Page 12 of The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto #2)

CHAPTER NINE

Raisa

Now

“Tell me about Shay,” Raisa said as the plane leveled out. She didn’t have a sense for who this woman was. Just as she’d blamed Kate Tashibi for reducing the victims to names and numbers, Raisa had created a shallow stand-in based on murder-scene photos and myths for a flesh-and-blood person who’d probably had strengths and flaws and a personality.

That was the problem with the way they talked about these victims. They no longer belonged to themselves—they belonged, forever, to the person who had murdered them.

“You would never guess someone like her ended up with someone like me,” Kilkenny said, with an incredible amount of fondness.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“She was really fun,” Kilkenny said, and Raisa lifted her brows in surprise. He was right; that wasn’t what she’d been expecting. “Really fucking fun.”

Raisa huffed out a laugh. “But you two clicked anyway.”

“Against all odds,” Kilkenny said, his mouth tilting up in acknowledgment of her little chirp. “She was hilarious and quick and smart as hell, though she didn’t think so.”

“Really?” She’d always imagined Shay Kilkenny as an academic type, though Raisa wasn’t sure why. Or a model, the sleek and polished kind to match Kilkenny. All grace, no ketchup stains.

“You remind me a little of her,” Kilkenny said, and from anyone else, Raisa would have taken it as a line and thrown up all her brick walls. But the two of them were on the same page about any potential romance. It had been a nonstarter from the word hello .

Instead, Raisa took it as a compliment. “She sounds awesome, then.”

He laughed. “Yeah.”

“What did she like to do for fun?” Raisa asked.

“The beach,” Kilkenny said. “Put her near water and she was a happy camper. She even liked our Pacific Northwest beaches.”

“Slightly different than Galveston’s,” Raisa said.

“Right.” He smiled softly. “She’d talk me into taking a day off in the middle of the week, and we’d go down to Oregon. Eat good cheese and get drunk on cheap wine.” He went quiet before admitting, “She made me remember there were beautiful things in the world. And it wasn’t all just terrible trauma and death.”

Raisa wondered how many vacation days he’d taken in the past ten years. She didn’t think the number reached the double digits. “It sounds like she was good for you.”

“She was.” He rubbed his thumb over his wedding band. “I’m not sure I was good for her.”

“I am,” Raisa said.

“You have to say that,” he said, predictably. Kilkenny always appeared so confident, and he was, in his job. But outside of that, he carried around the weight of Shay’s death like it was an indictment on who he was as a person.

Even for the five seconds she’d wondered if he’d been the one to kill Shay, Raisa had always known he was good . At least, well meaning, which she put a hell of a lot of stock into even if it sounded like she was damning him with faint praise.

She thought about the way he had sent her texts every few days as his own version of a wellness check over the past three months, how he’d compiled a list of therapists but didn’t nag her to go see one. How he’d met her at the courthouse door.

“I really don’t.” She exhaled before he could argue further, shifting the subject. “Okay, if you were approaching this case without any attachments to it, what would you think?”

“I would think horses and not zebras,” he said. “Conrad killed Shay and is lying about it for attention or some other reason we haven’t figured out yet.”

“And if he’s not?”

He shook his head, at a loss.

“Okay.” She tried to force herself to think of the problem sideways. What if Kilkenny wasn’t the reason Shay was killed? What if Conrad wasn’t? “You said she was tight with her family. Tell me about them.”

“A mixed bag,” Kilkenny said. “Her mother, Hillary, was narcissistic and emotionally abusive. She had full custody of Shay, though sometimes pawned her off with Beau and his father, Billy. Who was also abusive and an alcoholic.”

“Beau?” Raisa asked.

“Shay’s half brother,” Kilkenny clarified. “She had two siblings—that we knew of, at least. Beau was a couple years younger than her. They were incredibly close, and after Hillary left to places unknown, they became co-guardians of their sister, Max.”

“Who also had an abusive father?” Raisa guessed.

“Hillary knew how to pick ’em,” Kilkenny said, his lingering and warranted bitterness clear. “Max’s father was killed in a robbery gone wrong when she was eleven, and Shay took her in. Beau moved in to help, since both of them had somewhat erratic schedules.”

“What did Beau do?” Raisa asked.

“Nurse at the local hospital,” he said.

“What was he like?”

“Old soul,” Kilkenny said, without missing a beat. “Reliable. A little bit of a bastard, when it was warranted.”

“It must have been hard for them,” Raisa said. “Raising a kid. Especially when they hadn’t had the best childhood themselves.”

“Shay never complained,” he said. “Which didn’t mean it wasn’t difficult. Max was ...”

When he trailed off, Raisa bumped her knee against his. “What?”

“Challenging.”

“Preteen challenging or ...?” She let him fill in the blank, and he did.

“When I met them, Max was seeing a psychiatrist who specialized in violent children,” Kilkenny said.

“Oh-kay.” Raisa drew out the word, processing that. “Violent as in she could kill her sister and frame a serial killer while doing it?”

“No,” Kilkenny said, quickly. Maybe too quickly. “Nothing I ever saw indicated that she had a personality disorder that would lead to that kind of behavior.” He paused. “Although I didn’t spend much time with her. She might have been a very good actress.”

“There must have been an incident in her past that would have led to her seeing the psychiatrist in the first place,” Raisa said. He slid her a look, and her brain caught up with her mouth.

Robbery gone wrong. Abusive father. Dead father. “Ah.”

“Just rumors,” Kilkenny said. “Shay never confirmed it either way.”

Everyone was capable of killing. Not everyone was capable of murder.

“It would have been like long-term self-defense,” she mused.

“That’s likely why no one pursued anything,” Kilkenny said. “That, and there was no hard evidence beyond blood on her clothes. Which she said she got from feeling for a pulse. They weren’t about to waste too many resources trying to lock up an eleven-year-old girl over the death of an asshole who’d made her life hell.”

“How old was she when Shay was killed?”

“Sixteen,” he said, and they met each other’s eyes. Other people might say that was too young to commit a crime like the one that had been done to Shay. But they’d both just seen how dangerous Isabel Parker had been at that age—she’d murdered three members of her family to kick off a twenty-five-year killing career.

“Are you still in contact with her?” Raisa asked.

“No, she left Houston about a year after Shay died,” he said. “She cut all ties with everyone here, and to be honest, I didn’t try very hard to find her. She had no love lost for me.”

“Is Beau still in the city?”

Kilkenny nodded. “Still lives in their house, still works at the hospital.”

Yet both of his sisters were gone. “Was there ever any talk of Max coming to live with you guys when Shay moved up to Seattle?”

“No, Beau didn’t want to leave Texas,” Kilkenny said. “Neither did Shay, honestly. I put in a request for a transfer, but it was denied. Then Shay got pregnant and that forced her hand.”

“Oh,” Raisa murmured softly, surprised but trying not to show it. Kilkenny was staring hard at the seat back in front of him, his jaw tight and his hands clenched together. No one had ever mentioned a child, so it didn’t take much to guess what had happened. There was no need to push him further on a loss that would have been made all the more heartbreaking for what had followed.

“It was hard on Shay,” he continued. “Living in Washington, leaving them behind. And then we lost the baby ...”

Raisa nudged his knee again, this time in silent support. “Did she want to go back to Texas?”

“At that point, no.” He looked out the window, at the sunrise that was creeping along marshmallow clouds. “She was depressed. I’m sure of it, though she didn’t receive an actual diagnosis. I was away so much, she was alone so much.”

There was another story to tell. What had Shay been up to in that time period? If this were a different case, Raisa might have started digging. Had there been a lover? One who’d seen a way out of some complicated situation when he realized exactly who Shay’s husband was?

Replicating the Alphabet Man’s MO would have been brutal for any non-psychopath, though. The postmortem tattooing alone would probably dissuade the cruelest of them when they started to consider it. It sounded like anyone who wanted to kill Shay simply could have faked a suicide and had a chance of getting away with it.

“Why were you denied a transfer?” Raisa asked.

Kilkenny was like her—he got shipped around where he was needed far more than he worked out of any one office. Stationing him in Texas almost made more sense than having him on one side of the country.

“They never gave me a reason,” Kilkenny said. “It always made me wonder, though.”

“Did Xander Pierce make that decision?” Raisa asked, trying to remember how high he’d been in the chain at that point. “You would have thought he wanted you close by for the Alphabet Man investigation.”

“I don’t know,” Kilkenny said, with a shrug. He didn’t sound suspicious, though. “I suppose it’s possible Pierce could have poisoned that well even if he wasn’t making the actual decision, but I doubt it. We were good friends at the time. Why wouldn’t he have wanted me down there?”

Raisa hummed in acknowledgment, not agreement.

She didn’t know the answer to that, but she thought it might be a more interesting one than he seemed to want to consider.