Page 20 of By the Time You Read This (Raisa Susanto #3)

Chapter Fifteen

Delaney

Day Four

The eyes on the back of Delaney’s neck had returned.

When they had caught up with her—how they had caught up with her—she didn’t know.

But they were there.

Delaney stripped out of the costume she’d worn down to the bonfire to meet Gabriela Cruz, and then she flipped the motel’s shower on, watching it ramp up from a trickle to a stronger trickle.

At least the water was scalding. Usually in places like this she had to deal with both a weak flow and glacial temperatures.

It took a while, but eventually Lana Parker swirled all the way down the drain and she was back to being Delaney.

A comfy pair of sweats finished off the transformation.

Delaney made a cup of coffee that was more water and false promises than anything else, then grabbed her computer and went to sit on the edge of the kidney-shaped pool outside.

Her socked feet dangled over the chipped no diving warning painted on one of the walls, and she stared at the one other room that was lit up against the night. She wondered who else was there with her.

She didn’t think it was whoever was hunting her. They wouldn’t announce their presence like that.

The air smelled of weed, even though there was no one around, and Delaney wished the pool were full. She wanted nothing more than to slip beneath the cool water and disappear, really disappear. There would be no eyes on the back of her neck, no sour scent clinging to the inside of her nostrils, no memory of Isabel, staring at her from across the table of the visitors’ room at that correctional facility, a master plan brewing behind her eyes.

But there was no water and Isabel’s face would forever be burned in her mind and there was definitely someone tracking her.

Maeve? Or maybe Maeve was just someone her hunter had hired. Someone sent in to get a lay of the land before the real predator struck.

Delaney sighed and woke her laptop up. She punched in Lindsey Cousins’s name, as she always did. No new articles about the “drowning.”

She was going to be forgotten as just a tragic statistic. That was probably for the best.

A headline at the bottom of the page caught her eye.

Police Mull Curfew as Search for Emily Logan’s Killer Continues

Emily Logan. The girl who had died just like Isabel and Delaney’s parents had. On a bed, stabbed too many times.

Psychologists had said that kind of homicide could only be driven by rage or a psychotic break. Yet with the Parkers, it had actually been Isabel’s cold calculation.

She’d wanted to mimic rage. She’d never actually experienced it herself.

Let’s play a game . . .

Delaney shook her head and left Emily in the past, bringing up Gabriela Cruz’s Flik page. Delaney had been a content moderator for the video-based social media site for several years before Isabel made her triumphant return into her life via the app.

She knew it well.

Gabbi had established a following for herself in a particular corner of a very popular community. True crime girlies, she’d seen them called. Gabbi had also picked up a slice of the users who liked to advocate for better mental health treatment for women.

Delaney scrolled through her posts, searching for the start of the obsession.

Isabel Parker: Psychopath or Misunderstood Vigilante?

After that, there were a dozen or so other videos that focused on Isabel. Delaney made her way through them, coming to the conclusion that Gabbi idolized Isabel but didn’t want to, and the cognitive dissonance of connecting to something positive in a monster had caused her to break with reality a bit.

Delaney had seen it frequently in fandoms across popular culture. Bad behavior was explained away by the person’s fans; bad behavior was exaggerated by their haters. Being considered a “good” person who adhered to ever-narrowing and impossible social rules was the bare minimum expected for many celebrities these days.

The mental gymnastics that ensued if they stepped out of line would have been amusing to watch if Delaney didn’t find it so confounding. So many people seemed hell-bent on creating a religion, where they would be assigned to live out their days in heaven or hell based on their social media posting and nothing else.

Delaney wasn’t wired ... normally. She knew that. So she had never really worried about being thought of as a good person. She was just trying to make it through having helped more people than she’d hurt.

She returned to the last video Gabbi had posted about Isabel.

This one was simply titled Who Killed Emily Logan?

It had half a million views.

“Mind if I join you?”

This time Delaney was interrupted by a male voice. This time she didn’t flinch.

“Free country,” she said, without looking up. Still, she could see him from the corner of her eye. This was the fourth person to approach her unsolicited on this day when she knew she was being followed.

If she let her wilder conspiracy theories take root, she’d start to think everyone was in on the hunt.

That couldn’t be, though. This wasn’t The Truman Show . Not every stranger was a threat.

Still, once was a coincidence and all that. So she killed the screen, holding the computer protectively on her lap as she stared at the night sky.

The man was thin, probably too thin, his face all sharp angles. His sandy hair was pulled back into a nub of a ponytail, and he wore beat-up leather sandals on surprisingly clean feet.

“Roan,” he said, when he caught her looking.

“Like the mountains in North Carolina?” she asked, and he grinned, revealing teeth too white and straight to fit the rest of him.

“My mother was a glassworker in Asheville when I was conceived,” Roan said, as confirmation.

That was certainly a thought-out fake name if it was indeed a fake name. Delaney closed her eyes, wondering if being paranoid was smart or dangerous.

The thing about being in fight-or-flight mode all the time was that it wore on the body; it wore on the mind. Her ability to make smart decisions was eroding because she saw every situation as full of threats.

But today, without initiating contact with any of them, she’d been approached by a homeless man, a beautiful woman, and then the very girl whom she’d gone to the bonfire to meet.

And now this, a man with a name too unique for it to work for undercover but also too strange and perfect for it to be real.

This was where she lived now, she supposed.

“What are you doing in Gig Harbor?” Delaney asked.

“Headed up to Olympic.”

A hiker. That made sense. He had the vibe of one. Delaney’s eyes slid to his feet again. No black toenails. No calluses.

Those weren’t feet that had been in boots and wool socks for days on end.

Maybe he was a Seattle tech bro who fancied himself a bum. A weekend hiking warrior who stared at a computer the rest of his life.

“How about you?” he asked when she didn’t say anything further.

Delaney donned her Lana Parker persona, even sans wig.

She was tired of her own brain, tired of the what-ifs, tired of the chess game she felt like she was playing against her dead sister. Roan probably was exactly who he said he was. And right now, she craved the relief that came with turning her brain off in this particular way more than she feared the consequences if she was wrong about that.

So she stood up, holding out her hand as she did.

“I’m playing a game,” she said. “Do you want to join in?”

He followed her to her hotel room, because they always did.