Page 34 of By the Time You Read This (Raisa Susanto #3)

Chapter Twenty-Four

Raisa

Day Three

Raisa couldn’t shake the feeling that she was missing a crucial piece of evidence because she hadn’t given herself time to truly sit with all the written communication she had from the case.

When she left Roan and the pub behind, the evening was settling in around her. The place had been close enough to forgo the SUV, and she was glad for the walk back now. She would grab everything they’d gathered over the past couple of days and then head to the hospital.

She wanted to see Kilkenny. Even if that meant sneaking past the guard dogs at the nurses’ station to do so.

That made her think about Emily’s boyfriend, who worked at the hospital. She wondered what he did there, then dismissed him from her mind. It didn’t matter.

A block away from the hotel, she glanced in the coffee shop she and Kilkenny had stopped in before his accident, and caught sight of someone familiar.

Mildred ... something. Raisa didn’t remember her last name, but she remembered that she’d praised Essi for helping her get through the loss of her dog.

And now here she was reading a book.

The very one Raisa was eager to get her hands on.

Mildred was pleased as punch—in her own words—to see Raisa.

“Is that Essi’s book?” Raisa asked, cutting into Mildred’s recitation of her next week’s worth of plans. Something about Essi poked at Raisa. She wasn’t always good at reading people, and Essi was clearly a master at crafting her own image. But idiolects were harder to mask. Essi was sure to reveal more about herself in this book than she would ever want to. Maybe it wouldn’t help the case itself, but maybe it would. Essi was as tangled up in all this as anyone they’d talked to.

Mildred beamed. “Oh, yes. She gave me an early copy. She’s always doing sweet things like that. I’ve already read it through once, but I’m making notations this time around.”

“Could I borrow it?” Raisa asked, expecting a fight.

Mildred’s fingers tightened around it. “Um, well, dear ...”

“Please, it’s for official purposes,” Raisa said. “I’ll make sure it’s returned to you in perfect shape.”

Mildred did not want to hand it over. She licked her lips, her eyes darting side to side, as if she were desperately crafting a good lie to cover why she just absolutely had to keep the thing.

In the end, she surrendered it to Raisa, along with her home address.

“Priority shipping,” Raisa promised and then headed back outside.

Raisa ended up packing the thing next to all the other writing samples she had, before heading to the hospital.

The nurse behind the desk—the same one who had been working it when she’d first come in—lit up when he saw her.

“You can go back,” he said. “He’s not awake, but he’s stable. Room 114.”

Raisa’s rib cage went tight. “Thank you.”

Somehow she managed to find the room, and there, for the first time since she’d all but told him to go to hell, was Kilkenny.

She swayed on her feet at the sight of him, reaching out to the wall to steady her.

He looked so small, surrounded by machines with lines coming out of his hands, his arms. A steady beeping filled the room. At any other time it might be grating, but for now it was the sweetest sound she’d ever heard.

His heart beat on.

Raisa exhaled and inhaled, keeping pace with the inadvertent metronome.

Kilkenny was too pale, from what she could see beneath the bruises. The egg on his cheekbone was every color on the spectrum, from a deep violet to turquoise to just a hint of putrid green. His sheet revealed the shape of a cast on his leg.

But the worst part was the white bandage wrapped around his head. She knew that they’d removed part of his skull to relieve the pressure, and she just ... she couldn’t think about the ramifications of something that, in this moment, looked so clean and innocuous.

Raisa sank into the chair beside his bed, her eyes landing on his face, his chest, the bandage, his feet, the rise of his kneecaps, his hands.

Only after the third or fourth pass was she satisfied that she hadn’t missed some gaping hole in his chest.

Finally, she relaxed enough to pull everything she’d brought out of her bag. She nabbed a dinner tray so she could spread it all out in front of her.

Despite the fact that Raisa had worked with Delaney before she’d known they were related, she didn’t have any writing samples from her. The closest she came were the blog posts submitted to the DA that showed Delaney talking about two different people Isabel had gone on to kill.

Those had been written when Delaney was a teenager, though. While that could provide something of a baseline, Raisa would be hesitant to make any judgments off it.

What she did have were the reviews and the letters from Isabel’s Biggest Fan.

They were difficult to run analyses on because they had been written in doublespeak that only one reader was meant to understand. Doublespeak wasn’t considered a code in the truest sense, but it would absolutely alter the author’s idiolect into something mostly unrecognizable.

Still, both materials were worth working up an analysis on.

One particularly interesting typo in both the letters and the reviews was a missed t in the so the word became he . It happened three times in the reviews and four times in the letters.

It was a small thing, but it was something to build on and gave some credence to her notion that they were the same author.

There were a few other similarities—like the author’s tendency to splice a phrase with a comma. But she didn’t want to let her biases take over. There were plenty of differences, too, including that noticeable absence of amplifiers in the Biggest Fan letters.

Raisa put those aside and moved on to Lindsey’s journals.

She had recently read an article in a research journal about the connection between linguistic choices and psychopathy deviations. The author had found that people with antisocial personality disorders tended to self-reference frequently; use emotional phrases, though not ones connected to anxiety; favor past-tense words, articles, and concrete nouns; and employ shocking language meant to arouse a reaction in the reader.

Lindsey’s idiolect fit the model perfectly.

But it didn’t reveal much else beyond disjointed fantasies about killing all the people she hated.

Except ... except for one entry a few days before Lindsey’s death.

There was a total cunt ass bitch on the cruise today. Tried to threaten me, something about the dangers of being interested in true crime documentaries. I wanted to kill her right there. Scalp that braid right off her head and shove those hippie rags down her throat until she choked.

Raisa swallowed hard. That description could fit so many people, but it definitely fit Delaney. And it matched the one Julia had given her about the woman sitting outside Peter Stamkos’s house.

As circumstantial as it might be, the evidence was starting to stack up in ways she didn’t want to let herself believe. But Delaney had been linked now to two separate victims in the days before their possible homicides.

It was easy to rule Lindsey out as the author to the Biggest Fan letters and the hiking reviews. Those had been written by someone in control of their idiolect enough to know how to hide it. As she’d thought many times before, that was harder than it seemed.

Delaney would certainly be capable of doing it, though. She was a language genius—had she pursued the study, she’d probably be a better linguist than even Raisa, who was at the top of her field.

Confirmation bias, Kilkenny said.

“Yeah, yeah,” she muttered.

The Kilkenny not in her head slept on.

Raisa turned to Emily Logan’s essay and blog posts next.

What struck Raisa the most was that Emily seemed incredibly earnest.

Her idiolect was also extremely easy to track between her essay and her blog posts. Written material in formal settings like college tended to be tighter, more grammatically accurate, and contain fewer misspellings on the whole than casual communication like blog posts. But for Emily, her authorial voice remained strikingly consistent over both mediums. Her errors were consistent, which told Raisa that she’d probably read them over the same number of times. Maybe that was once; maybe that was ten times. She also kept the same chatty tone throughout, like she was gossiping rather than defending a thesis statement.

On a whim, Raisa pulled out a tablet and scrolled through a few common social media sites in search of the FreeBell community.

After landing on a pretty niche subthread on Reddit, she poked around for a while until she found a post that was signed “E.L.”

Ok it’s late, don’t @ me if this comes off sounding cray. But. I think IP’s case did a lot to shine light on the benefits of the armchair movement, just like “Unsolved Mysteries” and faces on milk cartons did back in the day. Collective knowledge and attention can only be a net positive. I know. I know. Think of the families. But don’t you get it? I am. The more eyes on a case, the quicker it will get solved. Just look at Mitchell Johnston’s death. It would never have been solved—just another cold case. Do you remember that movie where the activists were fighting against the death penalty and they wanted a foolproof case to show that innocent people could be killed? And one of the characters was dying of cancer? And they staged it so that it looked like the dude killed her even though she was dying anyway? I feel like the armchair community needs that kind of thing. E.L.

Raisa had to read it a couple of times, because it only vaguely made sense, a common trait with this particular author, who didn’t always follow through on her thoughts.

Emily seemed to be tightly focused on drawing positive attention to her cause, and in making the argument that there should be more eyeballs on the movement, she took a somewhat nonsensical path. Even the reference to Mitchell Johnston was a bit strange, considering it had been the team at the DA’s office who had tracked down that case and not armchairs.

But the actual message was irrelevant. After reading a half dozen samples, Raisa felt like she had a grip on Emily’s authorial voice.

Where that knowledge fit into the rest of it all, she wasn’t yet sure.

Raisa grabbed for Essi’s book. She was curious about how Essi would present herself in the thing when her audience was so wide-ranging. The cover looked like it was trying to be too many things—and landed on the worst elements of an important current-affairs think piece and a celebrity memoir.

The descriptive blurb reflected a similar confusion about what the book wanted to be. Apparently, Essi had talked to experts on the topics of parasocial relationships, grief, and the psychology of cults. But through the entirety of the descriptive text—which would have been written by someone in marketing, Raisa realized—there was an aura of celebrity talking about her interesting life .

If Raisa had seen it in a bookstore, she would have picked it up out of sheer curiosity about how they were going to make the thing cohesive.

She supposed that was the point of it all.

“ You want honesty? ” Essi had said. “ I don’t care. I want them looking at me. ”

A knock on the door had Raisa looking up from Essi’s serious expression on the book flap.

Detective St. Ivany stood there, leaning against the doorjamb. She looked tired and pleased.

Raisa blinked at her, confused in that way of seeing someone unexpected and out of place. “What happened?”

St. Ivany grinned. “I found Delaney.”