Page 52 of The Truth You Told

“It’s your house,” Max said, in a terrible blank voice, and Shay realized her relief from moments earlier was ill founded. Max wasn’t mad, but Shay had broken her trust. And that was a profound loss, no matter how subtle it was. Max no longer felt like this was her home.

“Max,” Shay tried, her heart breaking a little, and Max just shook her head, too quickly.

“I get it,” she said. “You needed your charger.”

That was the problem, wasn’t it? There could always be a valid excuse. Shay could have stopped at the gas station on the way in. She could have bought a replacement. She could have borrowed one of the three burner phones Lonnie kept on his person at all times. She could have done anything but barge into Max’s room without her permission.

A twenty-dollar bribe wasn’t going to fix this.

Shay didn’t actually know if it was fixable at all.

So she asked what she wouldn’t have asked if Max had given her any sign that this would blow over. “Why do you have these?”

In a box, hidden in a closet, like it’s a bad secret,Shay thought but didn’t add.

Again, she got a neutral expression. Shay hated that Max had enough experience with intense emotion that, even at twelve, she was able to hide hers.

Max just stared at her for a long time. And then she said in a flat voice, “You shouldn’t ask questions you don’t want an answer to.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Raisa

Now

The Alphabet Man’s letters were spread out before Raisa, and for the first time all day, she relaxed. This was where she felt on solid ground.

Words. Writing. She had always been drawn to the patterns of language, even before she realized her biological parents had been world-class mathematicians. When she’d been thrust into the foster system at ten years old, everyone had wanted to talk at her. It was then she’d learned the power of words. They were something she could control, even as young as she’d been. She could withhold them or offer them up as she pleased, and no one could force her to do otherwise, no matter how persuasive they were.

So many people let their words fall out with abandon, as if they didn’t have any power. But Raisa had known better.

And here they were in all their terrible glory.

In front of her, she arranged all the letters in chronological order, all the way back to the ones that had been tossed into file cabinets before anyone knew what they were.

When going through them piecemeal, she’d thought them incredibly long-winded for encrypted messages. But after reading the first six or seven, she noticed they were almost a template of each other.

They weren’t the exact words repeated, but the structure was the same and could be broken down into parts.

An over-the-top greeting that over time became personalized to Kilkenny;

Taunts about being smarter than law enforcement, the task force, and then, again, eventually Kilkenny;

Taunts about the way he’d tortured his last victims to inflict as much pain as possible before killing them;

Personal information about someone on the task force to show how much he knew about all the members (though the first few letters deviated there, and were information on sheriffs at the departments he’d sent them to);

An over-the-top sign-off;

The next victim’s name.

The exact details varied, of course. But they, without fail, stuck to that format.

Except for four of the victims: Shay, of course. And then the female victim where Conrad had been “sloppy” enough to use the same code twice. Finally, there were the two male victims.

Raisa ignored the buzz in her skull, like she always tried to do when her mind wanted to jump ahead of her careful work.

This wasn’t about theories right now. It was about analysis. She went back to the beginning.