Page 19 of The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto #2)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Raisa

Now

“Nathaniel Conrad knew Shay,” Raisa said, perhaps unnecessarily. But she wanted them all to be on the same page.

Kilkenny was pacing in front of their rental car, and Pierce watched him with a concerned expression.

Raisa was just glad to be back out in the sunshine, the heat of it burning away the unpleasant residue of the prison. Fluorescent lights were really starting to wear on her.

“You’re throwing spaghetti to see what sticks,” Pierce said. She understood why he was being defensive, but she was tired of it. She wasn’t his enemy, and unless he’d had something to do with Shay’s death, he wasn’t hers.

“Did you not see him all but confirm it?” Raisa asked, letting a little bit of snap come into her voice.

“I saw you throwing out a theory and him smiling because we’re playing directly into his hand,” Pierce said, as if she’d never dealt with a serial killer before.

“And what hand is that?” Raisa asked.

“He wants to muddy the waters,” Pierce said. “That’s all he’s doing here.”

“We looked,” Kilkenny interjected. “We looked for a connection, of course we did.”

“I thought you didn’t investigate at the time,” Raisa said.

“It was after,” Pierce said. “The prosecutor’s team was huge. They investigated each victim, found when he first contacted them, then documented any evidence, any signs that he’d been stalking them in the weeks before the kidnappings. They never found anything connecting him to Shay. Beyond Kilkenny, of course.”

Raisa wished she could see those files. They sounded far more thorough than the ones from the active investigation. But that was because the FBI reports had been written when they’d had no idea who Nathaniel Conrad was. His name had never made it onto a single suspect list.

It was far easier to draw a map of connections when you had the name of your killer and all his personal details than when he was a faceless monster in a population of millions.

“I know you’re probably thinking we did a shit job,” Pierce said, the edge completely ground out of his voice now.

“I’m actually not.” It was the truth. There had obviously been some missteps, but Raisa was never one to judge anyone for how they acted while the stakes were so high. Her own decisions had almost led to her getting killed no less than three months ago. And she might have had Delaney’s blood on her hands as well, if things had gone just a little differently.

Pierce, who had seemed ready to defend himself further, was now at a loss. “Okay. Well.”

“Raisa’s just trying to help,” Kilkenny said. He looked over to her. “I saw what you saw. Conrad wanted us to believe he knew her apart from me, but I can’t say if that’s the truth or not. If they were friends, it was in passing. He wasn’t a big part of her life.”

“She worked at a bar.” It was one of the best places to meet someone, wasn’t it? Especially if you wanted to do so with some anonymity preserved. “Maybe he was a regular. She wouldn’t have thought to tell you about him by name unless he’d done something crazy.”

“I was there all the time. I never saw him,” Kilkenny said.

“But you can’t say that for certain,” Raisa pointed out gently. “You travel all over the country and have been to hundreds of bars and diners and clubs. Your brain has learned to filter out the noise. He could have been sitting on the barstool next to you every night and I doubt you would have remembered his face.”

After a minute of consideration, he tilted his head. “Maybe.”

“Tell me literally one thing about anyone at the airport yesterday,” Raisa challenged him, and when he remained silent, she laughed. “I’m not insulting you. You’re not unobservant, dude. You scan for danger and catalog your surroundings, but then you dump the information as useless. I’ve watched it happen—”

“This is pointless. So what if he knew her?” Pierce interrupted. “He probably started stalking her because of Kilkenny.”

“Why would you assume that?” Raisa asked. “Why can’t it have been the other way around? If he used this area as his base, is it crazy that he somehow knew Shay? And then if the FBI agent who was hunting him started dating her? Wouldn’t he become more interested in Kilkenny than he would have otherwise?” She turned to Kilkenny. “Did you do anything to draw his attention? Did you offer some brilliant insight right off the bat?”

Kilkenny stared at the ground, but then he shook his head. “No. I offered a fairly standard profile. And while it turned out to be spot-on, it wasn’t the thing that led to his capture. His own mistake did.”

That mistake had been reusing a code—but that wasn’t sitting right with what they knew about Conrad. He wasn’t careless. Serial killers weren’t evil geniuses who never made a misstep, of course. But there was something they were missing with that.

“Fine,” Pierce said. “Doesn’t that mean he’s more likely to be lying right now? You really think it’s possible she was friends with a serial killer, who was then framed for her murder?”

“I don’t know,” Raisa admitted, a bit helplessly. She was just trying to figure this out, too. It seemed wild to think that Shay might have known Conrad, one of the state’s most prolific serial killers, and not died by his hand. She didn’t have an explanation for it.

“What if she figured it out somehow?” Pierce said, persuasive now that he sensed her moment of doubt. “What if she figured out that her friend Nathaniel was the Alphabet Man? She didn’t want to believe it was him, so she confronted him instead of telling Kilkenny. That’s why there wasn’t a sign of a struggle. She was meeting him in that mall parking lot.”

Kilkenny stared at him for a long time, expression blank, and then his eyes flicked to Raisa. Because that scenario sounded incredibly plausible. In fact, that’s probably what had happened.

Except ... except there had been two different authors, one who penned the Alphabet Man messages and one who wrote the Shay letters.

That was the only real evidence they had that Conrad was telling the truth right now.

And it was based solely on Raisa’s work.

Raisa was used to people dismissing her analysis as pseudoscience, no matter how many graphs and statistical equations she threw at them. They didn’t understand, so they thought it must not be as convincing as things like DNA and fingerprints. Only once before had Raisa questioned whether Kilkenny respected her work. He had explained away his doubt in a manner that had been mostly convincing. But in this moment, she realized the bruise remained—because she wasn’t sure what he was going to say.

“He’s not lying,” Kilkenny said, and she relaxed, relieved. “He didn’t kill Shay.”

Pierce deflated. Where he would steamroll Raisa, he would at least humor Kilkenny. “Okay. We need Kate Tashibi’s film.”

“Can you convince her to let you watch the interview?” Raisa asked, dubious.

“I’m not leaking it to the press.” Pierce shrugged. “There’s no reason for her not to voluntarily share it.”

Maybe no logical reason, but there were plenty of emotional ones. But if he wanted to try, she wasn’t going to stop him. “That would be great if she turns it over.”

“I’ll get it.” Pierce glanced at his watch. “I bet she’s in town for the execution. We’ll chase her down.”

Raisa hadn’t even thought about that, but of course Kate would want some final footage.

Kilkenny shook his head. “You must be busy. I can’t ask—”

“Listen, buddy, I’m seeing this through to the end,” Pierce cut him off. “Nothing else is as important.”

That probably wasn’t true. Pierce was the head of the entire Houston office. He probably didn’t actually have time for coffee, let alone whatever it would take to chase down Tashibi and get her to hand over her precious film. But the loyalty earned him back a few points in Raisa’s book.

“Thank you,” Kilkenny said, holding out his hand. Pierce took it, and they locked eyes, years of experience passing between them.

She thought about what Kilkenny had said about Shay and her siblings. They’d been through war together. Hadn’t Pierce and Kilkenny weathered the same? Didn’t that create a bond that would last forever?

What would it take for that bond to be broken?

Pierce coughed, perhaps to cover up the fact that the big, tough men had been experiencing emotions , and dug into his pocket for his keys. “What’s your plan?”

Raisa desperately wanted her hands on all Conrad’s messages to Kilkenny, wanted to see the codes and the tattoos on the victims’ arms. She was here to support Kilkenny, but the best way to do that was to analyze writing samples. “I need to see the letters.”

“I’ll call down to the evidence room. You’ll just have to show your ID, but they’ll have everything ready for you,” Pierce said, jerking his chin back toward the field office. He turned to Kilkenny. “What about you?”

Kilkenny sighed and ran a hand through his hair, mussing it in a way she knew he would hate at any other time. “Beau.”

Pierce grimaced at him. “Good luck.”

Raisa lingered even as Pierce took off toward the office to wrangle Kate Tashibi into compliance.

“Why Beau?”

“If Conrad knew Shay, Beau might have as well,” Kilkenny said.

“Do you need backup?”

Kilkenny shook his head. “You’re right—you should analyze the writing. We really dropped the ball there.”

“You could take someone else,” she said.

“No, I can handle Beau,” Kilkenny said, sounding confident enough that she stopped pushing. This was his former brother-in-law, after all.

“Will he talk to you?”

“Probably not,” Kilkenny said with a sigh. “But I’ve got to try.”

“Do you really think he might have something to do with Shay’s death?” Raisa asked. He’d said the siblings had been tight. He’d described Beau as both an old soul and reliable. A bit of a bastard, too, but he’d said that part with fondness.

Kilkenny’s mouth did something complicated, like he wanted to say no but couldn’t. “I don’t know why he would have lied about knowing Conrad.”

Raisa pressed her lips together. Neither of them needed her to state the obvious.

“I’d always thought there was no way Beau could have tortured her, no way he could have tattooed her,” he continued. “But ...”

“If he was Conrad’s accomplice, he wouldn’t have had to. Maybe he simply killed her, and left the rest to Conrad,” she said. “Did Conrad ever strike you as the type to have an accomplice?”

“Never. He was a loner.”

“Okay, so maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree with Beau,” Raisa said.

Kilkenny sighed. “I hate that I have to think either of her siblings had anything to do with her death. Those three ... Family was everything for them. The be-all, end-all.”

Isabel had been the same way. She was obsessed to a fault with both Delaney and Raisa. They were her sisters, and that meant every other consideration went out the window.

Raisa had never experienced that emotion from her own end. For her, family was a destructive, terrible thing that led to death and grief and despair. She hated the way those ties that bound them together could be so easily used as puppet strings, as a noose, as handcuffs.

But in the right light, it could probably be appealing. That kind of devotion, unwavering and unconditional.

“We both know how rancid that kind of thing can turn, though,” Raisa pointed out. Isabel could be exhibit A, Delaney exhibit B, and everyone they’d dealt with in their careers at the FBI could fill in the rest of the alphabet.

For a moment she was back in those woods, Isabel’s gun pressed to her back.

Isabel would have killed both her and Delaney, even though she professed to love them. And with Delaney, it had probably been true.

“Yeah,” Kilkenny said. “I think it’s time we try to find Max.”