Page 18 of By the Time You Read This (Raisa Susanto #3)

Chapter Thirteen

Raisa

Day One

On the way back from Gabriela’s, Kilkenny pulled into a diner.

“The letters can wait twenty minutes for us to actually eat,” was all he said, before jumping out.

Now Raisa stared out the window at the quiet port. The tiny town was so idyllic, yet so much darkness lurked beneath.

“I know there’s a crazy murderer running loose out there, and yet I feel safer knowing Isabel’s dead,” Raisa murmured. “Is that odd?”

“Isabel’s greatest trick was that she was able to make herself seem all-knowing, all-powerful, even when she wasn’t,” Kilkenny said. “Sending you that note ...”

“It makes me feel like she can hurt me even beyond the grave,” Raisa finished the thought, and Kilkenny nodded. “Because she recruited a protégé.”

“Hmmm.”

Raisa slid him a look. “Sounds like you don’t agree with Gabriela’s theory.”

“Isabel wasn’t the type to want her legacy carried on by anyone else,” Kilkenny said. “My bet is if it is a protégé, Isabel wanted to use them for a different reason than just teaching them how to kill.”

“Like maybe to send me a letter,” Raisa said. “And take more drastic actions if I’d ignored it?”

Kilkenny lifted one shoulder. “If this person viciously stabbed Emily Logan to death, then ... yeah. I think we can safely assume they’re willing to go to extremes to follow Isabel’s orders. And that one of those orders might be to take you out if you don’t play Isabel’s game.”

“Well, isn’t that a delightful thought,” Raisa said. It worried her and it didn’t. Logically, she knew Isabel’s reach could extend beyond the grave; emotionally, it was hard to be too scared of a ghost.

They didn’t speak as they finished off their meal and then headed back to the hotel.

When they got to their floor, Kilkenny paused outside her door.

“Do you need company?” he asked. There was no hint in his voice that he could tell she was spooked, but she was sure the offer was at least partly because of that.

Raisa truly thought about it, which was new. At any time in her past, she would have immediately declined the offer, preferring silence over any other choice.

“I want to study the letters,” she said, so that she made it clear it wasn’t his presence she didn’t want.

He lifted his hand, and she wasn’t sure whether he was going to give her a gentle nudge on the shoulder or wrap her up in a hug. Instead of either of those, he palmed the top of her head for one brief moment. Human touch, contact with someone who cared.

It made a difference.

She pressed into it, and for a moment time stood still.

He pulled back with a soft, fond smile. “Good night.”

“We’ll attack it in the morning,” she said.

The moment she got inside, she stepped out of her shoes and changed into her comfy clothes, though they were no longer clean.

A chair and desk by the window overlooked the harbor.

The sun was just dipping below the horizon, the day long this deep into summer.

Boats rocked gently against the pier and Raisa thought of Essi Halla.

Sleek.

That was the word that came to mind. She was a lawyer, she had measured every word she’d said to them, even if she had come across as casual during parts of the conversation.

Raisa would kill for a sample of Essi’s writing.

She did a quick search and found that Essi had a book coming out in two weeks. When she did a broader search for an excerpt, though, she came up blank.

Maybe she would be able to ask Essi for an early copy.

For now, Raisa put her out of her mind and turned her attention to the Biggest Fan letters.

Look at the dates.

She did. She logged them all on a spreadsheet. Nothing jumped out at her, though.

Codes were fine and dandy, but if one person—Isabel—actually wanted to communicate to another—Raisa—she would have to give some guideposts that mattered.

Look at the dates.

Raisa shook her head, ignoring Isabel for now. Her sister had an agenda, always, and Raisa didn’t need to follow it anymore.

Instead, she read through the letters, one by one, without trying to run any analysis. The messages were frustratingly dull, but Raisa got a feeling for the pattern of them.

An update on the weather, and then a mention of a hiking trail, every time. Raisa googled all the trails mentioned, but there were no common similarities among them. The author said they’d summited a mountain in New Zealand one day, and a week later they were in the Alps, and then in California, and so on.

Of course, they weren’t just hiking trails. Isabel would never have kept these letters if there wasn’t some kind of secret communication going on in them. And the killer thing was, she absolutely wanted Raisa to figure them out.

Isabel didn’t do things by accident.

The letters always wrapped up with a signature from Your Biggest Fan .

Raisa slumped into the chair and rubbed at her eyes, tired from the day, tired from Isabel’s games.

Tired of being the puppet at the end of a string that had outlasted the puppeteer.

She checked her phone again, but really didn’t have to. Delaney hadn’t responded. She wasn’t going to respond. Still, because Kilkenny’s sad face haunted her, Raisa tried one more time. The call went to voicemail.

Raisa shot off a quick text and then tossed the phone back on the desk, staring at papers spread out on the desk once more.

She wished she had Isabel’s responses.

The journal.

Raisa let the legs of the chair fall back to the floor, hardly believing she hadn’t thought of it before. She had Isabel’s journal.

It didn’t take long to find it and then match up the letters with the corresponding dates.

On the surface, the journal entries were tame by Isabel’s standards. But Raisa thought about codes, thought about messages. Thought again that Isabel wanted to communicate something here.

To a linguist.

Or ... Tell her to look at the dates on the letters.

Dates were numbers, and those were Delaney’s purview.

What if the her hadn’t been Raisa?

She straightened, and ripped a fresh piece of paper from her own journal. She wrote down the numbers that comprised each of the dates.

1-7-2-5

3-6-2-5

When she had all twelve lines written, she crossed out the years. Anything that was a common factor could either be used as an anchor—unlikely in a situation like this one—or could be discarded.

Then she went to the journal, to the first date. January 7. She looked at the first sentence, and then the first letter of the seventh word in that sentence.

Please.

P.

Raisa typed that into her computer and flipped to the March 6 entry. She found the sixth word in the third sentence.

Exist.

E.

She repeated the process for all the letters from Isabel’s Biggest Fan.

When she finished, she sat back and huffed out a breath.

P.E.T.E.R. S.T.A.M.K.O.S.

Peter Stamkos—the single father who had abused his daughter and then died by suicide after a CPS visit.

He had died months after the date on the first journal entry.

Raisa chewed on the inside of her cheek, trying to figure out what this all meant.

The only way Isabel could have made all that line up was if she’d written the journal out completely after she’d received the Biggest Fan letters. The journal wasn’t meant to detail her life or be a record of the final months before her death; its sole purpose was meant to confirm that Isabel had known who Peter Stamkos was, he was linked to the Biggest Fan letters, and both were important to figuring out who had killed her.

“Fuck you, Isabel,” Raisa said, and felt immediately better. If her sister was going to create an entire journal out of thin air just to play simple word and number games, she could have simply written: these are the people who want me dead the most .

Sick of it all, Raisa slammed the thing shut. If, as a person, she were slightly stronger or slightly weaker, she would’ve packed her bags right now and left at dawn.

Instead, she took a shower and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

In the morning, she looked up the number for the CPS office that had visited Peter Stamkos and left a message along with her badge number.

She was playing with fire, introducing herself as an FBI agent even when she wasn’t working an official investigation, but she was mostly convinced she could get St. Ivany to invite them on to consult. Especially once the medical report came back that Isabel’s death might’ve been a homicide, which it would.

After she got dressed, she collected Kilkenny, and they walked to the coffee shop a block away. Raisa filled him in on the dates and letters after they got their drinks.

“So Stamkos’s death does have something to do with Isabel,” Kilkenny mused. They were back outside, meandering along the walkway that had been built up next to the water. Raisa looked for Essi’s boat, but a few more had come in overnight and it was blocked from view.

“Or, or, or, what if she saw his obituary and just decided to mess with me?” Raisa asked, and then let out a frustrated, though muted, yell. “I hate this second-guessing whenever it comes to Isabel. She’s a mastermind until she’s not. She’s an opportunist and a genius and kind of a dumbass sometimes and I never know which side of her we’re getting.”

“As long as we keep in mind that she’s trying to manipulate you, I already think we’re ahead of the game,” Kilkenny said. “Or at least better than we have been before when it comes to Isabel.”

“I wondered . . .”

When she didn’t finish, he nudged her. “Wondered what?”

“If the messages were meant for Delaney instead of me,” Raisa said.

“You were the emergency contact,” Kilkenny pointed out, and Raisa tipped her head in acknowledgment. “And you were the one she made sure knew she was murdered.”

“Thinking about Delaney got me to the right answer, so maybe that’s why she did it. She wanted me to think about Delaney and—oh my god, do you hear me right now? I’m acting like Isabel is playing 4D chess, and really she’s probably only playing checkers,” Raisa said, with a sigh. “And yet we have to act like she’s a grand master because every once in a while she is. She gave Gabriela Cruz a clue to give to me months ago .”

“Let’s just forge ahead for now,” Kilkenny said, with the calm air of someone used to high-strung horses. “One of the more interesting things to note is that if we do have a protégé on our hands ... well.”

“‘Well’ what?”

“They’re killing at quite a clip,” Kilkenny said. “Let’s say they’ve killed four people in the last four months or so? Isabel averaged that many a year, in a busy year. That, to me, signals the protégé could be escalating at a startling rate.”

Raisa grimaced. “Why?”

“They weren’t built for killing?” Kilkenny offered. “They thought they could, but taking that first life—”

“Peter Stamkos,” Raisa offered. “According to the timeline.”

“Killing Stamkos broke them,” Kilkenny continued, with a nod of thanks. “They’re not going to be functioning well, they’re probably holding it together by a thread at the moment. They’re going to make a mistake sooner or later, or even turn themselves in. But there will be more deaths before that happens. If I had to guess.”

“Yeah, your guesses tend to be pretty accurate,” Raisa said. She very much enjoyed when they set up shop in his area of expertise. “What kind of killer do you see this person as?”

“Erratic, is what I’m getting mostly.”

“Even though she’s killing like Isabel?” Raisa asked.

“Isabel killed for twenty-five years without ever getting caught,” Kilkenny pointed out. “Our person here? They were found out by a twenty-two-year-old with a homemade algorithm.”

“Because they stayed local and their cooling-off period is nearly nonexistent,” Raisa said. He made a, perhaps unconscious, move toward his holster. Raisa dropped her voice, even though there was no one following them. “You really think we’re in danger?”

“Not us,” Kilkenny said.

Raisa rolled her head, just enough to peek over her shoulder. “Me.”

“Yeah,” Kilkenny admitted. “Isabel wanted you in Gig Harbor. I think she sent you that note not just to get you to look into her death but because she has plans for you here.”

A shiver slid along the length of Raisa’s spine. The theory seemed to cut through all the maybes, the second-guessing, the what-ifs.

If Isabel had wanted Raisa to solve her murder, she would have given her more information.

If Isabel wanted Raisa in Gig Harbor, she would send the exact note she had.

“We’ll just have to stay four or five steps ahead of her,” Raisa said, though she wasn’t convinced they could do that. Not with so many different paths they could go down.

“We should get the visitors’ logs from the correctional facility,” Kilkenny said. “Gabriela probably wasn’t the only one to visit Isabel. Maybe we’ll get lucky and her Biggest Fan will have put their real name down.”

Raisa checked the time. They still had an hour to kill.

“They’ll probably all just say ‘Delaney’ and ‘Gabriela,’” Raisa said, though she didn’t disagree that they should get them.

“You think Delaney visited her?”

She glanced at him, trying to read his expression. “You don’t?”

“Delaney seemed like she’d come to her own realization about how dangerous it was to associate with Isabel,” Kilkenny mused.

“Yeah, I don’t know about that,” Raisa said. “A nearly forty-year-old habit is hard to break.”

“Have you heard from her?” Kilkenny asked.

Raisa checked her phone even though she didn’t need to. “No.”

When he didn’t say anything, she glanced at him. “You’re really worried, aren’t you?”

“Just as much as I’m worried about you,” Kilkenny said. It was reasonable, but Raisa didn’t feel like being reasonable. Not when it came to either of her sisters.

And anyway, you could say a lot of things about Delaney, but one thing you couldn’t was that she needed protection. Delaney Moore might look like a computer nerd, but she could handle her business. “Delaney always lands on her feet.”

“Well, if we’ve got the motive wrong, if it’s not a protégé, I think whoever killed Isabel is a pissed-off family member,” Kilkenny said. “Which means they would likely target either you or Delaney next. And honestly, a civilian is a lot easier to go after than an FBI agent.”

“You would like to think they’d go after the person who sat on the sidelines for twenty-five years, too,” Raisa muttered. “She doesn’t deserve to die, but it’s not like her hands are clean, either.”

“Raisa . . .”

“I don’t know why you refuse to hold her accountable for her actions,” she said, letting some of the long-held frustration seep into her voice.

“I do—”

“No, you don’t,” Raisa said, raw now. She hated this argument and she hated that Kilkenny had never budged on it. Every time Delaney was brought up, he acted like Raisa was in the wrong for icing her out. As if now that Isabel was in prison—dead, she was dead—it all shook out in the wash. “What? Is it because she’s a woman? You don’t think she knew what she was doing? Is it easier for you to make her into the victim?”

Kilkenny reeled back at that. “What?”

“I don’t know,” Raisa all but yelled. The morning was sleepy, only a few tourists wandering the streets now. Still, she realized she was making a scene, so she took a deep breath. “Why do you care what I think about her? She’s not getting charged, and I have no power over what happens to her. Yet you can’t just let it go.”

Hurt flickered in and out of his expression, before he shut it down completely. He was such an expert at that.

“She’s done a lot more good than bad,” Kilkenny said after a moment of letting the silence sit between them, loaded with her anger. “You can blame maybe two of Isabel’s victims on her, and you could say the same about yourself.”

He held up a hand to cut off her indignant reply. “Which is to say, neither of you is responsible for Isabel’s delusions and obsessions. And as our anonymous tipster, Delaney helped scrub the dark web clean of a lot of men who would have gone on to do very bad things. In my eyes, her ledger is balanced.”

“I know that’s what you think—”

Kilkenny interrupted her again. “But that’s not why I care.” He shook his head, staring at her so intently she had to look away underneath the scrutiny. “I care because ... she’s your sister, and you could actually let yourself enjoy that. Maybe it wouldn’t be smooth sailing all the time. You’re both prickly as hell. But you would have someone in your corner. Always.”

“I have you in my corner,” Raisa said, almost desperate for the validation.

“You need more than just me,” Kilkenny said.

At some point in the aftermath of learning she was related to Isabel, Raisa had unearthed a letter from her adoptive parents, the ones she’d thought were her birth parents most of her life. Her mother, Pia, had wished that she would find her sisters once again and recognize them as hers . As family.

She supposed that was what Kilkenny wanted for her as well.

Raisa just didn’t understand how he looked at Delaney’s past and thought Raisa would want someone like that in her corner.

She’d rather be by herself, but the amazing thing was she no longer had to be.

What she didn’t need was Kilkenny lecturing her about her life. Maybe he looked at it as sad, but he didn’t exactly have a full stable of friends, either. As much as he liked to pretend he was in a better place than she was, they’d recognized the loneliness in each other .

“Right now, I need another coffee,” she said even though she had barely touched her first cup. What she really needed was space. For the first time in a long time, that included from Kilkenny.

He sighed and reached for her, but she danced back a few steps.

A car started in the distance, and he turned. She used the opportunity to dash across the street.

When she looked back, his arm was still outstretched, his expression some complicated mix of anger and grief and irritation.

Join the club, she thought.

“Raisa,” he said, stepping off the curb.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a blur, movement that shouldn’t be there.

A second later, she could only watch as a dark SUV slammed into Kilkenny at full speed.