Page 22 of By the Time You Read This (Raisa Susanto #3)

Chapter Sixteen

Raisa

Day Two

When Raisa finished reading Emily Logan’s blog posts, she pulled up St. Ivany’s contact and hit “Call.”

The hospital’s loudspeaker crackled to life just as the woman picked up, and Raisa waited until she could hear herself before asking, “What was this class?”

“What?”

“What was this class?” Raisa repeated with what she thought was profound patience. The waiting room was bright because of the fluorescent lights, but the night sky had gone dark outside. The doctor hadn’t come out to give her any update on Kilkenny. She didn’t want to think about whether that was a good or bad sign, because in what world was that a good sign? “The class that Emily Logan took with Professor OB, who is a perv but a good teacher.”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay,” Raisa said, and then hung up. She had no time for fools. Not now, especially, when she swore Kilkenny’s blood was still caked beneath her fingernails.

She brought up the website for the local community college and ignored the incoming call from St. Ivany.

Raisa narrowed the available classes down to the psychology department—since that was the one specialty Emily had mentioned—and then scrolled until one jumped out at her.

Media Ethics: Fandoms and the Cult of Celebrity.

The phone rang again.

St. Ivany.

Raisa ignored it and found the name of the professor. Declan O’Brien.

The pervy professor.

The first death that Raisa accredited to Delaney—even if Isabel had done the killing—had been a professor. He’d targeted Delaney when she’d been a precocious high schooler taking college classes for credit.

She didn’t know why that thought had popped into her head. But just like Delaney and Isabel, Raisa was good at spotting patterns, in writing and in life. That didn’t always mean that they were important, but it was good to acknowledge they existed.

The swinging doors to the ICU opened, but the nurse who walked out was wearing a jacket and fiddling with her phone. She was off shift, clearly.

Raisa watched her, hoping against reason that the woman would turn around and tell her Kilkenny was going to be just fine.

Her stomach rolled as the nurse disappeared into the elevator and she went back to her phone.

A few minutes later, she found O’Brien’s schedule. He had a night class that was set to end in forty minutes. If she was lucky, he would stop by his office after.

First, though, she had to bring herself to leave.

Raisa crossed to the nurses’ desk. The man behind it glanced up, his expression sympathetic. “No news.”

“Is he ...?” Raisa trailed off, not even knowing what to ask to try to shake loose something from these guard dogs, who had been tight-lipped all afternoon. They’d informed her at some point that he was out of surgery, but there had been no updates since then.

“Listen, why don’t you go get some sleep,” the nurse suggested, somehow both gentle and firm. “Your partner is going to need you in the morning.”

Raisa swallowed and nodded, getting the message.

She wasn’t about to go sleep, but she probably wasn’t going to be let back there tonight. Unless anything catastrophic happened in the next hour or two, she wasn’t about to miss an opportunity to go sit with Kilkenny.

“You have my—”

“Number,” he said, with that same kind smile. “Yes, we’ll make sure to call you right away with any updates.”

A helpless anger flared in her chest at being interrupted. She knew there was no actual reason to be mad at this man; she knew this feeling stemmed from frustration and fear and was simply searching for an easy outlet. But if she didn’t walk away in that moment, Raisa wasn’t sure she could maintain the generally positive relationship she had with the guard dogs.

So, without saying anything, she turned and left.

Kilkenny’s SUV was back at the hotel, so when she got outside, she called for a car.

While she waited for the ride, she did a simple search on O’Brien. He had several research papers published and even a few videos popped up—a sure sign of someone who was on the TED Talk circuit. The thumbnail picture of him revealed that he was young and handsome, with dark hair and blue eyes.

All his work concentrated on parasocial relationships between public figures and the worshipping masses, along with the ways that social media blurred the boundaries on what should and could be expected from each side.

In another situation, Raisa would have found the topic fascinating, but now, her eyes kept being drawn to the hospital lights.

Her biggest fear right now was that Kilkenny was going to die in there.

Alone.

The thought was almost enough to drive her back into the building. But that would do nothing to help catch the person who had put Kilkenny in there. And maybe tracking down a professor in a class that may have a weak link to Isabel and one of the other victims wasn’t doing much, either, to catch whoever had been driving the SUV, but it felt like forward movement.

Like when you pulled off a highway during a traffic jam and took a much longer route, but at least you were driving.

A white Tucson pulled to the curb a moment later, the license plate matching the information on the rideshare app.

The man behind the wheel was the quiet type, and Raisa continued her basic search for Declan O’Brien as they traveled through the darkened streets.

She pulled up a map of the small campus just on the outskirts of town, and when she got dropped at the main hall, she easily navigated her way to the psychology wing of the social sciences building. Then she simply wandered until she found O’Brien’s office.

Her knees gave out then and she slid down the wall beside the door. At the hospital, she hadn’t let herself close her eyes because all she could see in the darkness was Kilkenny’s body, crumpled on the pavement.

He shouldn’t have broken like he did. The car must have hit him just right. Or wrong.

Whatever.

She gulped in air, pressing the heels of her palms to her eyes so the tears gathering there wouldn’t escape. She’d never once cried on the job and she wasn’t about to start now.

“Hello?”

Raisa glanced up to find an extraordinarily handsome man hovering over her. Black hair, blue eyes. Emily Logan’s professor.

The perv, if the girl was to be believed.

“Do you need help?” he asked, and she remembered just then that she was still wearing the borrowed scrubs.

She scrambled to her feet and held out her hand. “I’m Raisa Susanto. I’m an agent with the FBI.”

He didn’t flinch the way people who were guilty tended to when she introduced herself unexpectedly.

O’Brien slipped his palm into hers. “Dr. Declan O’Brien, though I assume you know that.”

“I do,” Raisa said with a nod. “Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”

He glanced at his watch, and sighed. But then he stepped around her to open his office door. “This is about Emily Logan?”

“Yes,” Raisa said, almost surprised he’d been able to guess, but she supposed she shouldn’t have been. It was a small town, and no matter what Gabriela Cruz thought, homicides weren’t exactly common in a place this size.

“I don’t know how much I’ll be able to help you, but I’ll try,” he said, waving at her to take a seat in one of the chairs across from his desk. The office was cozy in a way she hadn’t been expecting, with warm artwork, more than a dozen plants, and a soft, colorful rug he’d obviously brought in himself. There was a messy air to the random stacks of books, loose paper piled up on the desk and personal photographs scattered throughout the room.

“Emily was in your class about the relationship between celebrities and their fans, correct?” Raisa asked.

“Yes,” O’Brien confirmed. “It was a six-week summer class that has become quite popular in recent years.”

“What was she like as a student?”

“Engaged and eager, though she didn’t have the highest grades in the class,” he said, considering. “She didn’t seem to make any friends, but that’s not unusual with older students like her.”

“She was only twenty-three,” Raisa pointed out.

“Which is five years older than your average freshman,” O’Brien said. “I’m certainly not saying she was long in the tooth, only that I didn’t find her behavior odd or off-putting.”

But what about LC?

“Was there someone in the same class with the initials LC?” Raisa asked. “She was remote.”

“Ah, yes, now that you mention it, they did pair up on a few projects,” O’Brien said. “That would be Lindsey Cousins.”

Raisa had suspected as much, but she hadn’t wanted to leap to conclusions, seeing patterns where none existed. “Were you aware that she died two months ago?”

What looked like genuine surprise flashed into his expression, and he sat back in his chair. “Ah, that’s a shame.”

“Two girls who took your class are now dead,” Raisa said, to make sure he picked up on exactly what she was saying.

His eyes narrowed, and she remembered then that they were in a mostly empty building and she hadn’t brought a weapon.

“They were my students, yes, but I have hundreds of students a year,” O’Brien said. “And Lindsey was virtual, which meant I pretty much checked to make sure she was attending. Beyond that, I didn’t know much about either of them.”

“Did you have any interactions with them outside of class?”

“No,” O’Brien said, his brows collapsing into an insulted vee. “Should I have a lawyer?”

She stared at him. “It’s your right to.”

He sighed and ran a palm over his jaw. “I don’t know what happened to either girl. They showed up for class, did assignments on time, and rarely talked to anyone else. That’s about the extent of what I can tell you.”

Raisa had a feeling that he was telling the truth, no matter how damning this connection was. “Okay. Can you tell me more about the class?”

O’Brien reached for one of his desk drawers, and a minute later she had a syllabus in her hands.

“That goes over everything,” he said. “But broadly speaking we cover the A-listers in every part of the industry. And then we touch on more niche celebrities as well. The chefs, the reality TV show stars. And at the end we wrap up with the gray-area celebs.”

“Gray-area?”

“The ones who only have a career because of their parasocial relationship with the audience,” O’Brien said. Raisa thought about Essi at that, because what better way to sum up the woman? “So the social media influencers mainly, who pay their bills by making their followers think they’re best friends. The Flik dancers who’ve monetized their accounts. People like that.”

The words might have been harsh— people like that —but his tone wasn’t. Raisa glanced down at the syllabus and tried to skim it quickly. She paused when she caught sight of the title of one of the sections, but she didn’t want to lead him into an answer.

“Did Emily seem engaged in any one section more than others?”

O’Brien squinted in thought, his face serious. He probably could have run for office and been touted as a JFK look-alike. “She did write her final paper on the true crime boom, drilling down on the rise of armchair detectives and their relationships with law enforcement.”

Raisa flexed her fingers to keep them from gripping the papers too tightly. “Do you remember what her thesis statement was in that paper?”

“Even better,” he said. He stood and crossed to the bookshelves lining one whole side of the room. Then he pulled down an accordion file folder. “She never picked it up.”

Raisa couldn’t believe her luck. “What?”

“The day she turned it in was the last day she attended class,” he said, handing the paper over.

Play-Along-At-Home Sleuths: Distractions or Godsends ?

“She makes a fairly convincing argument that bringing in more people—hobbyists who don’t need to be paid, at that—to help solve cold cases is a net positive for society,” O’Brien said. “She even cites stats that show how successful Unsolved Mysteries was. Half the cases profiled on that show were eventually solved. Statistically, that’s the average solve rate for detectives across the country.”

“And the net negatives?”

“Revictimizing the families,” O’Brien said. “A breakdown of the fourth wall, especially with podcasts. And then a muddling of timelines and evidence and suspects, of course.”

“Did you ever listen to Jenna Shaw’s podcasts for class?”

Jenna had been Isabel’s cover for the time right before she’d been caught. She’d even established a podcast for “tinhatters” who wanted to listen to discussions about conspiracy theories.

His brows rose. “You mean Isabel Parker’s podcast?”

“Yes.”

“No, I didn’t,” he said. “Though plenty of my students have been interested in her, I didn’t want to encourage anyone to get ideas about trying to visit her.”

That was a pleasantly thoughtful take, which she probably shouldn’t have been surprised at coming from a professor who taught about responsibly engaging in celebrities’ lives.

“Okay, thank you,” Raisa said, standing. “Can I ask where you were the night of the fifteenth?”

“The night Emily Logan was killed?” O’Brien asked, even though they both knew the importance of the date. “I was in Mexico, speaking at a conference. Feel free to email me for the details to verify them.”

Raisa smiled, hoping to ease the sting of the question. “I had to ask.”

“Yeah,” O’Brien said, not looking too put out. “Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“Do you think Emily got too close to Isabel Parker? Is that why she’s dead?” He sounded worried, like his class had been what sent her careening headlong into danger.

“Honestly? I don’t know.” She knew why he was asking and felt reasonably sure she could offer him some comfort. “But I’ve read her blog posts. She was interested in the topic long before your class.”

O’Brien nodded, though he didn’t seem convinced. “Okay, thanks.”

Her hand was on the door when he called out to her.

“Hey.”

Raisa turned to find him studying her.

“Emily, she was intrigued the most about the families of the victims.” He paused and licked his lips. “But also the families of the serial killers. I think she found that topic most fascinating of all—how it must be, to be associated with evil like that.”

“So, everyone knows that I’m Isabel’s sister.”

“It’s Gig Harbor, kid,” O’Brien said, in a poor Chinatown impression. “Everyone knows everything about our most infamous resident.”