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“No, I’m being a dick,” Kilkenny admitted. “We’re learning more every day. You know they’ve found a link between head trauma, psychological stressors at a young age, and serial killers? Maybe that means intervention is possible.” He paused. “I have to believe it’s possible.”
“It would be pretty grim if it wasn’t,” Raisa said. She herself had often wondered about budding psychopaths. If you could identify them, how did you protect both them and the world from themselves? If they hadn’t done anything yet, you couldn’t just lock them up. And yet, could you live with letting them roam free until they killed? “And, hey. Maybe my parents dropped the three older children on their heads, but learned their lesson when it came to me.”
“That’s the way to look at it,” he said, holding his beer bottle out to her so they could clink necks.
“You seem ... ‘better’ isn’t the right word,” Kilkenny observed. “But something like that. This case has been good for you. To get back in the field.”
He was right. Raisa felt more settled in her skin than she had in months, tired and brain-hazy as she was. It helped to move forward. The past three months she’d been stuck in that clearing, Isabel’s gun pressed to her spine. The memory had kept her paralyzed. “‘Better’ is the right word. I needed a reminder that monsters can be beat.”
“Yeah.”
“And your monster is about to be yeeted out of this universe,” Raisa said.
“Yeeted,” Kilkenny repeated. And then he lost it. Absolutely lost it. Full-on bellyache laughs, then giggles, back to bellyaches until he finally tapered into erratic hiccups of amusement.
“Wow. That was ... that was glorious,” Raisa observed as Kilkenny wiped at the corners of his eyes.
“Jesus,” Kilkenny muttered. “Yeeted. That’s terrible.”
“Maybe, but no less true,” Raisa pointed out. “Are you going to see him tomorrow?”
“Of course,” he said without hesitation.
“What are you going to ask him?”
Kilkenny opened his mouth, closed it. “Something.”
Raisa cackled. “Brilliant. Practically Sherlockian.”
“Shut up,” Kilkenny said, completely out of character and endearing. “Honestly, though? I don’t know. When we were chasing him, I had a million questions I knew I’d ask if I ever got to face him down. But now, I’m so uninterested in anything he has to say. He killed those girls because his brain is wired wrong. We’re killing him because that’s how we’ve figured out how to deal with people like that.”
He shrugged. “And I’ll continue to try to keep the cycle going.”
“Hey,” Raisa said, because she didn’t want him to go grim about the mouth again just yet. “Tell me something about Shay that no one else knew.”
“She loved being a bartender,” Kilkenny said, without hesitation. “Everyone thought she was just doing it to make a wage, I guess. But, God, she loved talking to people. About things that interested them. That was her favorite thing—to really get someone going about something they loved. No matter how trivial or foolish it might seem to anyone else. All you had to do to see someone at their most beautiful was to ask them a question. That was her philosophy.”
“What did she ask you about?” Raisa realized after the words had already tumbled out that it might have been mean. Kilkenny had interests, she was sure. Most people didn’t know about them; she didn’t know about them. That didn’t mean they didn’t exist.
“Wine,” Kilkenny said. “I’m a big wino.”
“You are not,” Raisa said, but she didn’t push for a real answer. There was one, she was sure. But it was private. Raisa wouldn’t intrude where only ghosts dared tread.
“Have you ever loved someone like that?” Kilkenny asked.
“No.” She would have danced around it with someone else. But here, wrapped in the protective bubble of night, she was truthful. “There was grad school and before that college and before that, you know, surviving. There’s always an excuse, always a reason to be too busy.”
“But?” he asked, because he was a psychologist before he was anything else.
“It’s always an excuse, isn’t it?” Raisa said, with a shrug. “I don’t want to be hurt anymore. So I make sure I won’t be.”
“Mmm. Sometimes I worry,” Kilkenny said.
“About what?” Raisa asked, hoping the answer wasn’t about her.
“That I can’t ever be hurt again.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE