Page 10 of By the Time You Read This (Raisa Susanto #3)

Chapter Seven

Delaney

Day Four

Disappearing was the easy part.

Delaney had never struggled with that. Leaving her tiny apartment in Seattle behind had hurt more than putting other places in the rearview, but she was still good at it.

What she needed to do now was regroup and figure out a way to beat Isabel at her own game.

Hopefully, she had left whoever was tracking her behind in Seattle.

They might find her again. But she’d bought herself some time.

Let’s play a game . . .

It had been those words that kick-started this whole thing six months earlier. Isabel loved her games, and she loved pulling Delaney’s puppet strings. She must have been so bored in prison.

Delaney decided to circle back toward Seattle, after her ferry ride to Bainbridge. That was probably the last thing anyone following her would think she would do. Most of the time, they would have been right. She would have bought a ticket to someplace in Latin America and lost herself for a few years to the anonymity of a different country.

She couldn’t live with another death on her conscience, though.

They were already starting to stack up.

Delaney didn’t go all the way to Seattle. Hotels were expensive, even the ones that rented rooms by the hour. Instead, she drove through Gig Harbor, past the correctional center where Isabel had spent the last year and a half of her life, and continued on down to Tacoma.

Her two sisters, so close to each other.

Delaney stopped at a Best Buy in Tacoma and bought a new laptop with cash. She kept her head tilted down, letting her hair cover her profile to deny any security cameras clean footage.

Then she found a hole-in-the-wall and ordered a Coke before waving off the bartender’s Wi-Fi offer. He shrugged and went back to reading a battered copy of The Fountainhead .

It was 3:00 p.m. on a Tuesday and there was no one else in the place.

Delaney jammed her thumb drive into the brand-new laptop, and pulled up one of the file folders. It contained pictures of all the notes Isabel had sent her in the weeks before her death.

The second note had been a list of names, in Isabel’s own handwriting.

Delaney had immediately recognized two on there. The girl who had arranged it so Delaney was sexually assaulted at a college party and the professor who had tried to coerce her into having sex with him when she’d been only a teenager.

There were twenty-seven in total—including, Delaney had soon realized, their parents and brother.

Isabel’s victims. All of them, even the ones the court hadn’t known about.

There was a man who’d set up a revenge porn website on his girlfriend. The case had made the news after the girlfriend sued. Some sort of plausible-doubt bullshit had let the man walk.

He’d died seventeen days after the verdict, an overdose in a cheap motel with all the damning, illegal files pulled up on his computer, just waiting there for the police.

There was also a priest who had been bounced around congregations to hide bad behavior with choirboys, a foster mother whose wards were frequent fliers in emergency departments, and a man who had a bad habit of beating every one of his girlfriends to a pulp.

Delaney had long suspected that it wasn’t the murder that scratched Isabel’s itch, so to speak, but the getting away with it.

That rush—the knowledge that she was smarter than everyone else—was also a reason she picked the scum of society. No one would ever admit it, but people were going to care a lot less about the death of someone who hung around kids too much than they were if one of those kids went missing.

To Delaney, it was the one thing that explained all the weird ways Isabel didn’t resemble your run-of-the-mill serial killer.

And yet her so-called fans just ignored it. They glorified the impulse as something noble instead of an ever-ravenous ego needing to constantly be fed.

The door to the bar swung open and a woman walked in. Delaney could make out only her silhouette because of the light flooding in behind her, but she could tell the woman was tall and casually dressed.

“Vodka tonic,” the woman ordered, before she even got to the bar. Her husky voice fit perfectly with the dive bar’s dark wood and sticky floors.

She didn’t glance at Delaney once.

Delaney covertly studied her, but when the bartender abandoned his book to start chatting the woman up, she went back to her computer.

It would make sense that whoever had found Delaney in Seattle was connected to someone on this list. Why wouldn’t they want to go after Delaney now that Isabel was dead? She was, of course, the next logical target. Although Delaney hadn’t read the transcripts, she was fairly certain that the fact Raisa blamed her for not speaking up about Isabel sooner had made it into the official court testimony.

“You from around here?”

Delaney slammed her laptop’s lid down, startled. The woman who had come into the bar was now practically right behind her, sliding onto one of the empty stools.

“No,” Delaney said, though it bordered on a lie. Tacoma was close enough to Seattle that she could have claimed it had she wanted to.

“I just moved here,” the woman said, and then laughed. Laughter was one of those social things Delaney disliked the most—or at least, she disliked it when it wasn’t connected to anything obviously humorous.

She stared down at her laptop, making sure to keep her fingers wrapped around the edges. There were two types of chatty people in the world—those who could navigate the social waters with extreme competence so they never got obnoxious and those who were oblivious to how annoying their chattiness was.

This woman seemed like the former, so Delaney hoped she would pick up on the not interested signs.

But the woman pressed on. “You’re just visiting?”

Delaney thought about the victim her sister had killed just for the crime of being irritating and felt a sudden and terrible kinship with her. “Yes.”

“I’m hoping I get used to the smell.”

At that, Delaney glanced up, somewhat amused. The woman wasn’t wrong about the stench that burned through your nose cells the second you hit the city limits. “It’s the paper plant.”

The woman laughed again, and Delaney wondered if it was at her. She’d never been good at telling that, either.

“It is indeed,” the woman agreed.

Then she jerked her chin toward Delaney’s laptop. Reflexively, Delaney’s fingers tightened, even though the woman probably wouldn’t think anything of the notes if she saw them out of context.

Let’s play a game . . .

“I’m sorry, I’m being terribly rude,” the woman said, her eyes still locked on the computer. “Are you working?”

Delaney nodded in agreement, because the woman was being terribly rude. But then she shook her head, because that hadn’t been the question. “No.”

The woman waited for more—as so many people did when they talked to Delaney. They never seemed content with the straightforward answers to their questions, as if Delaney were somehow on the hook for half of a conversation she’d never RSVP’d to.

The woman’s mouth quirked up on one side, and she held her hands up, palms out. “Got it.”

Delaney tilted her head, curious. “What did you get?”

“You’re not interested in chatting,” the woman said, shifting off her barstool.

“Oh, then yes. You’re right. I’m not,” Delaney said with a nod. “You did get it.”

The woman laughed, as she seemed prone to do, and then grabbed a bar napkin. She whistled to the bartender, and asked for a Sharpie.

Delaney watched, curious, as the woman scribbled something on the napkin and then dropped a twenty on the bar.

“If you ever do feel like chatting,” the woman said, handing the napkin over with a wink.

Then she turned and walked out of the bar, as easily as she’d come.

Delaney looked down at the phone number, a string of digits with a Seattle area code.

Above it, the woman had scrawled her name.

Maeve.