Page 24 of The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto #2)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Shay

October 2010

Three and a half years before the kidnapping

Shay hated lying to Beau, but she knew he wasn’t going to approve of what she was about to do.

He would defend Max with his dying breath, even if their sister were the one holding the knife. Shay loved Max, but that didn’t stop her from being worried about her. In fact, it just made her worry more.

She’d mostly talked herself out of thinking the serial-killer box meant anything but natural curiosity. But Max’s blank You shouldn’t ask questions you don’t want an answer to still sent shivers along Shay’s skin.

Max had been distant ever since, but Shay wasn’t shocked by that turn of events.

“Shay?”

Dr. Tori Greene’s voice broke her out of her doom-spiraling.

“I’m sorry, did we have an appointment scheduled?” Tori asked, looking between Shay and her secretary, who was, of course, sanctimoniously shaking her head.

“No, I’m the one who should apologize,” Shay said, standing. “I was actually hoping I could chat with you real quick. Maybe off the record.”

That got a small smile. “I’m not a journalist.”

But then she gestured toward her office before turning back to her secretary. “We’re done for the day, Chrissy.”

Shay had been in the inner sanctum before, but never as anything other than Max’s guardian. It felt different taking the comfortable—but not too comfortable—seat across from Tori.

It felt vulnerable.

Tori grabbed one of her notebooks, but kept it closed on the arm of her chair as she studied Shay. “I can’t tell you what Max and I discuss in our sessions, if that’s why you’re here.”

“No, no.” Shay rubbed sweaty palms against her jeans. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come, but ...”

Like any good psychiatrist, Tori seemed to know how to wait out the awkward silences.

“I’m worried Max is a danger to herself or others.” Shay had been told plenty of times in the past that saying those words would erase a lot of boundaries when it came to mental health privacy. The thing that made it palatable was that Shay really believed it.

Surprise flickered into Tori’s expression, but she skillfully ironed it into blank curiosity. “Did something in particular happen?”

Shay took a breath and spilled out a somewhat disjointed retelling of the serial-killer-box day.

When she petered out to a stop, Tori was hungrily eyeing her notebook like she was dying to write out how crazy she thought Shay was being. But she refrained.

“I see. And the articles are the only reason you’re worried about her hurting herself?” Tori paused delicately. “Or others?”

Because they both knew what Shay was saying, why she was here. She didn’t think Max was suicidal or considering self-harm. She was worried about the second part.

“Her history, too,” Shay said, cautiously. “And what she said after I found the box. How I shouldn’t ask questions because I might not like the answer.”

Tori inhaled, exhaled, and shifted to stare out the large window. The golden light poured into the room, making it cozy without being overly warm.

“There’s a wine bar a couple storefronts over,” Tori said, and Shay had to take a second to make sure she heard her right.

“Okay.”

“I could use a glass, how about you?” Tori asked, eyebrows raised, clearly communicating something.

Shay could pretty much always use a glass of wine. “Okay.”

Ten minutes later they were seated at a back table in a room with dark mood lighting and soft jazz music. The wine was expensive, and so was the cheese board Tori ordered without blinking at the price. All of it was delicious.

It was then that Shay realized she didn’t have any female friends. No one to call when she wanted to hit up a fancy happy hour. All she had were the regulars at the bar, Callum Kilkenny, sometimes, and her family. How pathetic was that?

“Listen, I can’t talk specifics with you,” Tori said after their waiter left. “Hypothetically, though, what you told me doesn’t worry me. I would expect a girl, a teenager, even a young woman, to show interest in a criminal that’s known to be in the vicinity.” She held up a finger to stave off whatever follow-up Shay had. “And I think anything that happened after you found a box like that might be that person trying to unnerve you.”

“Why would she try to unnerve me?” Shay asked, not wanting to play along with hypotheticals.

“To punish you,” Tori said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Perhaps it was.

Shay slumped back, the relief a palpable thing on her tongue right beneath the smooth cabernet. “Thank you.”

Tori sighed. “I probably shouldn’t have given you that much, but I do believe you’re worried for no reason. If I thought anyone in my care was capable of harm, I would be obligated to report it.”

“I know,” Shay said. “Logically, I knew that.”

“We’re all a bit shaken up around here,” Tori said. Her insanely beautiful hair was braided back today, but the tail end hung over her shoulder and she toyed with it. “I’ve started carrying bear spray.”

That startled a laugh out of Shay.

“Hey, don’t mock it,” Tori said, with a smile. “That can take down a six-hundred-pound grizzly. I’d like to see a serial killer escape that.”

Shay giggled and then glanced around. There were mostly women in the crowded little wine bar, and she wondered how many of them were having this exact discussion. How many of them had been having this discussion for their whole lives? If it wasn’t the Alphabet Man, it was the rapist next door or the frat guy who couldn’t hear no. Violence was a part of their daily lives—the Alphabet Man was just bringing it to the forefront.

“I feel like I’m burying my head in the sand,” Shay admitted, like it was a shameful secret. “I am definitely not of the collecting-articles mentality.”

Tori tilted her head in that way every psychologist Shay had ever met did when they found something you said interesting but didn’t want to come off as diagnosing you. “Why do you think that is?”

“Noooo,” Shay said on a laugh, tossing a peanut lightly in Tori’s direction. “You’re off the clock.”

“Oh my god, sorry.” Tori buried her face in her hands and shook her head. “I can’t believe I just said that.”

“I’ll give you one—and only one—of those,” Shay said, and then actually thought about the question. Because maybe it was interesting. “I don’t know. Doesn’t it feel like a slippery slope sometimes? Like you start paying attention to some of, and then all of, the articles. And then you get paranoid. You start triple-checking your locks every night. The next thing you know, you’re carrying a gun or Mace.”

“And that’s bad because . . . ?” Tori prodded.

“It gives us a false sense of security.” Shay shrugged. “It’s probably a best-practice-type thing, but for me, I don’t think that’s actually going to stop a serial killer from taking me if he wants to.”

Tori made a considering sound. “You’re more alert because you don’t have a weapon.”

“Yeah. But I guess I should just get a weapon and be alert,” Shay said with a wry smile. “And pay attention to his hunting grounds and all that jazz. It just seems like it won’t do me any good.”

“And his hunting ground is widespread,” Tori pointed out. “Hard to just avoid the entire multicounty area.”

“Right,” Shay said, getting into it now. “And the task force talks a big talk but doesn’t really seem to understand anything about the man or his choice in victims.”

Shay made a silent apology to Callum, who probably did know more than she realized. Still, from the snatches of conversations and news reports Shay picked up at the bar, it didn’t seem like they had a firm grasp on anything.

Tori’s eyebrows went up. “It is strange that he doesn’t seem to have a victimology that’s easy to profile. I would imagine that makes him hard to pin down.”

“Have you tried?” Shay asked, leaning in. “I would imagine you have a little bit more insight than the average person.”

Tori blushed a little and looked away. “If I were the task force, I’d hate armchair psychiatrists coming in and trying to out-Sherlock me.”

“But I’m not the task force,” Shay said, a slightly distorted echo of Tori’s earlier words.

“Ahhh, okay,” Tori said, like she’d wanted to be talked into it, but still wanted to put up a token protest. “Okay. I don’t think he’s underemployed like most serial killers. I think he works in a fairly respectable position, where he would need to stay groomed and approachable.”

“Oh, how can you tell that?”

“The fact that there isn’t much sign of struggle at the scene,” Tori said. “He’s articulate, maybe even personable. He hides his psychopathy extraordinarily well in the short term. But he won’t have long-term friends or relationships. He can’t maintain them.”

Shay didn’t wince, but that did cut kind of close to what she’d just been thinking about her own life.

“He experienced some kind of major trauma as a child,” Tori said. “Either extensive sexual and physical abuse, or something that completely rocked his world. But in a violent manner.”

Like Max, Shay thought but didn’t say.

Tori continued on for a good twenty minutes, laying out a psychological profile for their local serial killer. Shay ordered another glass of wine halfway through, enjoying the perspective. But a lot of what Tori was saying seemed to be things she could pick up on those popular FBI and cop shows. When she alluded to that fact, Tori made that same considering sound.

“I think looking from the outside in, abnormal psychology can seem chaotic, or at least how it presents looks chaotic,” Tori said. “But there are familiar beats to it, like anything else. If a child is abusing an animal, that’s not necessarily diagnosable by itself; setting fires, the same thing. The behaviors start to add up, and when they do, so do the similarities to violent offenders.”

Her vowels were a little loose, a little twangy now. She’d had four glasses to Shay’s two.

“I’m just glad the field is moving away from its obsession with mothers,” Tori said, rolling her eyes. “There was a time there when the mother got blamed for everything.”

“Shocker,” Shay said dryly, and Tori laughed in agreement. “What are you seeing more of now?”

“The father,” Tori said. She lifted her glass in a toast. “Parity.”

Shay tapped her own against it. “For once.”

“There’s a theory about war veterans coming home without mental health treatment,” Tori said more seriously. “They beat their kids because they had extreme PTSD, and then those kids go on to become serial killers.”

“Do you think that’s our guy?”

It was strange how both of them had started referring to the Alphabet Man as theirs . She’d noticed that at the bar, too, when her regulars spoke about him.

What a claim to make.

“I don’t know,” Tori admitted, her smile as loose as her vowels. “Can I ask you something I shouldn’t?”

Shay leaned forward. “Always.”

“What were you really worried about, with Max’s box? It’s not as if she’s the Alphabet Man.”

“You said there were patterns of behavior that could add up,” Shay said. “Hypothetically, don’t a bigger majority of the kids you see go on to get into criminal activity than the ones you don’t see?”

Tori squinted at her. “Oh, I need either more or less wine to be able to follow that.”

Shay huffed out a breath. “You can’t stop serial killers from becoming serial killers, right? Once they’re on a certain path.”

“Now that’s a fascinating question,” Tori said. “To my knowledge, no one has ever really been able to pinpoint the moment in someone’s life that sets them on an irreversible course. Is it the second they actually decide to kill someone? Is it when they put a tarp in the trunk of the car just in case? Or is it a moment when they were a child and they were hit, or burned with a cigarette, or locked in a tiny cupboard for seventy-two hours by an abusive family member?”

“Exactly,” Shay said, and it reminded her of the quote she’d found comfort in: One swallow does not a summer make. Only in this case, those swallows turned into a pack of murderous Hitchcockian birds. “So, if you see one of those moments, in real time, wouldn’t you try to intervene? Even if there was no current and present danger?”

“But what if you push it the wrong way?” Tori asked. “What if you create the very serial killer you were trying to prevent?”

“You know,” Shay said, as she waved down the waiter to order another glass of wine, “that would be exactly my luck.”