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Raisa managed about three hours of sleep, but she was up with the sun. Kate Tashibi had said to focus on Dallas and the interview day, and Raisa believed her.
It was a long shot, but she called the social services office Conrad had worked for while he was in Houston. Of course, no one answered at the butt crack of dawn, but she left a message with her badge number and details about the case.
What she wanted was a list of the people Conrad had met, even briefly, during his day in Houston. Kate was right—he’d been triggered into killing his very first victim only a day later. It seemed like too much to be a coincidence.
No more than a minute after she hung up, a call came in.
Delaney.
Raisa closed her eyes for one beat. And then answered.
“What do you have for me?”
“Good morning to you, too,” Delaney said, dryly. “I found one more male victim in the Houston area that might match your list.”
“Can you—”
“It’s sitting in your inbox as we speak,” Delaney cut in. “Time frame is right, age is right. Mother seemed like she was Munchausen by proxy. But she died when our vic was nine.”
“Sounds like exactly what I was looking for,” Raisa said. “Thanks.”
“Hold your applause,” Delaney said. “I could have sent that all to you yesterday. But I got curious. This seems like a definite pattern with our killer. So I broadened the search to all of Texas.”
Raisa hummed in approval. “You found something.”
“Three more cases. The victims all had some kind of violence in their past,” Delaney said. “When they were young children. But what was more interesting was that they were also then freed from that situation in some manner. So Munchausen guy was being abused, and then his mother died a mysterious death. Same goes with the other three.”
“It’s both. They were abusedandescaped it,” Raisa said. Like Max. Like Beau, almost, even if it was delayed. Like Isabel and Delaney and herself, though she might have been too young for it to match up perfectly. Was she looking for patterns? Or maybe they just lived in an incredibly cruel world, where people who were exposed to trauma and crime at a young age tended to be the ones, statistically, who experienced it throughout their lives.
“Yup. And one of the other interesting things of note is that they weren’t all men,” Delaney said. “There were two women as well.”
“Interesting.” Raisa couldn’t see the bigger picture yet, but she felt like they were closing in.
“I’m sending you information on all of them,” Delaney said. “You might be able to find more through the official files, but it doesn’t appear anyone’s made the connection between the victims. And they all died in different ways, so I probably wouldn’t have, either—except that I knew what to look for.”
“Like with Isabel,” Raisa murmured, not sure she’d meant to say that out loud. “How she killed.”
Heavy silence greeted her, but then Delaney made a thoughtful sound. “Exactly like Isabel, actually. Only one of the deaths was even suspicious—a mugging gone wrong.
“There was a single-car accident and then an apparent suicide,” she continued. And for one ridiculous second, Raisa had such intense déjà vu that she wondered if they were somehow looking at Isabel’s trail of death. She had been killing for two and a half decades before she’d been caught, after all.
“Isabel?” she tried out, hardly believing it, but needing to put it into the universe.
“I don’t think so,” Delaney said, and Raisa relaxed slightly. Delaney would know. “I think Isabel was in the Pacific Northwest when a few of these occurred.”
“La la la la la, I didn’t hear that,” Raisa said. Ignorance was bliss when it came to Delaney’s knowledge of Isabel’s crimes. For all anyone was supposed to believe, Delaney hadn’t talked to Isabel since they’d been teens.
But Raisa couldn’t get on her high horse if she was using Delaney for her services.
“There are similarities to Isabel, though,” Raisa said.
After another moment of silence, Delaney asked, “Did she ever tell you how she figured out that Conrad didn’t kill Shay Kilkenny?”
“She said the letters sent during that time didn’t match the ones Conrad had sent earlier,” Raisa said. “And she was right.”
“Hmm.”
“What are you thinking?” Raisa asked.