Page 19 of By the Time You Read This (Raisa Susanto #3)

Chapter Fourteen

Raisa

Day Two

Blood. Sirens. The heavy, dead weight of a body in her arms.

Raisa couldn’t breathe but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered right now beyond helping Kilkenny.

There was blood on her hands, warm and slick, his skin going slippery beneath her fingers. Frantic, she searched for the source of his worst injury, and found it at the back of his head.

A whimper escaped her lips, and she moved so she could cradle his skull in her lap.

Breathe. Think. Concentrate.

Raisa finally let herself glance at Kilkenny’s face, only to find it ashen.

Everything in the world stilled.

He was alive, he was. She could see his heart still pumping in the hollow of his neck.

It didn’t matter what his face looked like right now.

She glanced down again at her hands, the cracks in her skin dyed red.

Someone gripped her arms and she curled over Kilkenny’s body as if they were in a war zone.

“Ma’am, ma’am, let us get to him.”

It was the paramedics.

“His head,” Raisa said, as she kept it off the pavement, all while shifting back, away from him.

They needed to work on him.

They needed to save him.

The sunlight caught on their scissors, on the railings of the stretcher, on the pool of copper on the pavement.

Raisa shifted, retched, her body rejecting the images.

“Ma’am?”

The paramedics again.

Hands on her arms again.

“Do you want to ride in the ambulance?” It was a question, but it really wasn’t. He was already helping her up the stairs, onto the seat next to the bed.

Kilkenny wasn’t conscious.

She took his hand anyway. The other had wires and IVs and a Pulse Ox attached.

Beeping filled her skull, pinging off the bone inside.

It wasn’t long before a paramedic gently shifted her out of the way. They were working on Kilkenny some more. She didn’t know what they were doing.

There was a bag of blood swinging with each bump in the road, each turn.

Four seconds or four years later—she couldn’t tell—they pulled to a stop.

The beauty of a small town, the hospital was right here.

Hands again, directing her out of the way.

Then Kilkenny was gone.

Raisa scrambled to keep up, but they were too fast, disappearing through a door, yelling stats to each other even as it slammed closed behind them.

She stopped, her body refusing to move.

She couldn’t even imagine what she looked like, her skin smeared with Kilkenny’s blood.

“Miss, are you okay?” someone asked. A nurse in pretty pastel scrubs.

Raisa shook her head. “No.”

Nothing was okay.

A baby cried, his mother trying to soothe him across the waiting room. The woman sent Raisa an apologetic smile.

Raisa tried to force her face into something understanding, but it might have just come out a grimace. The woman seemed to understand anyway.

Kilkenny was in surgery, someone had finally come out to inform her. She might have claimed she was his partner, and they’d run with the assumption that she was his next of kin. He wouldn’t care, and at least it meant that she was getting updates.

It had been three hours.

He’d sustained a skull fracture. That was bad.

His leg had been broken in two different spots. That was also bad.

There was other damage, the kind sustained when an SUV slammed into a vulnerable rib cage.

But that was all secondary.

They needed to save his life first. Then make sure he would wake up.

A pair of heels appeared in Raisa’s line of sight. She wanted to ignore them, but she couldn’t.

“Did you catch them?” Raisa asked, lifting her eyes to meet Maeve St. Ivany’s gaze.

“No,” St. Ivany said, taking a seat near Raisa, but leaving one in between them. “We have an APB out for the make and model of the SUV. A few bystanders caught a good enough look to give us that.”

“But no license plate, am I right?” Raisa asked, going back to staring at her hands. Someone had helped her get cleaned up a while ago, and she was wearing the extra scrubs one of the nurses kept in her locker for emergencies. “Not even a letter or number to go off of?”

There was a beat. “No.”

Raisa nodded. This hadn’t been an accident. “They probably covered it with mud.”

“Probably,” St. Ivany agreed. “What are you thinking?”

“That it’s a pretty inefficient way to kill someone,” Raisa forced out, her lips numb.

St. Ivany didn’t say anything, which Raisa appreciated. Of course St. Ivany agreed with that assessment—any law enforcement officer would. But if she had made some comment that hit just left of acceptable, Raisa would have burned the bridge as quickly as she could come up with something to say that would do it.

“I don’t think it was an accident, either,” Raisa said, and this time St. Ivany nodded.

“A scare tactic gone wrong, maybe,” St. Ivany said.

Raisa glanced at her. That was ... smart. They had talked to both Essi and Gabriela, along with a handful of women at the correctional facility gates. They’d also met with the very person in charge of making sure there weren’t any homicides in her prison. They’d talked to multiple employees. Any one of those people could have gotten spooked and tried to chase them out of town. They might not have known they would catch Kilkenny just wrong.

Raisa didn’t care what their intent was, though. She was going to find the person who had done it and make them pay.

“So you might be onto something with Isabel’s death,” St. Ivany said.

“Yeah, you think?” Raisa bit off.

“You’re a linguist, not a field agent,” St. Ivany said, which got Raisa to finally look at her. She held up a hand. “I’m not insulting you or insinuating anything. I just mean I can’t simply request you join the investigation. I have superiors, too, believe it or not. And I’m guessing yours aren’t going to be happy to have you on this case, no matter how much free rein you might have.”

That wasn’t untrue. She probably shouldn’t be working it, if she were being honest with herself. The rules existed for a reason, and even Emily Logan’s investigation brushed too closely to Isabel Parker for anyone to feel comfortable with Raisa’s participation.

“I’ll put in a request from our end,” Raisa finally said, though she wasn’t sure what the outcome of that would be. Normally, if she was contacted independently about an investigation and raised it to the level of her supervisor, he generally signed off on it. But this case couldn’t get more personal.

“If it helps make your case, we do have Emily Logan’s blog posts,” St. Ivany said. “We didn’t find anything useful in them, but they’re printed out and ordered chronologically. You might be more successful.”

Raisa nodded, though she had no desire to dig through the dead girl’s blog at the moment. She wanted to find whoever had been at the wheel of the SUV. “I’ll take a look at it.”

St. Ivany seemed to understand Raisa wasn’t exactly going to do an in-depth analysis on the thing immediately. “I’ve requested a warrant for the bank account of the woman who was involved in the shiv incident with Isabel six weeks ago.”

Raisa straightened at that, finally curious enough to really engage with the detective. “Who was it?”

“A woman named Taylor Bultman,” St. Ivany said. The hit-and-run seemed to have changed her entire demeanor, as if she realized there really was an active threat in her town and she might need FBI assistance. “She’s in for multiple life sentences and had nothing to lose. But she has a kid on the outside who is currently applying to colleges. I’m curious if the money ended up going to him.”

“It must have been a significant amount of money,” Raisa said. “Might help us eliminate suspects when it comes time.”

“Yup.”

“But if the person is smart, that bank account will probably be untraceable,” Raisa pointed out.

“Then we would know it was a hit, though,” St. Ivany countered. “Or a possible one, at least. That would put pressure on the ME, not to mention the correctional facility. They don’t want headlines about a murder in their system.”

That was also not a terrible point. Raisa slid St. Ivany a look, assessing.

“Hey, I’m not actually the bad guy here,” St. Ivany said. “You guys came to me out of nowhere, when I’m working a homicide.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

St. Ivany nudged her. “I’m not an idiot, either.”

It felt like an olive branch, albeit one covered in Kilkenny’s blood.

“Here, give me your number, I’ll keep you updated on the progress of the warrant,” St. Ivany said, opening her phone. “I know you’re not going to want to leave here for something less than a real lead.”

“Did you bring Emily’s blog posts?” Raisa asked after rattling off the digits.

“Yeah, the binder is in my car. I’ll go grab it.”

Raisa didn’t have anything with her to actually analyze the writing. She usually worked off her laptop, which had software that allowed her to track her notes about the author’s idiolect and stylistic quirks, along with breaking down each sentence so she didn’t miss anything.

But sometimes reading a work without any of that hanging over her was effective in its own way.

When St. Ivany returned, she handed over a generic black binder you could buy for cheap at any dollar store. Raisa took it with the respect it deserved as the last remaining words of a woman taken from the world far too soon and in far too brutal a manner.

St. Ivany hovered over her. “Can I ask you something?”

“Depends on if it’s a good question.”

St. Ivany’s lips twitched in the same way Kilkenny’s did. Acknowledging the humor while not really giving in to it. “Why do you think the SUV was aiming for Agent Kilkenny and not you?”

Raisa thought about Kilkenny’s warning. Isabel wanted you in Gig Harbor. If Kilkenny had taken a hit meant for her, she wasn’t sure she would be able to live with herself.

Her mind supplied an alternative. “I think they just wanted to scare us, and they didn’t care who was hurt.”

St. Ivany nodded, but her expression remained clouded. “I’m going to post a uniform by the door. Just in case.”

The fact that someone else had reached the conclusion that Raisa might have a target on her back made it seem all the more real. “You think someone’s after me?”

“Or Kilkenny,” St. Ivany said, neutrally. “But it won’t hurt to have someone in place.”

St. Ivany wasn’t wrong. And there wasn’t just the possibility of one threat out there. Whoever had been driving the SUV could have been Isabel’s protégé working under her direction, but it also could have been a relative of one of Isabel’s victims, operating independently of anything else.

“It’s not just me who might be in danger,” Raisa said slowly, finally, finally , shrugging off the anger that stopped her from acknowledging it. “It’s also my sister Delaney.”

St. Ivany’s face flickered with an emotion gone too quick for Raisa to catch. “Well, there’s only one of you I can protect.”