Page 16 of By the Time You Read This (Raisa Susanto #3)

Chapter Eleven

Raisa

Day One

Gabriela Cruz lived in a pretty, well-maintained duplex about a ten-minute drive from the harbor that was much nicer than anything Raisa had lived in at twenty-two. The address had been listed in a trespassing arrest against Gabriela, and Raisa did wonder for a minute if she’d given the police wrong information.

But Gabriela answered only a few seconds after they knocked.

Her eyes slid over them before narrowing into a glare. “I know my rights.”

Then she slammed the door.

Raisa and Kilkenny exchanged amused glances. Some agents didn’t like the fact that this new, more online generation did things like this, but Raisa appreciated that people were learning more about protections granted to them by law.

Still, that didn’t mean she couldn’t try to convince Gabriela to talk to them.

“We just have a few questions about Isabel Parker.”

A beat passed, but then, slowly, the door opened. “Will you tell me what really happened to her?”

Gabriela was all eyes and lashes, as if her face had been created by a Disney animation artist.

Raisa couldn’t help but notice that, like the girls at the prison, Gabriela had styled herself to look like Isabel just before she was caught.

“We don’t know what happened to her,” Raisa said, honestly. “But we’re hoping you can help with that.”

Another beat, and then Gabriela shifted back, letting the door swing open all the way.

After Raisa and Kilkenny stepped into the tidy, well-lit apartment, Gabriela curled herself up on a fancy computer chair. She didn’t offer them seats, but Raisa took the sofa across from her, while Kilkenny leaned against the wall. It was his preferred spot—where he could watch the person’s face without being the focus of their attention.

“I’m not crazy.”

Raisa tried not to react. “Okay.”

Gabriela shot her a look. “Everyone thinks it. Because I’m interested in serial killers, like half the country isn’t as bad as me. As if Essi isn’t as bad as me.” Her mouth tightened. “Is she the one who gave you my name? She must have, she just doesn’t like anyone encroaching on her spotlight. She’s such an attention whore and then acts all holier-than-thou in front of—”

“You two know each other?” Raisa cut into the diatribe. The two of them seemed to be the leaders of two different, warring factions, and the dynamic was fascinating.

“She doesn’t know me,” Gabriela snapped, and then took a deep breath. “Sorry, she’s a sore subject.”

“Because you guys are on opposite sides of the Isabel argument?” Raisa asked.

“That, sort of,” Gabriela said with a one-shoulder shrug. “It’s more than that, though. If she just left me alone, or criticized our movement broadly, you know, whatever. But she’s flattened me into some caricature. She mocks me, she sends her cronies to troll me online, she sends the freaking FBI to come interview me.”

Gabriela waved at them at that, and Raisa couldn’t deny the girl had a point.

“She doesn’t know anything about me,” Gabriela said again. “She doesn’t know I had a boyfriend once. I was fifteen and he was twenty-six.”

Raisa nodded. She could guess where this was going.

“She doesn’t know that he put me in the hospital four different times,” Gabriela continued. “She doesn’t know that not one goddamn nurse made him leave my side when he came to visit.”

She plucked at her bottom lip. “She doesn’t know that I prayed every day that he would just die. That someone would kill him.”

Gabriela looked up at them. “Essi thinks I’m crazy. But she won’t ever admit that Isabel saved people. Not me. But people like me.”

Raisa exhaled slowly. There would be no point in arguing with Gabriela. Fanatics were fanatics for a reason. They were blind to logic, and their mind would perform Olympic-level gymnastics to allow them to maintain their worldview and biases.

That didn’t make it easier to hear.

“I know she’s evil,” Gabriela said, sounding like she didn’t believe it. “But, god, I don’t care. She’s saved so many people, and I’m pretty sure her positive balance outweighs the negative.”

If Isabel had only killed people who committed horrific crimes, Raisa might concede there was an argument there. Not one she agreed with, but one that could be made.

That wasn’t reality, though.

“She killed my parents,” Raisa said simply.

Gabriela looked away. Raisa caught a hint of shame behind her expression just before she did. It would take a lot more than that to rip out the roots of her obsession, though.

“She was young when she did that.”

“Right,” Raisa murmured. “Budding psychopaths have to start somewhere.”

Kilkenny tensed behind her, not because she was wrong, but because comments like that were just going to have Gabriela throwing up walls they would have to knock down to get any answers. Raisa wasn’t helping—in fact, she was actively hurting the investigation. This was why it wasn’t smart to get involved in cases that you were personally involved with.

Gabriela might be a bit strange, but she certainly wasn’t the first person in the history of the world to defend a vicious killer and believe she was in the right.

“Did you start the FreeBell movement?” Raisa asked, trying to get them back on track.

“That got co-opted,” Gabriela said. “After Isabel’s trial there were tons of people like Essi that came out of the woodwork.”

Gabriela spit the other woman’s name like it was a sour thing in her mouth.

“Claiming Isabel had killed all these people she couldn’t have possibly killed,” Gabriela continued. “Just glance at the timeline once, and she’s absolved of most of the crimes people put on her résumé.”

There were moments even in this brief conversation that Raisa thought Gabriela understood the weight of everything Isabel had done, but then those were overturned by Gabriela equating Isabel’s victim list to a résumé.

She was young, she heard in Gabriela’s voice, and realized it could so easily be applied to this girl. She was young. She’d been through something extremely traumatic. Raisa felt for her, she did. But Gabriela was old enough to know better than this.

“They just wanted their five minutes of attention,” Gabriela continued on, blithely unaware of Raisa’s judgment. “Or in Essi’s case, two years of attention.”

“Are you saying you didn’t want to actually free Isabel?” Raisa asked.

“No, of course not—she killed people,” Gabriela said, everything about her earnest as hell.

“What was your goal, then?”

“I wanted her record cleared, and you know, Free Britney was so popular, it just kind of morphed into that.” Gabriela must have seen some confusion on Kilkenny’s face, because she explained directly to him, “Britney Spears was being held in a conservatorship where she pretty much couldn’t make any decisions on her own. Like, she had to ask her father to spend her own money, things like that. Her fans launched this movement to get her out of it, and it worked.”

Before either of them could say anything, Gabriela rushed to add, “I know it’s not the same thing. I know.”

“Then why did you keep using it?” Raisa couldn’t help but ask.

“Because it got attention?” Gabriela shrugged. “People had this view of Isabel that wasn’t true. They thought she was a psychopath, but they just didn’t understand her or the situation.”

“She was a psychopath.” This time it was Kilkenny who dropped the hammer. His voice, usually so neutral and diplomatic, had taken on a sharp edge. “One of her victims was a four-year-old girl whose head she smashed into a tree so that it looked like she died in an accident.”

Gabriela flushed pink, but it wasn’t with shame this time. “That’s a fake story.”

Raisa hated the way fake could be thrown around these days anytime someone was confronted with a fact they didn’t like.

“It happened,” Raisa said quietly. “There are pictures of the scene.”

Everything about Gabriela shut down, closed off. “What can I help you with?”

Raisa only half regretted pushing her to that point. She’d been defensive coming in, wanting to argue with them. There had been no avoiding this, and Raisa wasn’t going to lie just to more easily get answers out of an interview subject.

Not about this.

“Did you have any contact with Ms. Parker?” Kilkenny asked.

“I wrote to her a few times,” Gabriela said, back to not looking at either of them.

Raisa stilled. “Did you sign the letters as ‘Your Biggest Fan’?”

“Ew, no,” Gabriela said, genuinely surprised and disgusted. “That’s so cringey.”

Right. “Okay, did you visit her?”

“Once,” Gabriela admitted.

“When was that?” Raisa asked.

“Like, a couple months ago?” Gabriela said. “I don’t know—time blends together. But it was kind of strange.”

“What was?”

“She didn’t ... she didn’t want to talk about anything, even though she was the one who’d invited me there,” Gabriela said, sounding a little pissed at Isabel for the first time. Maybe the hero worship had some cracks in the armor. “She only said one thing and then waited for the guards to come get her.”

“And that was?”

“She said, ‘Tell her to look at the dates on the letters.’”

Raisa’s pulse kicked up. “How long ago did you say this was?”

Gabriela squinted into the middle distance. “Maybe three months?”

Which meant ... which meant Isabel had been planning some elaborate game for at least that long.

She met Kilkenny’s eyes and could see the same question in his.

How could Isabel have known they would even end up here? Were there more letters out there, ready to direct them to Gabriela had they not ended up talking to her themselves? Was someone watching their every move with directions from Isabel at the ready?

Or was it just inevitable that all roads led back to this girl? She was the leader of the FreeBell movement, they’d been pointed in her direction by multiple people. It would be a logical assumption that if Raisa was investigating Isabel’s murder, she would eventually find her way to Gabriela Cruz.

More likely, Isabel had simply planted a bunch of clues along the way, figuring they would stumble onto the right combination eventually. She was the queen of covering all her bases. If it wasn’t Gabriela telling them to look at the letters, it might have been some other fan imploring them to do something else.

Isabel was good, but what she was mostly good at was making everyone think she was omnipresent simply by working her ass off.

Still, Raisa itched to get her hands on the Biggest Fan letters once more.

“Okay,” Raisa said. “Do you know of anyone in your FreeBell movement who would want to do her harm?”

Gabriela’s eyes flew to Raisa’s. “Like kill her, you mean?”

“Yes.” There was no reason to beat around that particular bush. And Raisa wanted the answer. “Like kill her.”

“No, never. Why would any of us try to kill her?” Gabriela asked.

There were plenty of reasons to suspect an obsession had turned violent, but Gabriela continued before Raisa could say anything.

“I mean, if you should be looking at anyone, it’s Essi.”

Raisa nearly laughed at that. The feuding generals—clouded by hatred and distrust of each other. “We’re just trying to get some information right now.”

“Well, I wouldn’t look at the FreeBell group,” Gabriela said. “I’d go looking for whoever is copying her.”

Raisa hoped she hadn’t heard her right. “What do you mean, copying her?”

But Gabriela lit up.

“I can’t say whoever it is isn’t a lower-level person in our group, but none of my friends would ever ,” Gabriela said, and Raisa tried to make the words make sense. She glanced at Kilkenny, who shook his head, looking more baffled than she felt.

“What?”

Gabriela stood and crossed to the closet, pulling out a whiteboard a moment later. “There’s someone out there pretending to be Isabel. Or taking notes from her and doing something similar.”

Your Biggest Fan. Raisa’s stomach clenched, making her painfully aware that the only thing she’d had since the night before was that cup of coffee hours ago.

“Can you walk us through this?” Kilkenny prompted, though he probably hadn’t needed to. Gabriela was already setting everything up. A real true crime aficionado.

“So, from what I can tell, there’s been three homicides that I can connect to this ...” Gabriela trailed off, tilting her head back and forth. She had completely come out of her shell. “Protégé. Can I call them that?”

“Sure,” Raisa said, weakly.

“They weren’t all in Gig Harbor, which is probably why Detective St. Ivany missed them.” Gabriela tossed her dry erase marker. Caught it. Tossed it.

“Have you gone to her with all this?”

“She was ... not receptive to my ideas,” Gabriela said by way of an answer. “But anyway, I like to track police reports and the like—it’s not weird, a lot of real true crime junkies do it.”

Raisa thought of Delaney, tracking their sister across the country through similar reports. “I know.”

“So, there’s Emily Logan, of course,” Gabriela said, pointing to the girl’s name, before looking back at them. “You’ve heard of her, right?”

“Hmmm.” Of course she and Kilkenny had wondered about Emily’s death being related to their case, but she had no interest in encouraging the delusions of an armchair sleuth.

“That was the most obvious one,” Gabriela said, now a completely different person. Where before she had been curled in on herself and shy, almost, now she was eager and energetic. “Stabbed to death in bed, not unlike your parents.”

“Well, sure,” Raisa agreed dryly.

“There are two more deaths that I think fit Isabel’s preferred killing style as well,” Gabriela said, fully stepping away from her board so they could see her work.

The first one was Peter Stamkos, who had apparently been a single father raising an eleven-year-old girl. Washington State CPS had been called to investigate after an anonymous tip came in that the state took seriously. He killed himself the day after the visit and left behind a letter that was a full-on confession.

“Did you get a copy of the letter?” Raisa asked before she remembered that she was dealing with a hobbyist and not an actual detective. It still would have been nice to see. Isabel had a signature symbol that hadn’t been widely publicized and had let them identify several “suicide” deaths as her work. If this really was a protégé—someone who might have been in contact with Isabel herself—they might have left something similar behind.

“I wish.”

Raisa hummed and her eyes dropped to the next name.

Lindsey Cousins.

It wasn’t shocking, but her stomach gave a strange jolt that Gabriela had so casually figured out the connection.

“Between the three of them, she’s my biggest stretch,” Gabriela said, chewing on her thumbnail while staring at the whiteboard.

That was ... ironic. “What made you include her?”

Gabriela tapped a sentence written beneath Lindsey’s name: There’s only about eight-hundred drowning fatalities annually in the U.S.; that number goes down by 85 percent if the person is wearing a life vest.

“ She wasn’t wearing a life vest, ” Helen had said. Lindsey always wore a life vest.

“That sounds like a tragedy,” Raisa said, as carefully as possible.

“As do a lot of Isabel’s kills,” Gabriela pointed out.

That was true. Isabel seemed to like getting away with the murders at least as much as she liked the actual killing. And she’d found the easiest way to do that was to make her kills look like accidents, overdoses, suicides, things of that nature.

The case that had brought Isabel crashing back into Raisa’s life two years ago had been an outlier—a double homicide that had been brutal and bloody and staged to look just like their parents’ deaths.

The murders had been so different from Isabel’s previous “work” that they had confused everyone on the team. On one hand, the killer had clearly been practiced. And posting a video of the scene to social media afterward was a decision more arrogant than you’d expect from a novice serial killer. Yet the FBI had been unable to uncover any similar crimes that could be attributed to the Unsub —beyond the very massacre it was paying homage to.

They’d come to realize that the only time Isabel wanted to really put on a show was when the kills were personal. Once the FBI knew what to look for, they were able to identify the string of accidents, overdoses, and suicides in Isabel’s wake.

What Gabriela was describing did sound a lot like Isabel’s longtime MO.

“How did you connect these three?” Kilkenny asked.

“Emily’s obvious, right?” Gabriela said, tapping the girl’s name. “The other two ... I don’t know. I just keep an eye out for strange deaths. Like, for example, there are plenty of people who die in car accidents, right?”

“Sure.”

“But a lot of those have a reason, like they were on a highway or it was bad weather,” Gabriela said. “I came up with a formula that kind of gives a value to each component of a crash or accident. Then I run any odd crime through there, and if it pops up with a low number, it means the death was statistically unlikely to have been caused by natural circumstances.”

Raisa blinked at her. “You created this?”

A shy grin broke out over her face as she noticed how impressed they were. “I’m studying to go into law enforcement. It’s really kind of like how actuaries work? For life insurance companies and stuff like that. But I don’t want to be an actuary—I just was inspired by some of their concepts.”

“So your formula spit out these three—or two, I guess. Peter and Lindsey,” Kilkenny summed up.

“Yeah, I didn’t need it for Emily, obvs,” Gabriela said. “It did flag Isabel’s death as suspicious, though. So I’m glad someone is taking it seriously.”

Raisa rocked back on her heels. “Did it really?”

“Yeah, her age and environment, plus the fact that she has probably four billion enemies who want to kill her, did the trick,” Gabriela said. “There’s, like, a point-five percent chance she died of natural causes.”

“Have you talked to anyone except Detective St. Ivany about this?” Raisa asked, and Gabriela went a little shifty eyed.

“I may have floated a theory or two to some close friends who follow the crime reports, too,” Gabriela admitted. “But I didn’t put it on main anywhere.”

“On main,” Kilkenny repeated, and Gabriela rolled her eyes.

“Like in the main Discord channel or on Reddit under our subthread,” Gabriela said, in that very-young-person voice that came out whenever they had to explain new technology to the olds.

“Right,” Kilkenny said. “Of course.”

“Well ... that’s all I’ve got for you guys. So ...,” Gabriela said, gesturing toward the door.

They stood and asked her to call them if she remembered anything important. Raisa also took a photo of the whiteboard, with Gabriela’s permission. Because why not have it?

“Does Peter Stamkos’s death undermine our theory that someone’s out there targeting psychopaths?” Raisa asked when they got back to the SUV.

“Why would it?”

Raisa cut him a look. She knew they saw the worst of the worst in their jobs, but the world wasn’t actually that bad. “You think there were three in such a small radius? Peter, Isabel, and Lindsey.”

“The rate of psychopathy in the US is one percent or so,” Kilkenny said. “Though some studies have estimated it’s as high as four-point-five percent.”

“So in a state of about eight million people,” Raisa mused. “Holy shit. There’s eighty thousand psychopaths in Washington State?”

“In theory.”

“Huh,” Raisa said. “So maybe he was a psychopath. He did get a visit from CPS.”

“Before killing himself, in theory,” Kilkenny said. “Psychopathy and suicide have an interesting relationship that I won’t get into. But it’s unlikely that a psychopath would kill himself over the shame of a CPS visit.”

“I would have guessed they wouldn’t kill themselves at all,” Raisa mused.

“They do actually have suicidal ideation, but it’s not tied to an emotion like shame,” Kilkenny said. “You see it connected to their tendency for impulsivity.”

“None of this matters if he didn’t kill himself or he wasn’t a psychopath,” Raisa said. “Or we’re wrong about someone targeting psychopaths.” She paused. “Especially if they’re mimicking Isabel, right? Why would they mimic her while taking out her brethren?”

“Her brethren,” Kilkenny repeated, amused. “Maybe it’s meant as the ultimate insult? Not necessarily as an homage to her, but as a middle finger?”

Raisa cracked her neck. “All we have right now is speculation.”

“And Isabel’s message to you.”

“Check the dates of the letters,” Raisa said, some of the tension leaving her body.

Every time in her life, not just her professional career, she had been able to seek solace in language, in the quirks that could only be found in someone’s choice of words.

The answer didn’t lie in these interviews with Essi or Helen or Gabriela, as helpful as they might be.

The answer, as always, lay in the writing.