Page 31 of By the Time You Read This (Raisa Susanto #3)

Chapter Twenty-Two

Raisa

Day Three

Roan Carmichael agreed to meet Raisa at a nautical-themed pub a few streets down from the police station.

She had texted Essi to see if she had contact information for him, and had gotten his email. He’d responded almost immediately and confessed he’d come to town after he’d heard the news.

He wasn’t the only person in the pub, but she spotted him easily, sitting in the back corner away from the family who had taken over two booths in the front and the couple at the bar itself.

Roan was tall and lean with messy hair he’d tied up in a topknot. He wore a poncho that looked like it was made out of alpaca hair and Birkenstocks with woolly socks despite the summer heat.

He shoved the chair out with his foot, inviting her to sit.

“Larissa Parker,” he said, and Raisa narrowed her eyes.

She was tired of being addressed by a name that had never really been hers.

“FBI Agent Raisa Susanto,” she corrected and he nodded.

“Of course, sorry.” He seemed genuinely contrite, which she appreciated. “How can I help you, Agent Susanto?”

“I wanted to talk to you about your time with the anti-FreeBell movement,” Raisa said.

“That’s a popular topic these days,” he muttered.

“Is it?”

“Yeah, even before Isabel died,” he said, and then he winced. “Someone wanted to interview me about it.”

“Emily Logan?” Raisa asked. It wasn’t unusual that, in a niche group, so many members would know each other and interact, but she did find it notable that Emily had been quite the presence in a community Gabriela said she didn’t have much interest in.

“Yeah,” Roan said, his brows going up in surprise that she knew the name. “I feel like I should start earlier than that, though.”

“How about the fact that there’s no Carmichael on Isabel’s victim list,” Raisa suggested.

He smiled sheepishly. “That’s as good a place as any. My brother actually is on the list of known victims, we just had different dads. Mitchell Johnston.”

“Stabbing, outside a bar.” Raisa hated that she had them all memorized, but she would have felt guilty had she not.

He laughed but there was little humor in it this time. “A full life reduced to a single sentence.”

“I’m sorry,” Raisa said, meaning it. She knew what that was like.

“No, I’m sorry. You’re not responsible for your sister’s crimes,” Roan said, sounding like it was a line he’d practiced hoping he’d believe it. “He was far from the perfect victim. Everyone told me he was killed in some drug deal gone wrong or a gang initiation or something where he would have brought his death upon himself.”

“Was he mixed up in those kinds of things?” Raisa asked.

“Yeah, a little bit,” Roan said, lifting one shoulder in a careless shrug. “He’d sobered up three months earlier and cut most of his friends out of his life. But he was at a bar when he died, and that apparently was enough to convince a lot of folks he’d relapsed.”

“Even if he had, it’s not as if he deserved to get stabbed for it,” Raisa said, annoyed on his behalf.

“Preaching to the choir,” he said, holding his hands up. “We got lucky when Isabel was arrested. She’d apparently been active in the area, and there were some photographs in some old Facebook albums linking her and my brother together that night. But she probably picked him because she knew no one would care what happened to him.”

“You cared,” Raisa said.

“Right,” Roan said. “Fat lot of good that did.”

“So how did you get involved in the anti-Isabel group?” Raisa asked.

“I was fairly active in the cold-case community for a lot of the years after my brother was killed,” he said. “I still lurked sometimes, and the group got a big surge with Isabel’s arrest. Lots of people trying to connect their unsolved murders to her.”

Raisa nodded—the thing about a prolific serial killer who’d taken her victims mainly via accidents and suicides was that anyone could latch on to her as the answer to the biggest question in their lives.

“Once you’re in that space, it’s kind of easy to find things like the FreeBell groups and then the antis, as we’re called,” Roan said, rolling his eyes. “As if not wanting a psychopath unleashed on the country warrants the ‘anti’ label.”

The way he said psychopath rang an alarm bell in her mind. Because the second part of that pissed-off-family-member theory was that they’d redirected their rage toward anyone displaying psychopathic tendencies.

And this man had a connection to both Emily and Isabel.

“Have you ever heard of someone named Peter Stamkos?” Raisa asked, as neutrally as possible, so as not to put him on the defense.

He pursed his lips. “No. But people don’t always use their real names online.”

“How about Lindsey Cousins?”

Roan shook his head. “Nope. Doesn’t sound familiar.”

Raisa nodded, not sure she believed him. “Okay, so this ‘anti’ community. That’s where you met Essi?”

He laughed. “Oh, Essi.”

“What’s the reaction mean?”

“Sorry, she’s just. Funny,” Roan said, shaking his head. “Her shtick is playing outrage queen and then you get her alone and it’s all, I don’t care. ”

“You think she’s performative?” Raisa asked.

“Yeah, but it’s both ways,” Roan said. “No one ever seems to realize that, and it’s actually pretty fascinating.”

Raisa tilted her head, curious. “What do you mean?”

“Everyone thinks that the blasé thing is her true form, right?” Roan said, truly engaged in the conversation now. This was a topic that he found interesting. “But they never stop to consider who they are as an audience might be playing into Essi’s decision to put on that mask.”

“Huh.”

“Right,” Roan said. “It’s a trick to get you to think about her a certain way, just as all that faux outrage is a performance. I don’t know what Essi actually believes but she’ll tell you whatever it is she thinks you want to hear. Or see. Or experience. And the brilliance is that you think she’s being honest because she’s ‘letting you in on a secret.’”

Raisa had to admit she had completely fallen into the trap, because who would want other people to think they were a money-hungry, callously ambitious bottom dweller instead of an actually outraged victim?

Essi had known the latter wouldn’t play well for Raisa and Kilkenny. So she’d given them something that would make sense but would be nonthreatening. The second Raisa realized Essi just cared about Isabel because of the attention she brought, Raisa had dismissed her as a viable suspect.

She guessed the real question now was whether that meant anything.

If Essi could switch gears like that with such pinpoint precision, there was a solid chance she was a sociopath. While sociopaths didn’t experience emotions in the same way neurotypical people did, one of their skills was being able to give an audience what it wanted.

What if she really did want revenge on Isabel, but she’d known the best way to convince them she didn’t was to pretend to be in it for the money?

Kilkenny had said Essi wouldn’t have drawn so much attention to herself if she’d been planning to kill Isabel, but maybe all that spotlight was blinding instead of illuminating. Maybe it helped her hide what she really wanted.

“So I take it you two aren’t friends?” Raisa asked.

“Oh, we’re friends—you just have to know what you’re getting,” Roan said. “And honestly, she’s one of the best friends anyone could ask for. She always knows how to read your mood and give you what you want. I don’t know what she gets out of that, but for other people, it’s great.”

Raisa would hate the idea of someone constantly performing for her. But she had a grand total of one friend, so she wasn’t exactly an expert. “She gave us your name as a ‘true believer.’”

“See, this is why, friend or no, she would never be the one I’d pick to help hide a body,” Roan said, and then seemed to abruptly remember who he was talking to. “Just an expression, I swear. But, yeah, anyway, I am probably what you would call a true believer in that I truly believe Isabel should have gotten the death penalty for her crimes.”

“You wanted to see her dead?” Raisa asked, pushing a little.

He wrinkled his nose. “I’m definitely not crying over the news. It was the universe righting itself, in my eyes. Sorry for your loss and everything.”

As if Raisa didn’t agree with everything he was saying. “The universe righting itself?”

“Yeah, who would have thought she’d have some mysterious disease that killed her in her early forties,” Roan said. “It’s all that karma catching up with her. And think about it. If you all hadn’t stopped her two years ago, we might never have known she’d existed. So many families wouldn’t have gotten closure. It’s almost spooky, isn’t it?”

Raisa studied him, trying to figure out if he was trying to pull one over on her, like Essi had. He seemed to genuinely think Isabel had died of natural causes, though. Where did that land him on her suspect list?

Especially since he had the strongest motive out of anyone she’d talked to yet.

When she didn’t respond, his smile faded and his eyes narrowed. “Wait.”

“Hmmm.”

“You’re asking me questions,” Roan said slowly. “To find out if I really wanted her dead. There has to be a reason you’re doing that.”

“Hmmm.”

“Oh, shit,” Roan muttered. “You think it was murder. You think I murdered her? Jesus, why would I do that? No, how would I do that? I’m a tech dude, I don’t know the first thing about prison rules outside of Orange Is the New Black .”

“I’m just asking questions,” Raisa said neutrally. “But there was a reason I wanted to meet with you, other than you being a ‘true believer.’”

“Goddamn, Essi. You’re right, she’s a shit friend.”

“Did I say that?” Raisa asked.

“No, but your face did,” he said, and then sighed deeply. “Okay, how else did I make the suspect list?”

“Not the suspect list,” she said, and he rolled his eyes, waving her to go on. “You were Isabel’s last visitor.”

His brows tugged together. “What?”

Raisa nodded. “She wasn’t exactly Miss Popular, believe it or not.”

“No, I mean, what?” Roan said, and she tried to make the words make sense.

“You were her last visitor,” Raisa repeated. “I wanted to know what you two talked about.”

Roan shook his head. “You must be mistaken.”

“Nope, it’s right there in the visitor logs,” Raisa said. Even after she’d found Roan’s name, she’d continued forward until she’d hit the date of Isabel’s death. Roan Carmichael had been the last person not in the system to see her alive.

“No,” Roan said. “You’re not getting it.”

“Not getting what?”

“I never visited Isabel Parker,” Roan said. “Not a single time in my life.”