Page 11 of By the Time You Read This (Raisa Susanto #3)

Chapter Eight

Raisa

Day One

All things being equal, Raisa would never interview people of interest in a case. She’d much rather spend time with words on paper than try to parse through someone’s lies. So, when they left Helen and her shrine to a—possible—psychopath behind, Raisa exhaled. Helen had let Raisa borrow the journals with the promise that she’d return them, and so now Raisa had two different writing samples to work on.

That always made her analysis easier. Instead of just creating a profile of an unknown subject, she could usually rule out if the two authors were one and the same.

Journals were different from letters—people tended to write with a slightly different voice when they didn’t think anyone else would read the thing. But there were always markers to pull out and compare, even if someone was trying to mask their idiolect.

The first thing people tried to do was dumb down their writing, which most would guess was easy enough. Only, it wasn’t. Authors who had a poor grasp of spelling and grammar tended to make mistakes in a way that was difficult for proficient writers to mimic. It became a dead giveaway—like when an author spelled cops with a k but then cash with a c .

It was hard to change writing tics, especially for anyone who wasn’t trained on what they were and how to spot them.

Raisa did a rough job of comparing the letters and Lindsey’s journals on the drive back from Helen’s. There were almost no similarities. Though she had noted on the way out that the letters seemed to be someone trying to change their authorial voice, it had been done by someone proficient at miscommunication, not a nineteen-year-old psychopath who was a middling writer at best.

The differences were ones few would think to employ.

Notably, Lindsey used discourse markers—phrases to organize thoughts, such as I mean , on the whole , although —in about 60 percent of her sentences. The letter writer used them in about 5 percent. Lindsey also liked anaphora—using the same phrase at the beginning of subsequent sentences for emphasis.

One of the more famous examples of the linguistic device was from A Tale of Two Cities : It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness ... et cetera.

Lindsey’s use of it was a bit more violent.

This knife that cuts this flesh like butter, this heart that’s so easy to consume as this blood rinses out my mouth, this death. This death.

There was a bit of emo-poetry girl to it that didn’t quite match with the pictures Helen had up, but that was the beauty of writing. It revealed things people wanted to keep hidden.

“Not her,” Raisa announced. “For the letters. And obviously she couldn’t have killed Isabel, since Lindsey was already dead.”

“What gives it away?” Kilkenny asked. “In the letters, that is.”

“Lindsey is addicted to amplifiers,” Raisa said, throwing out just one of a dozen small things she’d noticed. “With a particularly notable preference for ‘deeply.’ She uses it sixteen times in the span of as many pages. Not a single amplifier within the letters themselves—to a strange extent, given that it’s signed from Isabel’s Biggest Fan.”

When Kilkenny didn’t say anything, Raisa’s shoulders tensed. “I know that sounds like a stretch, but it’s just one of the examples—”

Kilkenny cut her off. “No. I’m not doubting you. It just seems like magic to me. I like to appreciate it.”

Raisa flushed at her own defensiveness. Sometimes she couldn’t help it, even with Kilkenny. “I’ll have to do a more thorough analysis.”

Those involved graphs and statistics and equations that no one but the nerdiest linguists loved.

“But you have a sense,” Kilkenny said. “It’s okay to be so good at your job you don’t have to go through every step to come up with a general conclusion.”

“Watch me be wrong,” Raisa said, because she was far more comfortable at self-deprecating remarks than she was with accepting compliments. “But yeah. With the voices and styles as different as these, I can pretty confidently say that they were written by two different people.”

“So, what does Lindsey have to do with Isabel?” Kilkenny asked.

“It looks like she was taking inspiration from the way Isabel got away with her crimes, but not much else.” There were a few mentions of Isabel throughout the journals, but it was often just a passing thought. Lindsey had listened to at least one of the podcasts that had detailed the murders that had been Isabel’s ultimate downfall, but Lindsey had also listened to a lot of other popular true crime content.

“But Isabel knew about her,” Kilkenny mused. “And now they’re both dead.”

“Two dead psychopaths,” Raisa murmured.

“Possible,” Kilkenny warned.

“Two dead possible psychopaths,” Raisa amended. “Well, one dead psychopath, one possible. You get what I’m saying. And it’s weird, right?”

“Very,” he said, though neither of them had a chance to speculate further before Kilkenny pulled to a stop in front of the Gig Harbor police station.

They had to flash their badges a couple of times, but eventually they were directed to the lead detective in the department.

Maeve St. Ivany.

St. Ivany had a face that would send photographers into raptures—prominent cheekbones and wide-set eyes that probably looked fantastic in pictures but seemed a bit too much in person. She wore her strawberry-blonde hair in gentle waves, but that was the only soft thing about her. Her shoulders were those of a swimmer, and her mouth had been pressed into a serious, annoyed line for the ten minutes it had taken them to fill her in on everything that had happened since Raisa had opened that envelope.

“You have an unsigned letter,” St. Ivany said, with the same tone she’d probably use on a bunch of flat-earthers if they’d barged into her office.

“Yes, but it’s from Isabel,” Raisa said, trying to keep her own patience.

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“No,” Raisa said slowly. “But I got it when she died.”

“Near the time she died,” St. Ivany corrected, gazing at the wall behind them, her mind clearly working. “It could have been a cruel prank, no?”

“Someone who knew she had died in the middle of the night before the facility even found her body?” Raisa asked, and St. Ivany tipped her head, seeming to acknowledge that scenario was unlikely.

“She was an otherwise healthy woman in her early forties who had been involved in a violent confrontation not even two months earlier,” Raisa continued. If a woman with Isabel’s profile had shown up in a normal emergency room, the medical examiner would’ve been all over the death.

“You’re right, that is suspicious,” St. Ivany agreed, but something about the way she said it rankled.

They were FBI, so she probably didn’t want to be outright dismissive, but she obviously wanted to get them out of here so she could hand this off to someone much lower in the pecking order.

“I realize this isn’t the most appealing case to solve—”

St. Ivany held her hand up, looking genuinely insulted. “If this was actually homicide, I’d want it solved even if Hitler was the victim. We’re a small town, though. And we’re already dealing with a death that’s stretching our resources thin.”

“So call us in on this,” Kilkenny offered, before Raisa could ask what the other death was.

The FBI had limited jurisdiction when it came to local cases, but anyone could ask for their help. It would let Raisa and Kilkenny navigate the investigation so much more easily if they were there as law enforcement instead of as a relative of the victim and her friend.

“A forensic linguist and a criminal profiler?” St. Ivany asked, brows raised. “How exactly do I justify that?”

Kilkenny tensed beside Raisa. Out of the two of them, he usually garnered the most respect. TV shows like Criminal Minds and Mindhunter had legitimized forensic psychology in a way Raisa could only dream about when it came to her career. But some doubt would always linger for people who wanted to discredit his existence.

St. Ivany placed her hands flat on her desk in a conciliatory gesture. “Look. I promise, I’ll keep an open mind, once we get confirmation foul play was involved from our—very competent and brilliant—medical examiner. Now, I’m going to set you up with my partner, who will take your statement.”

She stood and they had no choice but to follow suit.

“If it is homicide, that means there’s a murderer on the loose in your town,” Raisa said. “If you don’t care about solving it for Isabel, you should care about the safety of your residents.”

It was a low blow, but Raisa was desperate. They wouldn’t get very far if both the prison and the local detectives were against them.

“I already have a murderer on the loose. So.”

“What?” Raisa asked, not sure she understood.

“A homicide, a violent one.” St. Ivany shook her head and then took a deep, composing breath. “I’m sorry. Like I said, we’re not going to prioritize the death of a serial killer when we’re dealing with another case. But believe me, if the ME finds anything suspicious, we’ll give it all the attention we would any other investigation.”

“Two deaths, so close together,” Kilkenny murmured as they walked past a conference room toward the back of the station. They could see a whiteboard with pictures and papers hung up on it, the scrawled handwriting of multiple different people colliding together with theories and suspect names.

Had they been anyone else, St. Ivany probably would have led them a different way, but being in law enforcement bought you some degree of trust.

“We’ve had a couple a year since I moved here,” St. Ivany said. “But there’s usually an obvious suspect. A domestic, or a bar brawl gone incredibly wrong.”

“That’s not the case in this one?” Raisa guessed, squinting to try to make out the name written at the top of the board.

All St. Ivany offered was a terse “No.”

Perhaps she was defensive or just proprietary.

Or maybe she just didn’t like them.

Raisa tried to think of any news alerts from the past couple of weeks, but she’d been so wrapped up in the San Diego case that it wasn’t hard to imagine missing even a violent homicide so near to her house.

The man waiting for them in the smaller conference room was dumpy and forgettable, and his clothes did nothing to address either problem. His trousers were too tight and his blazer too big, while he had a coffee stain on a wrinkled shirt. He smelled of menthol and lavender, making her wonder if he had some kind of joint ailment.

St. Ivany left them with a tight smile and light knuckle-rap on the doorjamb. Off to try to solve her much more important homicide.

The detective cleared his throat, looking perfectly pleased to have been entrusted with the task.

Raisa gave her statement, repeating much of what she’d just told St. Ivany. And then they were seen to the door.

“It’s going to be at least a few days before that report comes back,” Kilkenny said, as they lingered by the SUV.

“That’s optimistic.”

“You’ve done more than anyone could ask from you,” Kilkenny said. “We could just go home.”

“ We’re not going to prioritize the death of a serial killer ... ”

Raisa thought of Helen and Lindsey, and this other murder victim. Of Isabel.

There was something here to unravel. Raisa always got a few days off after every case to make up for the weekends she missed while on the investigation. She owed it to ... someone to at least try to follow a few leads here.

Even if that someone was herself.

“No,” Raisa said. “Let’s camp out a couple days. If you have the time.”

“I have the time.”

It sounded like a promise.

“Hey,” she said as she climbed into the SUV. “We should probably look up the name of that homicide victim.”