Page 41 of By the Time You Read This (Raisa Susanto #3)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Raisa

Day Five

Raisa and St. Ivany staked out the motel for about an hour after Delaney led Roan Carmichael back into her room. Raisa deliberately blocked any thoughts about what they were doing from her brain. Instead, she tried to find everything she could about Roan, while St. Ivany called her partner for his take on the man.

“Seems straightforward,” Raisa said as they drove back toward town, the motel shrinking in the side mirror. “Isabel killed his brother, he met with Emily because she found him through their shared interest in true crime’s effects on the victims’ families. Did he kill Isabel, then?”

Wouldn’t that be strange? If they’d looked into all these other deaths and they hadn’t had anything to do with Isabel’s.

“Seems like a possibility,” St. Ivany said. “We already know he’s a liar since he told me he was just a friend of Emily’s passing through.”

Raisa said, “I don’t know where Delaney comes into all this, either.”

“Maybe she’s next,” St. Ivany mused, sounding interested enough in the possibility that Raisa almost wanted her to turn the SUV around. But if they did, if they barged into that motel room, apart from it being potentially incredibly awkward, they would also scare one or both of their suspects into completely clamming up.

They wouldn’t be able to arrest them for anything, either. So all they would accomplish was losing their upper hand.

Raisa didn’t think either of them was going to die tonight.

She could be wrong, but it was a risk she was willing to take.

“Regroup in the morning?” Raisa asked, when St. Ivany pulled to a stop in front of the boutique hotel.

“Yeah,” St. Ivany agreed, though she sounded lost in thought.

“What?” Raisa asked.

“I don’t know,” St. Ivany admitted. “I can’t get a handle on this thing. And you’re leading me astray.”

Raisa laughed. “Yeah, maybe.”

St. Ivany shot her a grin. “Get some sleep. Maybe in the light of day this will all make sense.”

Before Raisa closed the door, she threw St. Ivany a salute, though she had no intention of actually getting any rest.

She wanted to make it through Essi’s book.

Out of everything she had in terms of writing samples, that was the one she’d barely touched.

Raisa settled into Kilkenny’s hotel room—her own had plastic sheeting over the door.

And then she started, once more, from the beginning.

It took only three hours to get through.

When she was done, she didn’t feel like she had any answers. She wondered if she’d just completely wasted her time.

But studying words was never a waste.

She went back through, marking key passages that had come across as particularly voice-y, and she started to build an analysis on them.

Essi was conversational. Her use of contractions—which often gave writing a natural feel—became an idiolectic marker. She never used I am when she could use I’m . She used metaphors and similes so rarely that Raisa wondered if the ones that showed up on the page had been edited in.

Her grammar was harder to judge because she’d likely had several professionals work on the book. But whoever that was had done a nice job.

What was striking to Raisa was that it didn’t sound like anything she’d worked on to this point in the case. Narratively, Essi was able to close a circle when she started drawing one—unlike Emily. She never slipped into any of the psychopathic tics that Lindsey did with her writing.

The closest she sounded to any of the players in the case was to Isabel herself. Namely the way they both wrote as if they were addressing the reader.

Do you hate me yet? Essi had asked in one of her opening paragraphs. It was achingly similar to how Isabel had always included my friend when writing, even just to herself.

It was something performers did. Not professional performers, necessarily, but people who performed for others as their main type of presentation to the world—which described Essi to a T, if Roan was to be believed. It was a hard habit to turn off, apparently.

Essi did use a few idioms that were slightly left of center, which Raisa assumed were English translations of Finnish originals.

To run with one’s head as a third leg.

There are two ends of a sausage.

To pick up one’s bones.

The last one—meaning, to finally get around to leaving a gathering—was so interesting that Raisa searched it in a few of the databases she used for her investigations.

The Communicated Threat Assessment Database—the brainchild of Jim Fitzgerald, a prominent agent who worked on the Unabomber case—pinged back a result.

It came in an email written by Mikko Halla, Essi’s father.

That wasn’t ... completely strange. Children often used idioms passed down by their parents or grandparents, especially ones that came from their country of origin.

But Raisa slowly toggled over to the software she used to build idiolect analyses, and started one for Mikko Halla.

She then searched his name rather than the idiom itself in the CTAD.

The database wasn’t just for threatening messages sent to the FBI; rather, it was meant to hold any kind of written documents that played an important role in any investigation.

That meant her request returned dozens of emails and texts all written by Mikko, unearthed in the federal investigation into his business practices.

Raisa glanced at the clock. It was well past midnight, but she wasn’t about to put this off until morning.

She pulled a few of the longer emails at random to better get a sense of his authorial voice.

Then she started to read.

All contractions, no metaphors, no similes. A conversational tone sprinkled with strange idioms.

Addressing an audience.

Do you hate me now? one of the emails read. It was in a different tone from the one in Essi’s book—snarky and challenging, rather than sheepish and vulnerable.

But it was written by the same person.

Raisa was almost sure of it.

By the time she made it through a dozen emails, she had a profile built that was almost exactly the same as Essi’s book.

A fingerprint.

Essi had been running her father’s business behind his name.

Raisa whistled long and slow as she slumped back into her chair.

She picked up the phone and called St. Ivany even though it was past 2:00 a.m.

St. Ivany answered on the second ring. “Is someone dead?”

“Mikko Halla,” Raisa said.

A pause. “One more time.”

“The father of Essi Halla, the woman who is profiting off of saying Isabel killed that very same crook of a businessman father,” Raisa said. “She wrote a self-help book about it.”

“About getting over your father being the victim of a serial killer?” St. Ivany asked, still sounding mostly like she was half-asleep.

“Pretty much,” Raisa agreed. “Only, she’s been upfront about it being a performance.”

“A grift,” St. Ivany said, finally waking up.

“Yeah,” Raisa said. “But now I’m wondering if that was all it was.”

“What do you mean?”

Raisa explained her work over the past two hours. And then: “I think she might have been running the organization.”

“Holy shit,” St. Ivany said. “Is that really something your boys would miss?”

“It was a back-taxes case. There was no reason to call a forensic linguist in,” Raisa said, defensive of agents who would never defend her in return. “They had the white-collar guys working on it. I’m sure they saw Mikko in the boardrooms and then on email and never once considered he was a figurehead.”

“So . . .”

“So did he really die by suicide?” Raisa asked. “Or did Essi kill him so he wouldn’t snitch to the feds?”

“Damn,” St. Ivany muttered. “Okay, so what does that have to do with either of our homicides?”

Was that the first time St. Ivany hadn’t tacked on a potential while describing Isabel’s death? Raisa couldn’t remember, but it sounded newly serious. “Honestly? Maybe nothing. She took advantage of the fact that Isabel had victims in the area, and continued figuring out a way to make money while her other source evaporated.”

“I better flag this for the boys down in California,” St. Ivany said. There was some ruffling, like she had now fully resigned herself to getting out of bed.

“Sorry,” Raisa said, squinting out into the night. “I’ll send a note to the lead on the FBI investigation.”

“Cool. Let’s touch base in the morning?”

“Yeah,” Raisa said. “Hey, is Delaney still at the hotel?”

“She found the AirTag,” St. Ivany said, with a sigh. “It’s disabled. I’ll send someone over to keep track of her.”

She’ll lose them easy enough, Raisa thought.

“See you in the morning,” Raisa said.

It would be a long five hours between then and now.

Raisa eyed Essi’s book. It had given up a few answers, but she still felt like she was missing something.

Something small, even.

Which meant reading the book in its entirety again.

She finished faster this time and still couldn’t put her finger on what had her itching for a third read.

Whatever it was, going through each page, sentence by sentence, wasn’t going to shake it loose.

So she showered and thought about sleeping.

Instead, she slipped under the plastic on her old room to grab the box of Isabel’s things, everything she’d gotten from the correctional facility. When Raisa had come to Gig Harbor, it had been with the purpose of figuring out who had killed Isabel. Since then, she’d been pulled in a million different directions.

Here were Isabel’s belongings, though, and she’d barely made her way through them so far.

She returned to Kilkenny’s room and then sorted them out, carefully going through the wallet. Checking every centimeter of the watch for a hidden compartment.

The only thing that really stood out was the landscape painting that Raisa was sure had been done in some art therapy class. But Isabel wouldn’t have saved it just because she’d been proud of it.

She wasn’t wired like that. She was proud of her victim list; she was proud of how long she’d operated before getting caught. Beyond that, she didn’t understand how to feel proud about normal things. Like a painting.

So why had she kept it around?

The landscape was of a ridge of mountains. They made Raisa think of the hiking trails in the Biggest Fan letters.

She touched her fingertip to the canvas, dragging it along the surface until it connected with a thin brown line.

A hiking trail.

It was a visual clue, one Raisa wasn’t sure she would have found if she hadn’t been up all night existentially contemplating her life.

Raisa followed the trail all the way to the corner of the painting, where it dipped over the side. Instead of ending, it continued on toward the back.

Which was thicker than it should be, she realized.

Raisa quickly unearthed the Swiss Army Knife she kept in her bag at all times—a tradition that felt terribly old-fashioned but had been extremely useful too many times to get rid of it.

The extra layer came off easily in her hand, but it was blank.

Before disappointment could set in, Raisa realized that it had been hiding something else.

A folded-up piece of paper.

One that looked like it had been ripped from Isabel’s journal.

Raisa stared at it like the bomb she knew it could be.

It was one page, handwritten.

Everyone always wants me to start from the beginning.

But where is the beginning?

Raisa read through it without thinking like a linguist. She didn’t pick up on word choice or grammar or narrative voice. Instead, she read it like a note she wasn’t sure she’d been meant to find.

She read it like a true diary, not one that had been written for an audience.

I wanted to make them the same as me.

Broken.

Lana and Larissa aren’t broken.

But wouldn’t it be more fun if they were?