Page 25 of By the Time You Read This (Raisa Susanto #3)

Chapter Eighteen

Raisa

Day Two

Raisa tried to make the puzzle pieces fit. She tried to make them fit as she called another car to come get her from campus, and she tried to make them fit on the ride back to the hotel. She tried to make them fit as she finally, finally, finally scrubbed herself completely clean of Kilkenny’s blood.

And she couldn’t.

So she finally returned Maeve St. Ivany’s calls.

“Where do you live?” Raisa asked. “Send me the address.”

St. Ivany hung up, but a second later, Raisa’s phone vibrated with a text.

Raisa grabbed Kilkenny’s keys from the adjoining room, slung her bag over her shoulder, and then headed for the door.

The house turned out to be one not unlike Raisa’s own. It was small but cute and had a view of the harbor.

St. Ivany was waiting for her when she pulled up. “I am busy, you know.”

Raisa glanced at the time. It was just after 11:00 p.m.

“Yeah, last time I got a full night’s sleep was before Emily Logan was stabbed to death.” St. Ivany turned, leading her back into the house. The living room was all bland beige walls and off-white furniture. There weren’t any personal touches Raisa could see. It reminded Raisa of her apartment in Tacoma, the one she’d used as essentially a mailing address before she got her bungalow. Settling in had felt like too much work.

More notably, though, the room was messy. Papers were strewn everywhere, as were take-out containers and empty coffee mugs. A pile of clothes spilled off a chair and onto the floor, and the air was stale, smelling vaguely of sweat and artificial mango—the latter probably being St. Ivany’s attempt to cover up the fact that she hadn’t cleaned in at least two weeks.

“Yeah, it’s not pretty,” St. Ivany said. “Coffee or no?”

“Yeah, the strong stuff,” Raisa said, as she lowered herself into the only clean chair. It was probably the one St. Ivany had been using, but Raisa didn’t care.

Five minutes later, they both had their mugs and were eyeing each other, St. Ivany just as wary as Raisa was, clearly.

“I found a connection between Emily Logan and Lindsey Cousins,” Raisa said, and then filled St. Ivany in on the last couple of hours.

“Declan O’Brien,” St. Ivany murmured before leaning forward and typing his name into her computer. A minute later she shook her head. “No priors.”

“He was in Mexico the night Emily Logan died,” Raisa said. “Or at least says he was. Seems easy enough to check.”

“I’ll make sure someone gets the details in the morning,” St. Ivany said, and Raisa nodded in thanks. It always sucked when she didn’t have the full resources of the FBI behind her. “So, two girls in the same class, now dead.”

“Both of them were involved in the true crime community,” Raisa pointed out. “And the professor said everyone in town is interested in Isabel.”

“Two deaths in the past two months,” St. Ivany said, running a frustrated hand through her hair. “Goddamn.”

“And Isabel,” Raisa said. “And maybe a fourth.”

St. Ivany squinted at her. “Get out of here.”

“Gabriela Cruz flagged it with her formula,” Raisa said.

“Gabriela,” St. Ivany said on a sigh.

“What’s your read on her?” Raisa asked.

“She’s been working for or volunteering at the department for years now in various iterations of junior programs and internships,” St. Ivany said. “I think she has the potential to be a great detective. I do worry about the way she latched on to Isabel, though.”

“It will impede her career if she gets attached to every charismatic psychopath out there,” Raisa agreed. “But I think she was right about Peter Stamkos’s death being connected to all this. Isabel wrote his name in her journal—I’m guessing for me to find.”

“Like I said, she’ll make a good detective one day, if she can just get it together,” St. Ivany said and then studied Raisa for a long moment. “What do you think Isabel was hoping to accomplish with that letter she sent you? The first one?”

Raisa thought again about what Kilkenny had said. Isabel wanted you in Gig Harbor.

“She wanted me to find her killer.”

“Did she?” St. Ivany asked. “Because if she did, she would have said, ‘This is the information I know, here is who I suspect is behind this, and this is why.’”

Raisa blinked at that. “Well. Yeah. But it’s Isabel. She would never do something so straightforward.”

“Even if she was trying to get whoever killed her locked up?”

“I never said that was the goal,” Raisa parried before realizing what she was saying.

St. Ivany’s expression turned smug. “Then what was the goal?”

To control me, Raisa thought, but didn’t say. It felt too vulnerable. “To pretend she knew more than she did.”

And that, finally, felt like the truth.

Isabel always wanted to be the mastermind in the room, and when she wasn’t, she would try to fool everyone into thinking she was.

She had known she was being targeted—she was too smart and paranoid to write off that incident with the shiv as random.

But she hadn’t known who it actually was, when it would happen, or how. Raisa guessed she’d simply paid someone to send Raisa that letter. She wasn’t all knowing or all seeing.

She was dead.

“So you think we have a copycat on our hands,” St. Ivany said with a sigh. “One who killed the person they were copycatting.”

“There’s still some logic to straighten out,” Raisa admitted.

“A protégé who tried to run over Agent Kilkenny because you guys were getting too close to an answer?”

“That makes sense to me,” Raisa said, not letting herself think of Kilkenny, fractured skull in her lap, face ashen. “And killed Emily Logan because she found something out, something damning. Or ...”

“Or what?”

Raisa shrugged. “Someone wanted revenge on Isabel, couldn’t get to her, so instead just started playing vigilante and killing psychopaths.”

St. Ivany’s brows shot up. “That would mean you think Lindsey, Emily, and Peter were all psychopaths.”

“It could be what connects the victims,” Raisa said. “We know Lindsey had signs of an antisocial personality disorder, and Peter abused his child. Isabel speaks for herself. So that leaves Emily.”

“There’s nothing that points to her being one,” St. Ivany said carefully, but Raisa could tell she was intrigued.

“And nothing that doesn’t.”

“True,” St. Ivany said, and then scrubbed her hands over her face. She was sitting on the floor in front of her coffee table, amid her stacks of file folders. And ... she looked small, almost defeated. That lasted only for a second, before she stood, brushing off her pants. “I don’t have the bandwidth to figure anything out tonight. I’m going to get some sleep, you can look through anything you want. Consider yourself officially invited onto the case.”

And with that, St. Ivany left the room. Water started running a few seconds later.

Raisa stared out at the mounds of papers, most of which probably meant absolutely nothing, and instead went back to read through Emily Logan’s final essay.

It was immediately clear off the hop how much Emily cared about this topic. She truly believed that the surge in true crime hobbyists was going to be a turning point in solving more cold investigations across the country. In fact, she seemed so passionate about it that Raisa searched for her name in the Bureau’s unsolved cases, curious if Emily had a relative or loved one who had never received justice.

Nothing came up and Logan was too generic a last name to return anything helpful in a broader search. But Raisa noted to herself that Emily might have a personal stake in all this. That could always influence a person—radicalize a person, even. If the system had failed her, if a loved one’s cold case was collecting dust somewhere, maybe that frustration had led her down the path to discovering something that had ultimately gotten her killed.

That’s not the crime we’re trying to solve, she heard in Kilkenny’s voice. Raisa considered herself a competent agent and a fairly skilled linguist. But she wasn’t perfect. She could get distracted when she got pulled in multiple directions. She knew her strengths and weaknesses—and a supervising agent she would never be.

She followed the rabbit down its hole too many times.

“What are we trying to solve?” Raisa asked the room, wishing she were asking Kilkenny himself.

Isabel’s murder.

Raisa chewed on the inside of her cheek. Emily, Lindsey, and even Peter were all connected, and that path would lead back to Isabel, she was almost certain of that.

But the other path is clearer. Focus on Isabel first.

“No, it’s not,” she muttered, just to be annoying. Still, she dug in her bag for the Biggest Fan letters, the ones with the hiking trails mentioned in all of them. The ones that had been found in Isabel’s cell, the ones that might be the key that Raisa was ignoring because she couldn’t read her dead psychopath sister’s mind.

There was something here that Isabel wanted Raisa to find; otherwise she would have left the letters and the rest of her possessions for Delaney.

The hiking trails, of course, stood out the most.

Whatever she was trying to communicate wasn’t about the hiking trails themselves—a good thing, considering Raisa was a city girl through and through. All the letters that came in and out of the correctional facility had the chance of being read. It was even such common practice to infuse paper with drugs such as fentanyl that some prisons had moved toward scanning any incoming letters and sending them to the inmates as a digital copy.

Isabel and her Biggest Fan were using the hiking trail names to talk about something that would slip past all those guardrails.

It made Raisa think about how Delaney had communicated with Isabel when they were teenagers. She’d simply created a blog where she “talked into the void” about people who had grievously wronged her. Isabel had been there waiting to read it all and then act on it.

Not only had it been easy, but there was plausible deniability on Delaney’s side of things. Enough that the DA hadn’t even bothered to throw some conspiracy charges her way.

Of course, online blogs or forums like that would be a great way for someone to communicate with Isabel behind bars as well. Prisoners didn’t have access to the internet beyond educational classes and monitored email—in theory. But Raisa had read enough memos from the Bureau to know there were plenty of creative ways to successfully smuggle cell phones into prisons. Once you had that as a tool, it was easy enough to find Wi-Fi somewhere. In one case, an inmate had even used the Wi-Fi set up for the nurse’s printer.

Raisa didn’t think Isabel would be able to run roughshod on the dark web, but it was believable that she would’ve been able to access someone’s blog.

Or someone’s . . .

Her eyes slipped to the hiking trail mentioned in the first letter.

“Holy shit.” Raisa sat up, scrambling for her computer. She grabbed it from her bag and booted it up.

When she got to a blank internet page, she simply ran a search on the trail name. The very first response was from a website designed especially for hikers to track the summits they hit.

Raisa clicked into it. There was so much information, so many numbers that could have pulled her attention.

Instead of scouring any of that data, she scrolled down. There, at the bottom of the page, was a place for hikers to leave their reviews.

“Holy shit,” Raisa breathed again. It really was as easy as that.

The trail wasn’t a popular one. There were hikes in a sidebar that had 20,000-plus reviews, but the Muddy Waters Conservatory outside Macon, Georgia, had 126 total, and only 32 from the current year.

Raisa scrolled down until she found the posts near the time of the first Biggest Fan letter.

Her heartbeat ticked up and she laughed, incredulous.

Because there, posted the same day as the letter was dated, was a review from a user who went by Becks P. Their mother’s name.

Terrible hike. This whole trail all I could think about was how much I wanted Isabel to stop going close to the edge. I wanted to remind her that if she fell, she would probably pull me down with her. Not that she cared. She would do what she wanted. One star.

There were a few comments underneath noting that maybe the user got confused about which hike they did, because there were no cliff edges on the trail. But no one had taken it down.

Raisa was almost stunned at the simplicity of it all.

She reread the message and then, slowly, she worked her way through all the letters. They didn’t all have reviews—possibly a safeguard to anyone from the correctional facility deciding to randomly check this website. It became clear, though, that whoever was writing the “reviews” wanted Isabel to stop playing some kind of game. It had not worked out well for the letter writer before, and said author was nervous and resentful about the fact that she was going to get dragged back into whatever Isabel was doing.

The “Biggest Fan” was, it turned out, an ironic sign-off.

Raisa brought up her text thread with Delaney, and couldn’t ignore the fact that her sister hadn’t responded. She couldn’t ignore the fact that this method was similar to how Delaney had communicated with Isabel before. Couldn’t ignore the fact that she could easily see Delaney being dragged into a game even if she hadn’t wanted to be.

She shook her head.

She might want Delaney to face consequences for the way she’d sat on the sidelines for so long, but she couldn’t see her sister getting within a hundred miles of Isabel’s bullshit again.

Delaney wouldn’t.

Except . . .

She toggled back to that first review. Becks P. She couldn’t ignore the fact that it was their mother’s name the poster had used.

Raisa swallowed hard.

She found the last review and read through it again. It had been posted under the name Magdaline , which was the street Emily Logan had lived on.

Great hike, but I have to tell y’all, my daughter screamed the whole time. “I won’t do it, I won’t do it. You can’t make me.”

A few commenters commiserated beneath the post. And then there, in black and white, was a post from “Isabel.”

My daughter’s the same way. I always give her a choice. She can either do it or she’ll pay the price for not doing it. She’s never had to ask what the price is—she knows it will be devastatingly steep.

St. Ivany cleared her throat, and Raisa yelped, nearly throwing the computer. As calmly as she could, she closed the lid, not wanting to share what she’d just discovered. “You scared the crap out of me.”

“You found something,” St. Ivany said, in a soft voice. There was a strange expression on her face.

And this, this must have been how Delaney had felt all those years. Because Raisa knew exactly what she should do, which was tell the law enforcement agent standing in front of her exactly what she’d unearthed. What her gut was screaming at her to do, though, was to think on it for longer, make certain she was sure it really had been Delaney communicating with Isabel.

“No, just more nothing,” Raisa said, her fingers clenching against the edges of the laptop.

St. Ivany cocked her head. “Oh yeah, is that right?”

How long had she been standing there? Raisa glanced toward the door, and only then realized she didn’t have a clear line to it. Was it locked? She couldn’t remember if St. Ivany had thrown a dead bolt.

“Yeah,” Raisa said, standing. “I think I’m going to call it a night, too.”

“You don’t have to leave,” St. Ivany said. She hadn’t moved, but for some reason Raisa pulled the computer closer to her belly to protect it.

“I better ...” Raisa gestured over her shoulder before bending to gather her stuff. She wasn’t being as careful as she could with it, but all she could think was that she had to get out now .

“You’re not telling me something,” St. Ivany said, eyes narrowed. There was anger there ... and something else Raisa couldn’t read.

Raisa shook her head, backing away until she hit the door.

“You should lock this behind me,” she called out, before stepping into the cool night air.

Maybe it was stupid to choose the dark and what waited there. In the light of day, she would probably find her own actions silly. After all, there was no reason to protect Delaney—if that was even what she was doing.

But, right now, she would take her chances with the shadows.