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“You don’t care about Kilkenny, though,” Raisa said, just hoping to throw him off enough to get some kind of reaction out of him. “Your letters weren’t even meant for him.”
Conrad’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, you are a clever one. No one else figured that out. Not even your sister.”
“You were talking to your ... partner?” Raisa tried. She didn’t think that would be how he would describe the relationship, but she thought she might get more out of him if she let him correct her.
He scoffed and looked away. “I take it all back. Not clever at all. No, that was not my partner. That was ...”
Conrad broke off, shook his head once, and inhaled like he was gathering his own control.
“That was someone who thought they could stop me,” he finally said.
“You didn’t know who it was?” Raisa asked.
“I did and I still do,” Conrad said, grinning. That dark space where his canine should be winked at her. “But, like I said before, I have no interest in doing your job for you, though.”
“You say it was someone who thought they could stop you,” Kilkenny said in that tone of voice she’d learned to pay attention to. Serious, thoughtful. Leading.
Conrad narrowed his eyes as if trying to decode the sentence. “That’s what I said, yes. A-plus comprehension, Agent Kilkenny. You could have used a little bit more of that in the five years it took you to catch me.”
“Whothought,” Kilkenny repeated, completely ignoring Conrad’s little gibe.
Again, Conrad missed a beat while searching for a trap. Finally, hesitantly, he said, “Yes.”
“They didn’t justthinkthey could stop you,” Kilkenny said, devastatingly calm. “They did.”
Conrad’s nostrils flared. “You’re wrong, though that’s not surprising given your track record. They had nothing to do with it. That was my own sloppy mistake.”
That had to be a lie. The second author had deliberately used an old code, which was what had led to Conrad’s eventual downfall. The motive for why they had done so might still be up for debate, but the fact that it had happened wasn’t. At least in Raisa’s mind. So why would Conrad—a noted perfectionist who liked to think himself superior to everyone in every room—not set the record straight there?
Kilkenny seemed surprised as well.
“You would rather say that, after five years of perfectly getting away with more than two dozen murders, you made an error instead of admitting that someone else turned you in?” Kilkenny asked, though it wasn’t a question. It was, perhaps, a revelation.
“My final girl, the one that got away. She died five years ago, you know,” Conrad said, back to being silky smooth. Like he’d regained the upper hand, but even Raisa, who felt a step behind, could see that he hadn’t. “A car crash. How pedestrian.”
He grinned again at his own wordplay, while Kilkenny tensed. Raisa fought off her own grimace. How terrible, to have just barely sidestepped a serial killer only to die a few years later from something so ordinary. Fate was a funny thing. If she were the type, she’d say it had corrected itself.
She wasn’t that type.
“Why would you rather us think it’s a mistake?” Kilkenny asked, a dog with a bone now, refusing to be put off by Conrad’s tactics. “You want to set the record straight about Shay. Even though you could have died knowing, I would always wonder. Wouldn’t that have been sweeter torture?”
“I don’t care about you,” Conrad finally said. “You are not interesting to me, and you’ve served your purpose. Isabel Parker had a price for her silence about my secrets, and that was that Ms. Tashibi dropher news at a particular time. Ms. Parker cares more about you than I ever did or will.”
That was probably more of a lie than he would ever admit—Conrad hadjustadmitted that he wanted Kilkenny to see his final show. There might be some truth to it as well, though, and it did drive home the fact that the narratives built up around the case didn’t seem much rooted in fact.
She tried to forget everything she’d thought before and look at the facts.
Better luck next time.
The cat and mouse game had never been between Kilkenny and Conrad. It had been between their two killers.
And if thiswasa game, their second author had effectively won. They’d made sure Conrad was caught. Him sitting in prison, so diminished, hours away from death, was a victory they could claim.
So why was Conrad—who’d presumably orchestrated an entire documentary to make sure his name was remembered long after he died, who’d figured out a way to gain control of the timing of the reveal of his biggest secret—letting the other person win?
The only answer was ... that he wasn’t.
If he wanted the person caught, all he had to do was give Kilkenny the name. He knew it, of course; that much was obvious. And he wasn’t holding it back just because he didn’t want to do their jobs for them.