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The process took her forty-five minutes to go through the shortest message, and she kept having to pull herself out of her near-fugue state to check her phone. No text came in from Kilkenny.
When she was done with the cipher, she stepped back from the whiteboard.
BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME
The knock on the door startled her into dropping the marker.
“Jesus,” she breathed out as Pierce poked his head into the room.
He was about to say something but then caught sight of the board. “What’s this?”
She didn’t actually think Pierce was their impostor-and/or-vigilante. But it still made her pause, made her study him closely for panic or fear.
There was nothing on his face other than curiosity, though.
“I figured out a hidden message within Conrad’s letters.”
“Holy shit.” He stepped fully into the room. He stared at her scrawled words, at the Caesar cipher table, at the crossed-out letters for a long time. “How did you figure this out?”
“Too long to explain,” Raisa said, waving away the fact that she might have gotten the idea from a Benedict Cumberbatch movie. No one needed to know that part. “But I think our second killer and Conrad were talking to each other through these messages.”
Pierce squinted at the board. “Can you figure out the other ones?”
“It would take a while,” Raisa admitted, and waved at her work. “This took over an hour.”
“Would a computer be able to do it, if it knew what to look for?” Pierce asked.
“Maybe,” Raisa said. She wasn’t the most technologically savvy but ... she knew someone who was. Delaney had said she would continue to help, if possible. “I can send them to someone who probably has a program to run them through.”
“They’re approved?” Pierce asked.
Technically . . . “Yup.”
“Let’s do it,” he said.
“Did you need me for something else?” she asked.
“We got an address for Max Baker,” Pierce said. “It’s about an hour away, and I’m going to drive out now. I know Kilkenny is waiting on Conrad, but I wanted to see if you wanted to ride along.”
It would probably be a fruitful interview. Max was their missing component, the person who kept coming up time and again in their case.
Perhaps even playing vigilante—which given the hidden message Raisa had just cracked, seemed a more likely scenario than some of their other wild theories. She bet if she lined up the dates, she’d find this letter was close to the time one of the male victims had been killed.
But Raisa didn’t shine in interviews. She knew where her strengths lay, and they were here, in this room, with a whiteboard and a bunch of letters.
She shook her head. “I’m going to keep working this angle.”
“Okay, keep us all updated,” Pierce said.
Raisa nodded, gnawing on the inside of her cheek as she debated asking. In any other situation, she wouldn’t have pushed, but this was execution day. And if they were going to come up with anything to blindside Conrad with, they couldn’t be squeamish.
“Did you not like Shay?” Raisa asked. It was mostly a shot in the dark. But for some reason when she pictured the Christmas partyKilkenny mentioned, it wasn’t Pierce hitting on Shay. It was him warning her off Kilkenny.
Pierce stopped, his back to her, the line of his shoulders tight. “Why would you ask that?”
Which sounded like a nonanswer, but really was one. Because if he’d liked her, he wouldn’t have hesitated to say so.
“Just something else Kilkenny mentioned,” Raisa said. “About a Christmas party.”