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He responded quickly.
Like was he crooked?
Yeah.
The typing bubbles appeared, disappeared. Finally, a text came through.
I asked around about him as I was resurfacing that report that clears Kilkenny. Word on the street is that he’s got a good moral compass, but he’s an ends justify the means kind of dude ... even with his eyes on the top spot, he still bends the rules. One person said they wouldn’t put it past him to plant evidence, but only if he a hundred percent knew it was the guy.
Raisa exhaled. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t at least hinted at in their first conversation, but it was interesting to have it confirmed.
Zero rumors about him on the take?
Unanimously said he was a good dude with questionable tactics.
Raisa wasn’t sure those two things could exist together, but she sent a thumbs-up emoji and a thanks.
Then she moved on to her next call.
Delaney picked up the phone once again on the first ring. “What do you need?”
It should have come off as abrupt, but instead Raisa could tell Delaney was just being succinctly helpful.
“Did you ever do any research into Xander Pierce?” Raisa asked.
“Hmm, no, not really,” Delaney said, sounding regretful that she hadn’t thought twenty steps ahead of Raisa. “Maybe the basics, but no deep dives.”
“Okay,” Raisa said. She couldn’t expect Delaney to know everything, even if she wanted her to.
“You think he’s your second killer?” Delaney didn’t wait for an answer. “Vigilante.”
“Right,” Raisa said. She didn’t want to give up too much, but was that really revealing anything?
“All those deaths I found, those people fit the profile of the Alphabet Man. So our second author might have been targeting people he thought was the serial killer,” Delaney said, mostly talking to herself, it seemed. She certainly didn’t need the logic confirmed. She was good at that. “Did something happen?”
He gave me a weird feeling,Raisa thought, but didn’t say.
“I asked him about Shay and he got tense,” she offered, even though that wasn’t much better. “Not in a way I’ve seen before, either. He thought I figured something out that I didn’t. It’s probably nothing.”
And with that, she remembered the real reason she’d called Delaney. She relayed everything that she’d found with the double code, and asked if Delaney could figure out a way to decrypt the rest faster.
“Of course. Send me what I need,” she said.
Her phone buzzed in her hand, a message from Kilkenny.
Conrad here in less than ten.
“Gotta go,” she told Delaney, and hung up without waiting for a response. Delaney would understand. Then she quickly fired off the email she’d already prepared with the codes and took off at a quick walk-trot through the hallways.
She beat Conrad by two minutes—enough time not to look out of breath when he came in but not enough to fill Kilkenny in on everything.
“A meeting with the feds,” Conrad said, as he was locked to the table. “What a way to start my last day on Earth.”
“You wanted me here,” Kilkenny said softly.
“I did,” Conrad agreed. “I wanted you to see my final show.”
My final show.Something about the wording of that struck Raisa as strange. Perhaps it was the use ofmy. As if he were putting on his own execution.