Page 1 of The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto #2)

CHAPTER ONE

Raisa

Now

Someone was watching her.

FBI forensic linguist Raisa Susanto didn’t need her training to tell her that—she’d learned the weight of a predator’s gaze long before she’d stepped foot in Quantico.

Raisa shifted over to the coffee shop’s pickup counter, searching for reflective surfaces. She found one in the fancy espresso machine, but all she could get was the impression of dark hair, a blurred face.

She touched her shoulder, an instinctive gesture she’d been trying to fight for the past three months since a bullet tore into her flesh right at that spot.

The injury had made her paranoid, jumpy in crowds—she could admit that. But this was experience, not fear, talking now.

When the barista called her name, Raisa bit her lip, wishing she’d given a fake one instead. If whoever was watching her had any doubt about her identity, that had just been wiped away.

The mistake made Raisa long for the solid press of a gun against her rib cage. But she’d stopped at the little shop after a run, and had only the essentials with her.

She forced a smile for the barista, and then, instead of skirting around the gaggle of other patrons, she wormed her way directly into the middle of the group. They grumbled at her, but the move gave her some cover and let her scan the room.

The place was packed, as expected on an unseasonably pretty Saturday. She didn’t catch anyone watching her, and for one moment she doubted herself in a way she hadn’t before she’d been shot.

Crowds did make her more jittery than they ever had in the past, and her fight-or-flight mode was easily triggered by unexpected noises, by the brush of a stranger’s arm against hers.

But the echo of the stare lingered on her skin.

Raisa had a few options here.

She could wait, see if the person came to her. The coffee shop was a relatively safe location, where she could easily call for help. The downside was that it carried a higher risk of a civilian getting hurt in the confrontation.

Or she could force their hand.

Raisa had never been one for the passive approach.

Murmuring her apologies, she exited the gaggle and headed for the door, deliberate and purposeful so she would be seen.

It didn’t take long for the predator to follow, close enough for Raisa to hear the bell chime as the door shut behind them.

Bold.

Or inexperienced.

Raisa took the next left and then sprinted up to the alcove just ahead of her. She pressed her back to the stone wall and waited one beat, two.

A woman came into view.

She was short and curvy, her dark hair piled into a messy bun that showed off an undercut. She wore leggings paired with combat boots and an oversize flannel shirt open over a white tank. There was no sign of a weapon.

Not exactly threatening on first glance, but Raisa wasn’t, either.

When the woman stuttered to a stop, Raisa wasted no time stepping out of the hiding spot, yanking the woman by the collar, and pushing her up against the wall. Raisa pressed a forearm against her throat, hard enough to show she meant it but with just the right amount of pressure that she could apologize if this was all a misunderstanding.

“You have about three seconds to tell me why you’re following me,” Raisa said.

The woman blinked at her in apparent confusion, her hands coming up to pull at Raisa’s arm. At least Raisa could be reassured there was no hidden strength beneath that hipster wardrobe.

“One,” Raisa said.

“I’m not following—”

“Two.” Raisa didn’t need to explicitly state what she’d do at three. If this woman was stalking her, she knew who Raisa was. It didn’t hurt that Raisa also had her forearm shoved up against her windpipe and, between the two of them, was clearly in control of the situation.

“Lady, you are paranoid. I’m not—”

“Thr—”

“Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Fine, you’re right. Christ, let me go,” the woman said, slapping at Raisa’s arm. Raisa released her, but didn’t relax. “Isn’t that police brutality?”

Raisa lifted her brows. “We both know I’m not the police.”

“You’re a glorified cop,” the woman said, all piss and vinegar.

“Why are you following me?” Raisa demanded, uninterested in all her diversionary tactics. Giving her more time just to let her figure out ways to lie.

“Good lord, I’m just a student,” the woman said, all huffy about it, still rubbing at her neck as if Raisa had actually caused any damage.

All her bluster seemed like too much, though. She wanted to convince both of them that Raisa was the unreasonable one in the situation, but it had been Raisa who’d been followed by a stranger while out on her morning run. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I’m trying to get into grad school,” the woman said. “For forensic linguistics. It’s a hard program to break into, so I thought if I could talk to you ...”

She shrugged and trailed off.

That was plausible. Raisa was one of two forensic linguists employed on a full-time basis by the FBI. While there were certainly smarter, more experienced experts in her field, that type tended toward academia. They might have been called in to consult on bomb threats and kidnappings every once in a while, but Raisa was the one who dealt with those kinds of cases on a daily basis, along with murderers, rapists, and run-of-the-mill white-collar criminals. She had a range of experience someone sitting in a classroom wouldn’t be able to impart.

But this was Tacoma, it wasn’t the right time of year for grad school applications, and Raisa had contact information on her website.

A student looking to get into a graduate program—unless independently wealthy—wasn’t flying out to Washington and then stalking Raisa just to get her advice on grad schools.

Even if she’d been looking for a recommendation, she probably would have tried email first.

“Okay,” Raisa said. “Now the truth.”

The woman’s eyes flew to hers. She smothered the surprise in them quickly but didn’t do as good a job at keeping the annoyance out of the twist of her lips.

“Yeah,” Raisa drawled. “You can try another lie on for size, but I already started with about zero patience and it’s only wearing thinner. In fact, I’m about to call in backup. So, if you’d like to do this here instead of at the police station, I’d suggest you start telling me what you really want.” When that got nothing out of her, Raisa pushed on. “Isn’t that why you’re following me in the first place? To get something?”

The woman’s eyes darted over Raisa’s shoulder, but Raisa knew better than to fall for the basic ruse. She kept her attention on the woman’s face even as she reached for her phone. At the movement, the woman lifted her chin, decision apparently made.

“Okay, fine,” she said. “I’m Kate Tashibi.”

“The documentarian?” Raisa asked.

A couple of weeks prior, she’d gotten an email from Kate, asking her to talk about the Alphabet Man, an infamous serial killer who’d tattooed ciphers onto his victims, using them to taunt law enforcement with coded messages. Raisa had deleted the message before she’d even gotten to the end of it, then informed the front desk of the FBI field office that any of Kate’s calls should be held.

“You’ve been ignoring my requests,” Kate said.

“Yeah, some people would take that as a hint.” Raisa turned away, no longer worried or interested. Now she just wanted to put as much distance between them as possible. “Next time you follow me, I’m having you arrested.”

“For sharing a sidewalk?” Kate called after her.

“You want to test me?” Raisa asked, shifting once more so she was walking backward. Kate needed to see that she was serious about this. “Because I’m pretty sure you don’t just happen to frequent the same coffee shop as I do.”

Kate’s mouth worked until finally she spit out, “I’m telling an important story.”

Raisa usually tried to take the high road. At work she was forced to do so, more often than not, and it wasn’t just the criminals who tested her, either. There were plenty of fellow agents who made condescending remarks about her specialty, who looked at her like she was a novelty at best and a waste of resources at worst. Most of the time, she could rise above it.

But Kate Tashibi was a vulture.

She called herself an artist. A filmmaker. That email she’d sent had been a longer, less petulant version of I’m telling an important story . Kate had listed all the awards she’d won at some distinguished MFA program, and had even included early reviews of the Alphabet Man project, which was set to air on one of the more prestigious streaming services.

But the world didn’t need another documentary memorializing a man who’d kidnapped, tortured, and killed twenty-seven women.

Anyone who thought that it did didn’t deserve Raisa’s time or respect.

“I promise you, you’re not telling an important story,” Raisa said, and meant it.

The serial killer Kate had picked to feature in her cash-grab documentary was a run-of-the-mill psychopath. There was nothing special about Nathaniel Conrad—a.k.a. the Alphabet Man—beyond what made any of those monsters gruesomely fascinating.

“Now, if you want to make a series on one of the Alphabet Man’s twenty-seven victims, we can talk,” Raisa continued. “Until then, stay the hell away from me.”

Raisa turned again, this time tuning out anything else Kate Tashibi had to say for herself.

Once she was out of the other woman’s sight, she tossed her coffee into a garbage can and ran the rest of the way back to her building.

The place was nothing fancy. Raisa spent most of her life shipped around the country to the task forces that needed her specific expertise, which tended to be any case involving some kind of written communication as a central component. Her apartment often served as a landing spot for a night or two a month instead of a home.

But it was hers.

Once inside, Raisa slid behind the small, uncluttered desk that overlooked the one window in her living room. Her laptop was the Bureau-issued dinosaur she barely used—preferring her tablet most of the time—so it protested when she asked it to turn on. Still, it had enough juice for a simple Google search on Kate Tashibi.

The latest news article on her project populated the top carousel of the results page.

Documentary maker Kate Tashibi promises bombshell revelations in new series on the Alphabet Man

Raisa rolled her eyes. She’d been loosely following Kate’s press coverage ever since that first email. The headlines on the articles always promised jaw-dropping surprises, and yet the stories themselves were all just teasers, lacking anything of substance.

There had been so many of these pieces in recent weeks as the Alphabet Man’s execution date neared that Raisa was starting to get a familiarity with the case even though it had happened long before her time.

Most of the details were fairly typical serial-killer stuff. Fifteen years ago, a woman’s body had been dumped in a field outside Houston. She was young and pretty and clearly had been tortured before she was killed.

The twist with the Alphabet Man, and the reason he’d been given his moniker, was that he’d tattooed a cipher onto the woman’s arm after she died. The code, called an Alberti Cipher, had been key to decrypting messages the killer had sent to law enforcement.

He had always included his victim’s name in the letters he mailed to the FBI—in theory, giving them a chance to save the person—but the message could be decoded only once they found the body.

Raisa had always found this detail particularly sadistic.

Would the name of the victim matter in the bid to save her life? Maybe not. But how could the agents not feel extra guilt for knowing a clue was in their grasp if only they could understand it?

The Alphabet Man had terrorized Houston and the counties surrounding the city for five years, the pattern always the same. Kidnap someone, write a coded message to the task force, torture the victim for three days, send more taunting letters to law enforcement in the meantime, kill the victim, tattoo the Alberti Cipher on his or her skin, and then dump them somewhere in the open to be found easily.

His body count had climbed well into the double digits. Most of his victims were white women in their twenties, but not all of them had been. Two had been men—an anomaly Raisa had never seen a good explanation for—and five of the women had been middle-aged or older. Three of his victims had been Hispanic and one had been Black.

The fact that he hadn’t seemed to have a type had made those years even more terrifying for Houston’s residents.

He had been vicious and prolific. And he’d never made any mistakes.

Until the last victim.

In that case, the letter the killer had sent the FBI had been encrypted with a code he’d used for a previous victim, a duplicate that had allowed the FBI team to quickly figure out the name of the woman he was planning on kidnapping.

Nathaniel Conrad, an unassuming social worker who had never appeared on any suspect list, had been found sitting outside the woman’s apartment with a gun, a rope, and a tarp in his car. That had been enough to get all the warrants the FBI needed, and they’d found a bounty of evidence—everything from DNA to souvenirs and tattoo equipment—in Conrad’s house, tying him to at least fourteen of the victims.

Conrad claimed innocence and misunderstanding, but at that point, the case was a home run and everyone knew what his fate would eventually be. Now, ten years after he had been caught and fifteen years after he’d started killing, Conrad was less than two weeks from his execution date.

Raisa closed out of the article about Kate Tashibi’s documentary that had been a nothingburger, as expected, and navigated to one of Kate’s social media pages. It was slick, a carefully curated layout that was fully dedicated to the upcoming series.

Are you ready for the truth? the caption on her latest post read, and Raisa rolled her eyes again. There was no truth here to uncover. There was no mystery to peel back when it came to the Alphabet Man. This was clickbait, pure and simple.

The rest of the page was more of the same, and Raisa made note of Kate’s idiolect—her unique use of language, including but not limited to grammar, vocabulary, and writing errors.

Raisa didn’t always read with an eye toward creating a linguistic profile, but as she scrolled, she couldn’t help but pick up a sense of the woman behind the glossy marketing campaign. Of course, any social media analysis like this—where someone else might have been running this page besides Kate—had to come with caveats. There were a host of reasons that this particular writing wasn’t actually a good representation of Kate’s idiolect. She might have to run each post by the marketing department of the big streaming service and get input and corrections before posting, for example.

But Raisa was one of the leading forensic linguists in the country, and she had been paying attention to Kate for a few weeks now. She was starting to get a feel for the woman.

Kate Tashibi had a dramatic and brash tone that stood out, and a style that exuded confidence. If Raisa had been cataloging her authorial tics, she would note that Kate’s sentences varied in length—a sign of a strong writer—and that she had a way of leading in with a complex one before dropping the mic with a short one right after.

When we think of monsters, we think of the shadows where they lurk, the darkness from where they emerge, but Conrad hunted his prey during the day. He thrived in the light.

Her voice was distinctive and thus easy to build a profile around if Raisa had been doing so within the capacity of her job. Now, though, all she wanted to find were hints of the bombshells. Even if Raisa didn’t believe they existed.

The only post that broke free of the rigid, sleek, and yet boring marketing campaign was a personal photo at the very bottom of the grid.

The first thing Kate had ever posted.

It was a close-up of two girls hugging, both grinning wildly at the camera. If they weren’t sisters, they looked similar enough to be mistaken as such.

The caption was simple: For you, H.

Raisa stared at the girls and wondered whether Kate ever took into account that these victims, whose tragedy would become a feast for a voracious public, had been someone’s sister, maybe. Or someone’s friend, or someone’s lover.

Or were they just names and numbers to her? Serving as nothing but narrative tools to get across just how truly villainous her documentary’s Bad Guy was?

Maybe Raisa should give Kate the benefit of the doubt. Maybe that first picture was a message in and of itself—that every victim was someone’s sister, lover, friend.

But Raisa wasn’t feeling charitable.

Not when Kate had picked this particular serial killer.

Raisa’s phone dinged, and she smiled when she saw the preview text.

If someone had told her four months ago that FBI forensic psychologist Callum Kilkenny would be texting her a ridiculous cat meme on a random Saturday, Raisa would have called bullshit so fast. But now it was a standard occurrence.

Most of the time that Raisa had known Kilkenny—about three years now—they had been cordial colleagues.

As a forensic psychologist, Kilkenny had been in a similar boat to Raisa. He was shipped out to task forces instead of working in one area. It was hard to make friends, or even just allies, that way, and so whenever they’d been assigned to the same case, they’d naturally teamed up.

They’d never been on a texting basis, though.

Of course, everything had changed three months ago. She’d been shot and he’d been there to save her life, and now, if she tried to scroll to the top of their thread, she would be going for a while.

She hearted the meme Kilkenny had sent and then tossed her phone back onto the desk.

Raisa once again stared at the picture of the two little girls.

Kate had clearly done her homework. There was no reason for her to contact Raisa otherwise. Raisa had been a teenager when the Alphabet Man had been active, and she’d never done any special research on the case.

Four months ago, Kate probably hadn’t even known her name. She might pretend she was hounding Raisa for an interview about the linguistic shortcomings in the Alphabet Man case, but Raisa knew she had an ulterior motive.

Kate knew exactly what she was doing and exactly who she was hurting with this film.

And for that, Raisa would never forgive her.

Because for Kate Tashibi, Shay Kilkenny was probably just number twenty-three on a list of the Alphabet Man’s victims.

For Callum Kilkenny, she’d been his whole world.