”
He shuddered theatrically. “Those are just cringey.”
Theywereembarrassing, but Raisa wasn’t going to agree with him. Not when she felt like he was leading them on a merry chase with his answers. She just couldn’t figure out what he gained from lying rightnow, a day before his execution, when he’d already divulged the most shocking revelation he could.