Page 29 of By the Time You Read This (Raisa Susanto #3)

Chapter Twenty-One

Raisa

Day Three

Raisa’s hotel door was cracked open.

She stuttered to a stop midstep and made quick work of her holster, the gun a welcome weight in her palm.

On the way up the stairs, she’d been lost in thought. All she’d meant to do was grab her laptop on her way to the prison to check the visitor logs, so she’d been moving on autopilot.

Now everything snapped into sharp focus.

Isabel wanted you in Gig Harbor.

Raisa positioned her body to the side, so she wouldn’t be an easy target, and then she nudged the door fully open.

Raisa didn’t announce herself, simply waited a beat and then stepped into the room.

No one rushed by her. No one shot at her.

No one stepped out from behind the door and tried to smash a lamp over her head.

Objectively, she took in the mess but didn’t let herself linger on it.

Instead, she cleared the room, her eyes finding each corner as her heart beat a quick but steady pace against her rib cage.

The closets. The bed. The bathroom. The window, and the ground outside beneath it.

Only then did Raisa fully exhale and drop her gun to her thigh.

She finally let herself look at the damage.

The room was ransacked.

Her clothes were strewn everywhere, many of the shirts ripped apart. The furniture bore knife wounds, the guts spilling out. The curtains had been yanked down and were now pooled on the floor.

On the wall was one message in bloodred spray paint.

Leave

Raisa reholstered her gun and ran.

The young woman at the desk popped her bubble gum as Raisa stopped in front of her.

“Did anyone go up since you’ve been here?”

Joy—if her name tag was to be believed—rolled her eyes. “I don’t know.”

Raisa’s nostrils flared as she tried to control her irritation. Instead of shaking the girl, she flashed her badge. “Did anyone go up to the second floor since you’ve been here?”

The fact that Raisa was FBI did little to impress Joy, who began toying with her gum, pulling it out of her mouth into a droopy string. “Um, some of the guests.”

“Any strangers?”

“Not that I saw,” Joy said with a shrug. “There’s a back entrance, though.”

Raisa closed her eyes, inhaled for patience, opened them. “Does anyone secure that?”

That got her a derisive look. “Uh, no? We’re not Quantico.”

“Thanks,” Raisa gritted out. She took the time to do a sweep of the perimeter and then the hallways, but found nothing except a somewhat startled housekeeper.

She returned to the room. The door had been kicked open, she realized now, the flimsy wood hardly any challenge for someone’s boot. She would have to speak to the owners at some point about the damage. But, for now, she just stood in the middle of the mess.

Isabel would never have done something like this.

She thought, Erratic , hearing it in Kilkenny’s voice. He had theorized that killing Peter Stamkos had broken their UNSUB, and that all the moves since had been a product of their unraveling.

Raisa had looked at Emily Logan’s death as different from Peter’s and Lindsey’s because it hadn’t been staged as an accident or an overdose. She’d wondered if perhaps it had even been someone else who had killed Emily. But what if it had simply been the same killer who had lost control? Maybe that was why the girl’s death had been so brutal.

Kilkenny was better at all that than Raisa, but she thought he might agree. She tried to look at the room now through his eyes.

It was performative, over the top.

That made her think of Essi Halla.

It was immature.

That made her think of Gabriela Cruz.

It was reactive, which made Raisa think of everyone she’d talked to in the past twenty-four hours. Beyond the nurses at the hospital, that boiled down to Gabriela and Essi.

And Maeve St. Ivany.

It could’ve been any of the three or none of them, but it was a stark reminder that Raisa was in a small town, without any backup, and her partner had already been put in the hospital with life-threatening injuries.

On her way out, she informed Joy of the damages, while assuring the girl she could stay in Kilkenny’s room. Not that Joy had shown any signs of distress at the news either way.

Raisa then grabbed her laptop—thankfully unharmed, as she’d thought to lock it in the room’s safe—and headed toward the prison.

The visitor logs were easy to access—they were technically public documents—but the front desk regretted to inform her that they couldn’t filter the records by inmate.

So she was given a conference room and a thick stack of notebooks.

She stared at them, wondering if it was a waste of time.

What else could she be doing, though?

Watching Kilkenny’s heart monitor, rereading those letters from Isabel’s “Biggest Fan,” which Raisa was half-convinced was actually Delaney. Scouring Lindsey Cousins’s journals to confirm that she was indeed a psychopath.

That wouldn’t change anything besides maybe confirming a possible motive for her death.

It took Raisa an hour before she got to Isabel’s first visitor. It had been a woman named Sadie Richardson, who’d made a documentary about Isabel. Raisa hadn’t watched it, but she knew it had been the most-viewed movie for a month on one of the big streaming services.

It took her another forty-five minutes to get to Delaney.

“Crap.” She’d known it was going to be there, but it still was upsetting to have proof.

Raisa let herself imagine it. Had Delaney come crawling back, or had Isabel threatened her? Either way, it had ended up in the same place—Isabel telling Delaney what to do. Delaney protesting, but likely doing it anyway.

Delaney had visited one more time, a few months before Isabel had died.

In all that time, Isabel had only received one other visitor.

The name . . . looked familiar.

She had never met the person, but she had seen the name somewhere recently. It was beautiful, unique, and that was why it had stubbornly stuck to her brain like a bur.

Raisa thought through all the material she’d parsed through over the past forty-eight hours or so. Emily’s and Lindsey’s journals; the Biggest Fan letters and the hiking reviews; Gabriela’s murder board.

None of those were right, though.

She closed her eyes and pictured where she’d seen it. Long, pink nails. A blinking cursor. A swaying dock beneath her feet.

Essi.

When they’d first interviewed Essi Halla, they’d asked her to give them a list of “true believers”—family members who actually hated Isabel enough to do something as drastic as hiring someone to kill her. It had been the first motive Raisa had come up with when she’d been trying to figure out who would have done this. How simple it would be, if there was no protégé, there was no copycat, there was no need to parse the ethics of fandom and true crime.

This really might have been it all along, just a pissed-off family member.

Raisa quickly thumbed over to her notes app and then held the phone up next to the visitor log.

And there it was, matching Isabel’s last visitor.

Roan Carmichael.