Page 43 of By the Time You Read This (Raisa Susanto #3)

Chapter Thirty-One

Raisa

Day Six

Raisa sat staring out the window of the hotel room, Isabel’s journal page on the desk in front of her. She’d read it so many times now, she had it memorized.

Lana and Larissa aren’t broken.

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

She felt like it was the key to everything, and yet, Raisa couldn’t see the few steps ahead she needed to.

Once again, Isabel was winning.

Meet me at the harbor , she texted St. Ivany.

Ten minutes later Raisa found St. Ivany standing across the street from the very coffee shop where Raisa and Kilkenny had stopped the morning of his accident.

Something pulled tight in her chest and she brushed it aside. She took one of the cups St. Ivany was holding. “Isabel hid a page of her diary behind a painting that was included in her belongings.” She took a sip of the coffee. “Belongings she wanted left to me.”

St. Ivany took her own long gulp. “I’m almost scared to ask, but what did it say?”

“That Isabel wanted to see both me and Delaney broken like her,” Raisa said. “It’s not a surprise, especially considering she wrote it while rotting away in prison. She would be the last person in the world who would ever want to see us thrive while she was stuck behind bars.”

“Broken,” St. Ivany repeated slowly. “Okay, what exactly does that entail?”

If she had been in the car with Kilkenny, she wouldn’t have hesitated to say what she was thinking. Now she studied St. Ivany. They might not ever be bosom buddies, but the detective was fine enough. There was no real reason not to trust her. They’d come this far, after all.

“Delaney has always maintained a bit of moral superiority over Isabel because she’s never actually killed anyone.”

St. Ivany made a concerned sound. “Isabel wants to force Delaney into taking a life.”

“That’s my thought,” Raisa said. The hiking trail reviews slotted perfectly into that theory. Isabel had given Delaney a task, and Delaney had not wanted to do it.

“And what about you?” St. Ivany asked, sliding her a glance.

“She wants to force me to arrest Delaney after Delaney kills someone,” Raisa said, her throat raw from even speaking the words. “Or perhaps she wants me to kill Delaney in the process? That would probably do it.”

“Man, she was a sadistic little bitch, wasn’t she?” St. Ivany said.

Raisa barked out a laugh. “Yes.”

“So maybe Delaney already broke,” St. Ivany said. “What if she killed Emily Logan?”

“Then there’s nothing left to do but arrest her for it,” Raisa said, hating, hating, hating that Isabel would get what she wanted.

“That’s ... frustrating,” St. Ivany said as she looked around. “What do you want from the harbor?”

She was about to explain about Essi, when something flashed in the corner of her eye.

“St. Ivany,” she said, swiveling to find what had caught her attention. “What’s that?”

St. Ivany turned as well. “What do you mean?”

The sun shifted again. “There.”

A moment of silence. And then St. Ivany offered, hesitantly, “I don’t know. Looks like a camera lens.”

Raisa stared up at the curtain, running the calculations in her head. “Did your people talk to that person?”

“What?”

“They would have had a view of the accident,” Raisa said, already moving. “They would have had a view of the SUV that hit Kilkenny.”

“I don’t know,” St. Ivany said, keeping pace as Raisa broke into a jog to cross the street. “They should have.”

Raisa slowed to a stop, searching for the right door that would take them up to the second-floor apartment. She found it wedged between the coffee shop and the florist. Thankfully, it wasn’t locked, and she took the stairs two at a time.

No one answered when she knocked, so she pounded on the door again and then again.

“This is getting close to harassment,” St. Ivany muttered from where she leaned against the opposite wall.

“Hello,” Raisa called, desperate. “I’m FBI Agent Raisa Susanto. I’m trying to figure out who put my partner in the hospital. I was hoping you might be able to help.”

She dropped silent, listening, waiting. St. Ivany leaned forward, doing the same.

Raisa pressed her open palm against the door, resting her forehead against the wood. “Please.”

The chain clinked.

Just in time, Raisa stepped back as the door opened.

Standing just beyond the threshold was a middle-aged man dressed in freshly pressed khakis, a blue button-down, and a tan cardigan. He had thick-rimmed glasses and his hair was losing the fight against age.

“I just want to know what happened to my partner,” Raisa said, because she was certain that was what had persuaded him to open the door where he probably hadn’t to St. Ivany’s men.

“You’re an FBI agent?” he asked, suspicious.

“A linguist,” she rushed to say, because he seemed the type to be put at ease by expertise rather than the idea of some gun-toting G-man. “I’m a forensic linguist.”

“You’re working on the Isabel Parker death?” he asked.

“Yes,” she all but gasped, relieved to find someone who understood without several minutes of explanation. “What’s your name?”

“Jameson Ekblad,” he said, shoving his glasses up. “I’m a professor at the college. Ornithology.”

Raisa glanced over Jameson’s shoulder. “You’re photographing birds.”

“Yes. There’s a rare—well you don’t care about that,” Jameson said, ushering her in. “What do you need?”

“How is your equipment set up?” Raisa asked, crossing to the window. There were two cameras there, pointed at different angles of the street. Or, more likely, the harbor beyond it.

“This is my long range, manual,” Jameson explained. “This is the one I keep on video and running for most of the morning.”

Raisa didn’t want to get too excited. “Do you have footage from Sunday? When there was a hit-and-run right there.”

She pointed to the street, where Kilkenny had nearly bled out.

“I do, yes,” Jameson said, crossing over to his desk. “I was too distracted to take the manual pictures, but the video captured it.”

“And you didn’t think to alert the police,” St. Ivany said, and Raisa shot her a look.

They weren’t going to win favors by slapping him on the wrist.

“I didn’t have anything useful,” Jameson said, his voice tighter than it had been a moment earlier. “I watched the footage. The SUV doesn’t come into frame until the driver is mostly out of view. You can tell it’s a woman and that’s about it.”

He tapped away at his computer, before gesturing for Raisa to come sit. “Here, watch.”

Raisa braced herself, but she had hardly any time before Jameson hit play.

And then there they were.

She and Kilkenny.

They had been arguing about Delaney of all things.

Raisa stepped off the curb, and then the rev of an engine cut over the footage. She looked away as the bumper collided with a stunned Kilkenny—the whole thing playing out in the bottom quarter of the screen.

She inhaled, exhaled, concentrating not on the accident itself but on doing her job.

To find the person responsible for putting Kilkenny in the hospital.

Sometimes, when she was bored, she would watch stupid Flik videos to silence her brain. One of the more famous users was a man who could geo-locate anything or anyone on a map of the world by one photograph alone.

The key was taking in all the details and then forcing them into a context that made some logical sense.

With this video, they had way more than one photograph.

Raisa leaned forward and dragged the video back to the first moment the SUV had come into view.

“Can we do this slice by slice?” Raisa asked, as the SUV accelerated toward Kilkenny. It happened in two blinks of an eye, and Raisa wasn’t going to be able to concentrate if she couldn’t slow it down.

“We can run it at a tenth of the speed,” Jameson explained, reaching over her to tap a few keys. “Here.”

He hit play and this time Raisa was able to gather her bearings.

She watched it carefully, knowing both Jameson and St. Ivany were doing the same. But it was difficult. There was no good angle of the driver, only of the car. And of Kilkenny and Raisa.

Raisa had to watch her own horrified face too many times before Jameson reached over her and slammed the space bar.

“There,” he said, with the confidence of someone who could spot the right markings on a bird a hundred yards away. “That sticker.”

He tapped the screen. It was paused on a shot that showed the SUV’s windshield. Raisa couldn’t tell what he was talking about, and from St. Ivany’s silence, she couldn’t, either.

Jameson leaned over Raisa once more and tapped at the keys. “Come on. Right there.”

He was right. There was some kind of sticker, but of what it wasn’t clear.

“Here,” Jameson said, and then did some kind of magic with his mouse and keyboard. And there, blown up and pixelated though it might be, was a tag for a local rental place. “They rented the car.”

And if the person rented the car, they must have had to show ID.

Raisa nearly pumped her arm in the air but refrained. “Thank you. Can you print this out, and send it to us via email as well? We need to submit it to a judge.”

Jameson leaned in for a moment, and then a printer hummed to life. “Done.”

“Thank you,” Raisa said, as sincerely as possible, when she stood. “I very much appreciate it.”

“I hardly did anything,” he demurred.

St. Ivany took care of the logistics after that, contacting a local judge, presenting the evidence. Sending the picture of the windshield tag that would lead them back to the local car rental shop that offered better prices than all the chains—in their words.

Meanwhile, Raisa stared at the printed-out picture, trying not to see ghosts in the shadows.

She couldn’t deny that it looked like Isabel behind the wheel, even though the rational side of her couldn’t help but note that all that was shown was the hint of a profile.

“Let’s roll,” St. Ivany said, grabbing Raisa by the arm.

“Will we get the warrant?” Raisa asked. St. Ivany didn’t even lead them to the SUV. Apparently, the shop was in town.

“Yeah,” St. Ivany said. “Our judge is kind of a lovable asshole, but he won’t give us shit on this. That picture is a slam dunk, and Kilkenny is an FBI agent. So.”

So no one would admit it, but everyone in law enforcement was a little more sensitive to solving cases involving one of their own.

A teenager was working the counter of the rental place, his floppy hair falling into his eyes as he swiped at his phone.

“We need your manager,” St. Ivany said, before the door had even closed behind them.

“Jeez, Karen,” the teenager mumbled. “You didn’t even give me a chance.”

St. Ivany flashed her ID. “We need your manager.”

The teenager straightened, going a bit pale at the sight of the badge. “Okay, lady. I mean. Sergeant. I mean. Det—”

“Get your manager,” St. Ivany cut in.

“Right.” The teenager almost fell off his stool in his scramble.

Two minutes later he reemerged from the back, trailing behind a woman with the same no-nonsense expression as the superintendent of the women’s prison.

“I’m sorry if Cole—”

“Ma’am, we’re about to get a warrant from Judge Iginla,” St. Ivany cut in. “We need to see who rented a black SUV from here in the past week.”

The woman—whose badge read Letitia—crossed her arms. “Well, we keep impeccable records, so I’m sure we’ll be able to help you. But we will need to see that order from the judge.”

“Of course,” St. Ivany said, pulling out her phone. They all waited in semi-awkward silence until the order came through.

Once it did, Letitia shifted her attention to the computer. A few keystrokes later she presented them with a list of three names.

Raisa didn’t need to see any others.

There at the bottom was one that jumped out immediately.

Delaney Moore.