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She didn’t know, and Kilkenny didn’t need to hear her talking herself in circles.
“Not yet,” she said. “I’ll have an update soon, though, I swear.”
“You don’t report to me,” Kilkenny said, some amusement in his voice again. It made her shoulders relax to hear him closer to normal.
“Are you going to try to find Beau?” she asked.
“I have a BOLO out on him,” Kilkenny said. “But ... I don’t know. He’s used to hiding from authority. I’m not optimistic, and we have a ticking clock.”
There wassometruth to the fact that innocent people didn’t run—but there were caveats, too. People like Beau, people who’d grown up looking over their shoulder for the next horrific thing to happen, ran as a default and then figured out the rest from whatever place they deemed safe.
“I’m going to get an update from Pierce,” Kilkenny continued. “See if he tracked down Kate Tashibi.”
Kate.
Raisa had all but forgotten the documentarian in the past hour. Where did she fit into this mess? Or was she just a bystander, capturing it all on film?
There were too many threads right now. They needed to start snipping some of them away. Hopefully, she’d been a little more cooperative with Pierce than she had been with Raisa.
The moment they disconnected, Raisa dismissed Kate Tashibi and Kilkenny and even Beau, and focused back on the letters, which was where she could actually be helpful.
Was this a partnership gone bad? That would explain how their second author knew so much about Conrad’s MO that he managed to dupe the task force.
But why had the second author written letters for only four people? If it was a partnership, it was a lopsided one.
Which ... could still make sense, even if Kilkenny had dismissed the idea. Serial-killer duos existed, and when they did, there was often a dominant personality and a submissive one.
She pulled the two male victims’ files closer. She’d been focused on Shay and the last woman. But these were data points as well.
The only two men out of the bunch.
In the original investigation, they had stood out and they hadn’t—mostly because the Alphabet Man’s female victims differed from eachother so much in terms of age, race, and socioeconomic status. And so the men had looked like just another variation.
But out of the three actual victims they had connected to the second author, two of them were these men.Thatwas notable.
So what was it about these two that had been special?
Raisa had thought a lot about puzzle pieces during their hunt for Isabel. When constructing a puzzle that was just a blue sky, all the pieces looked too similar to tell apart in the beginning. But as you filled in the corners, the edges, the obvious bits, and the gradations started to emerge, it became more and more obvious when two puzzle pieces were in the completely wrong spot.
Those pieces could be what made the rest finally make sense.
Jason Stahl. Tyler Marchand.
Raisa stared at the two male victims’ names and wondered if she’d finally found those pieces.
TRANSCRIPT FROM “SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY” DISCORD CHAT
Two years before the Alphabet Man’s arrest
DRSHERLOCK:Let’s talk body drop sites
MARPLESASSISTANT:You’re going to talk about Jason Stahl again, aren’t you?
DRSHERLOCK:Why Miss Marple’s assistant, you know me so well. It’s almost like you’re a detective or something
MARPLESASSISTANT:It’s almost like we’re the only two people on at 3 a.m. talking about a stupid serial killer. Alright get on with it
DRSHERLOCK:I’m guessing he’s anything but stupid. He’s gotten away with killing more than a dozen people in the past three years at least. But OK, have you noticed that Jason Stahl’s delivery routes go right by seven of the ten body drop sites we know of? That can’t be coincidence