Page 17 of The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto #2)

CHAPTER TWELVE

Raisa

Now

Nathaniel Conrad was not immune to prison. Just like with Isabel, his shine had dimmed.

There had been a period of time after he’d been arrested that a small, but vocal, group of people had declared him too beautiful to be guilty. When he gave interviews, he was not only gorgeous but able to fake sincerity with incredible ease. His supporters simply played videos of him as proof that he couldn’t have been butchering women for five years.

Now, he looked beaten down, his hair dishwater instead of golden, his skin sallow instead of tanned. He was missing one of his incisors and the front tooth beside it, so the smile he gave them was upsetting to look at rather than charming.

There was some magnetism left, Raisa realized as her body swayed toward him for no reason. Some people just had that within them—a current that even life inside these desolate walls couldn’t take away.

As the guard went through the motions of chaining him to the table, Raisa fought off déjà vu from the day before. The entire time Kilkenny had been helping her hunt down Isabel, he’d kept returning to Nathaniel Conrad, the similarities in their puppet-master personalities too strong to ignore. Seeing them both behind bars now drove that home.

“Agents, what a surprise,” Conrad drawled in a way that made it clear it wasn’t. Whether he was lying about Shay or not, he had been banking on the fact that Kilkenny would come down to make sure it wasn’t true.

His attention slid to Raisa. “You’re pretty.”

“I am pretty, thank you. But you don’t care about that, do you?” Raisa asked, and had the pleasure of seeing surprise flit in and out of Conrad’s eyes. There were plenty of reasons that might explain why Conrad hadn’t sexually assaulted his victims. But she’d found that most of those came from someone looking at the crime through a heteronormative lens. They talked a lot about him not wanting to leave evidence behind, as if that had never occurred to the majority of serial killers who raped their victims. Kilkenny had suggested Conrad might be impotent, and the killings could be some sort of outlet for his sexual frustration and shame. Even on some of the more open-minded message boards she’d checked out, people simply thought he was gay.

The speculation had never gone beyond the gay/straight binary.

Raisa had a broader frame of reference. She’d been friends with plenty of sex workers as a teenager living mostly on the streets and had gravitated toward people in college and grad school who were gender and sexuality majors.

If she had to guess, she’d say Conrad was on the asexual spectrum, perhaps even sex-repulsed.

“Mmm. You’re a clever one, aren’t you, Agent Susanto?” Conrad leered. “Which is something I do care about.”

“That would be a lot more terrifying if you weren’t chained to a table, less than two days out from execution,” Raisa said, making sure to sound incredibly bored.

“Perhaps you should ask your sister how easy it is to get things done from the inside.”

He wanted a reaction, but Raisa wouldn’t give it to him. They already knew Isabel had a hand in this in some way. And like Isabel, Conrad hadn’t been able to resist giving up information just for the sake of a jab. It was both something to keep in mind and further proof that Kilkenny had been right about their similarities.

“So, you’re saying all this was her doing and not yours.” Raisa knew how someone like Isabel would react if challenged like that. But he just smirked.

“Or maybe it was Kate Tashibi,” Raisa pressed, “who orchestrated all this.”

Conrad rolled his eyes. “Ms. Tashibi couldn’t find her way out of a paper bag.”

Raisa would never call herself Kate Tashibi’s biggest fan, but the woman hadn’t struck her as incompetent or stupid. Maybe it was pure misogyny speaking. But he had just admitted Raisa was clever.

So maybe . . .

Maybe he didn’t want them to realize Kate had figured something out on her own, and whatever had helped her crack his code, metaphorically speaking, might be different from what Isabel had discovered. Maybe more evidence existed to prove that Conrad hadn’t killed Shay, but it would give away something Conrad wanted to keep hidden.

Before Raisa could press further, Conrad continued.

“Your sister must have filled Ms. Tashibi in on the details, and so there were two people out there who knew my secret. By then, I knew my story would be told whether I liked it or not,” he said. “If I gave Ms. Tashibi her interview, at least I would know it would be a good representation of what actually happened. God forbid, I go to my grave and have my documentary end up chock-full of those terrible reenactment scenes.”

He shuddered theatrically. “Those are just cringey.”

They were embarrassing, but Raisa wasn’t going to agree with him. Not when she felt like he was leading them on a merry chase with his answers. She just couldn’t figure out what he gained from lying right now, a day before his execution, when he’d already divulged the most shocking revelation he could.

Even as she had the thought, it occurred to her that this very confusion might be at the heart of it all—in theory, if he’d already divulged his most closely guarded secret, why would anyone think to probe deeper?

But if he was using the Shay confession as camouflage, that meant he was hiding a bigger secret than admitting he hadn’t killed his most well-known victim.

That seemed impossible.

“This is all just bullshit,” Pierce said. “Why are you lying about Shay?”

“What if I told you it was to get a stay?” Conrad asked.

It was Kilkenny who answered. “That’s not the reason.”

He said it quietly and with such certainty that the room dropped silent for a moment.

Conrad’s eyes flicked to Kilkenny and then back to Raisa. It was only in that moment that she realized how little he’d looked at Kilkenny. If his primary motive for this stunt was to engage Kilkenny in one last confrontation, wouldn’t Conrad be focused on him? Instead, he’d been talking mostly with Raisa, without any attempt to draw Kilkenny into the conversation.

“Believe me or not, I didn’t kill Shay,” Conrad finally said.

Something about that struck Raisa, and she parsed each word to figure out why.

Ms. Tashibi. Agent Susanto. He was formal in how he addressed them.

He lingered over Shay’s name with a familiarity she found disturbing. Serial killers became attached to their victims, of course, but this seemed slightly different. He said her name like he was talking about a friend.

“You were framed,” Pierce said flatly. “You and all your neighbors on death row, you guys are innocent, you swear.”

Conrad sighed. “Not innocent. But not guilty of killing Shay.”

“Why come out with the truth now?” Raisa asked. “Isabel said she figured this all out five years ago.”

“Did she now?” Conrad lifted a shoulder. “I suppose I have a flair for the dramatic. And like I said, I wanted to set the record straight before I’m murdered myself.”

Pierce’s mouth pressed into a straight line of displeasure at the framing of that. Raisa agreed with Conrad in theory—capital punishment had always struck her as hypocritical and barbaric. But as she looked into Conrad’s empty eyes while he made sure they knew just how many girls he’d killed, she could admit that, for her, there were exceptions to be made.

“Who killed her if you didn’t?” Raisa asked.

“You think I’m going to do your whole job for you?” Conrad asked, amused. “I’ve already told you more than you deserve to know.”

“But then you won’t know,” Raisa said.

His mouth pursed, not wanting to bite. But he couldn’t resist. “Know what?”

“If we ever catch her killer.” Human curiosity was a dangerous and beautiful thing. It was why people binged television shows and stayed up until 3:00 a.m. reading a page-turner, the words blurring beneath their eyes. Everyone felt that driving need to know .

But Conrad just smiled. “Oh, I already know. You won’t.”

Raisa sat back at that. A part of her believed him when he said he wanted to set the record straight. She’d been studying his file. He was a control freak. It would have been torture for him to die without ever knowing what Kate or Isabel would do with his story. And if he agreed to an interview, he could stipulate that he needed to see the final version of the documentary before he died.

There was something else she couldn’t put her finger on layered beneath all that, though.

She couldn’t help but think he was acting the magician right now, showing them enough to make it believable, utilizing misdirection to conceal his tricks, and knowing that it didn’t really matter if they bought it as long as he could control where they were looking.

“Was Isabel the first person to realize you hadn’t killed Shay?” Raisa asked, trying to sidestep her way toward whatever had set the itch to the back of her neck.

“I’m guessing Shay was the first one to realize that.”

Pierce straightened out of his casual stance at that, shifting so he loomed over Conrad. “Keep her name out of your mouth.”

Conrad peered up at Pierce through indolent, hooded eyes. “Or you’ll ... what? Kill me?”

Pierce exhaled through flared nostrils, then shifted ever so slightly to cup the back of Conrad’s head. A second later, Conrad’s face hit the table, a loud thunk of bone and metal.

“I can make your last forty-eight hours very painful,” Pierce said, stepping back as if he hadn’t just assaulted a handcuffed man.

Conrad touched his nose, which somehow, miraculously, wasn’t broken or bleeding. Pierce seemed to know just how to cause pain without leaving a mark. Not that Raisa gave two shits about Conrad’s health and happiness, but it was interesting to note. “I’d probably enjoy it more than you’d like, Agent Pierce.”

Raisa wrinkled her nose. She could have gone her whole life without learning such a thing about Conrad.

“Why me?” Kilkenny asked into the tense silence that dropped. “You wrote that in a letter one time. That if I ever found out why me , then I would be able to find you.”

It was a vulnerable admission from Kilkenny, an acknowledgment that Conrad had gotten into his head, at least a little bit. But for the first time, Raisa saw something like approval slip into Conrad’s smile. Isabel had worn a similar expression when Raisa had finally stumbled on the right question to ask.

Whatever the answer was, it was important. At least to Conrad.

“I like the trope,” Conrad said, a little too casually. “FBI psychologist, serial-killer mastermind.”

As he said each, he waved first to Kilkenny and then to himself.

Raisa shook her head slowly. Conrad was watching her closely, seeing if she would get to the right conclusion. That meant he might have handed them enough clues in this interrogation that she could figure it out.

Why Kilkenny?

Conrad had given them almost nothing. But maybe it was what he hadn’t given them that was the revelation.

Why Kilkenny? Why spend five years engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with an FBI agent? Why arrange for a shocking reveal in order to grab that man’s attention, and then ... barely talk to him when he flew all the way down to Texas?

If Conrad were obsessed with Kilkenny, she’d expect him to be reveling in his victory right now.

There was no reveling. Even the gloating seemed both toned down and, once again, directed at Raisa.

She didn’t for a moment think that made her important—she was just a new piece in this chess match, and he seemed to like shiny objects.

In the end, Kilkenny was just an afterthought.

Raisa went over every word, then stuttered once again at that moment—that moment she’d thought, Huh . She remembered what she’d said to Kilkenny at the airport, in a bit of an exhausted daze.

“Or maybe you had nothing to do with it at all.”

“You say Shay’s name like you knew her,” Raisa murmured.

Kilkenny made some kind of punched-out sound, but Raisa didn’t dare let herself look over at him.

Sometimes there were stories that people told themselves so many times ... they couldn’t see that the stories weren’t always true.

Conrad smiled, close-lipped but pleased. Another secret uncovered before he went to the grave.

“Kilkenny has spent ten years thinking he dragged Shay into the crosshairs,” she said slowly. “But it was the other way around.”