Page 22 of The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto #2)

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.

Each individual letter had its own evidence bag. And then attached to it was a decoded version of the message it contained.

She carefully handled the very first letter through the bag—modern-day paper was fragile and prone to tears. Although she couldn’t actually read the message, it was impressive in length. Encoding something with an Alberti Cipher wasn’t the most difficult thing in the world, but the ones she’d seen before tended to keep the contents limited to what was necessary.

The Alphabet Man—Conrad—had written an entire page.

She set it aside in favor of the decoded version. Attached to that with a paper clip was a photograph of the cipher tattooed on the first victim’s arm. Raisa easily parsed through the first word.

Salutations.

Those grandiose greetings were a hallmark. Maybe that wouldn’t hold up in court, but she’d found it on every one she’d analyzed. Except for the ones from those four victims.

Raisa pulled up her spreadsheet and labeled the Conrad letter as A and the possible second author’s letter as B .

Her fingers worked almost independently as she created lists for both.

A

No positive or negative contractions (ex: I am and are not, instead of I’m and Aren’t. Because it would give away code?) Excessive use of similes (ex: the knife sunk in like butter, the blood droplets spattered on my hand like rain; you might think I am crazy, but I am crazy like a fox) Excessive use of self-referential pronouns (ex: I missed you at the bar last night; My intrepid Agent Kilkenny; why will you not answer me?) Idiom misuse: One in the same (correct: one and the same. See: letters 3, 6, and 9) Word misuse, eggcorn: feeble position instead of fetal position Double space after periods

B

Error: Dropped vowels before consonants in last syllable or a word (considerbly, entirly instead of considerably and entirely) Error, likely typo: of instead of off Only grammatical error: used hear instead of here Positive and negative contractions (ex: they’re and can’t) Simple salutation: (ex: dear Callum)

She went on until she had a good sense of both their voices. Her one asterisk that she would add to any report was that the two authors had been writing using the Alberti Cipher. Likely they’d composed the message and then encoded it, but the process might account for something such as a dropped letter from the word off . The same could be said about some of the punctuation.

Still, there was enough to tell that they were different writers, just as she’d thought during that first analysis.

Raisa did the same with the letters about the two male victims, and came to the same conclusion.

The second author hadn’t even tried to mimic Conrad’s idiolect. Raisa wondered if they’d dismissed the idea or if they just hadn’t thought about it at all. They had probably thought that writing in a specific code was enough to make their letters seem like they were from the same person.

And she had to admit it had worked.

So why these victims? Raisa found it hard to believe that they simply had a much slower copycat serial killer on their hands.

One of the Alphabet Man’s signatures was that he had such a short cooling-off period. If these four victims were excluded, he’d still killed twenty-three women over five years. That was nearly five a year for an extended period of time.

That last woman, the one who would have been the Alphabet Man’s next kill, hadn’t actually died. So that meant their second author—copycat or whatever they were—had killed three people over the span of four years. Shay and then the two male victims. The difference was profound.

The fact that the last letter was probably written by their second author meant that the person had likely saved the woman’s life and ended a five-year-long manhunt for an infamous serial killer in the process.

The implications of that were big enough to send her pulse skittering.

Calm down. Go through the process.

She shifted through the files until she found more information about the last letter. It was directed to Kilkenny—or, rather, Callum, a notable departure from Conrad’s letters—but it had been addressed to the FBI Houston field office.

The victim was Conrad’s, but the letter was from their second author. So had their second author intercepted Conrad’s letter, or had that person beaten Conrad to the punch?

And if it was the latter, how had their second author known who the victim would be?

Raisa sat back and the pieces of the case rearranged themselves in her mind, but all she came up with were more questions.

What the hell was going on here?

Her phone buzzed on the table. She jumped and then laughed at herself, her nerves frayed.

“Beau wasn’t at home,” Kilkenny said, once she answered. “Looks like he closed up house and left.”

Dear Callum. How many people called Kilkenny that?

His brother-in-law, surely. His sister-in-law.

His wife.

“Do you think that means anything?” Raisa asked.

“I don’t know,” Kilkenny said. “I thought for sure he’d attend the execution.”

“Avoiding you?” she offered.

“Maybe.” He paused. “And obviously I didn’t get Max’s address.”

Both of Shay’s siblings, siblings who by all accounts would do anything for each other, were missing. That seemed ... important. But she couldn’t figure out how to fit it into what they knew about the case.

Kilkenny made some guttural sound that she could easily translate as anger and frustration and helplessness made vocal. It built into a tidal wave, crashing over both of them.

She let him ride it out, here in the safety of an open line, with her as the only witness. It was the best-case scenario, and of course Kilkenny had retained enough composure to wait until now to lose it.

The emotions retreated nearly as quickly as they had come, and Kilkenny dropped silent before uttering, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be?” Raisa tried quietly. “I’ve been worried you’ve been holding it together too well.”

He laughed. “Well, I’ve gone ahead and disabused you of that notion.”

“Nah, that was nothing,” she said, her tone light. But she meant it. Isabel had thrown Raisa into such a tailspin, she’d barely been functioning. And here Kilkenny was taking thirty seconds to vent his frustration before pulling himself together again.

“Right,” he said, not sounding like he believed her. “Right. Tell me what you’ve got.”

“I don’t know yet,” Raisa hedged, not really lying. Her thoughts were scattered, and even if she tried to put them into words, she didn’t think she could.

“Do you need me?” he asked.

Raisa stared at the letters. Dear Callum.

What did that mean? Did it mean anything? Did it mean anything that their second author had essentially turned the Alphabet Man into the authorities?

She didn’t know, and Kilkenny didn’t need to hear her talking herself in circles.

“Not yet,” she said. “I’ll have an update soon, though, I swear.”

“You don’t report to me,” Kilkenny said, some amusement in his voice again. It made her shoulders relax to hear him closer to normal.

“Are you going to try to find Beau?” she asked.

“I have a BOLO out on him,” Kilkenny said. “But ... I don’t know. He’s used to hiding from authority. I’m not optimistic, and we have a ticking clock.”

There was some truth to the fact that innocent people didn’t run—but there were caveats, too. People like Beau, people who’d grown up looking over their shoulder for the next horrific thing to happen, ran as a default and then figured out the rest from whatever place they deemed safe.

“I’m going to get an update from Pierce,” Kilkenny continued. “See if he tracked down Kate Tashibi.”

Kate.

Raisa had all but forgotten the documentarian in the past hour. Where did she fit into this mess? Or was she just a bystander, capturing it all on film?

There were too many threads right now. They needed to start snipping some of them away. Hopefully, she’d been a little more cooperative with Pierce than she had been with Raisa.

The moment they disconnected, Raisa dismissed Kate Tashibi and Kilkenny and even Beau, and focused back on the letters, which was where she could actually be helpful.

Was this a partnership gone bad? That would explain how their second author knew so much about Conrad’s MO that he managed to dupe the task force.

But why had the second author written letters for only four people? If it was a partnership, it was a lopsided one.

Which ... could still make sense, even if Kilkenny had dismissed the idea. Serial-killer duos existed, and when they did, there was often a dominant personality and a submissive one.

She pulled the two male victims’ files closer. She’d been focused on Shay and the last woman. But these were data points as well.

The only two men out of the bunch.

In the original investigation, they had stood out and they hadn’t—mostly because the Alphabet Man’s female victims differed from each other so much in terms of age, race, and socioeconomic status. And so the men had looked like just another variation.

But out of the three actual victims they had connected to the second author, two of them were these men. That was notable.

So what was it about these two that had been special?

Raisa had thought a lot about puzzle pieces during their hunt for Isabel. When constructing a puzzle that was just a blue sky, all the pieces looked too similar to tell apart in the beginning. But as you filled in the corners, the edges, the obvious bits, and the gradations started to emerge, it became more and more obvious when two puzzle pieces were in the completely wrong spot.

Those pieces could be what made the rest finally make sense.

Jason Stahl. Tyler Marchand.

Raisa stared at the two male victims’ names and wondered if she’d finally found those pieces.