Page 29 of The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto #2)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Shay

December 2013

Four months before the kidnapping

The doorbell rang.

Shay looked around Kilkenny’s condo—she still thought of it as his instead of theirs—as if someone else would be there to answer.

She didn’t have friends in Seattle, didn’t even have acquaintances. She certainly didn’t know anyone who would drop by unannounced.

A delivery, her foggy brain supplied. It had been six months since they’d lost the baby, and she still felt a step behind in her thinking.

Of course—it was a delivery.

Pulling her cardigan tight to hide her stained T-shirt and lack of bra, she shuffled to the door and opened it without bothering to look through the peephole. In the back of her head, she heard Kilkenny scolding her for lax security, especially when he was being targeted by a serial killer.

But she couldn’t really make herself give a damn.

Instead of a deliveryman, though, she got a dripping-wet Max.

“What on earth,” Shay said, because all other thoughts escaped her at the moment. She hadn’t seen her sister since the early summer, at her courthouse wedding to Callum. It had been the longest they’d been apart since Max was born. But Shay hadn’t felt like traveling after her miscarriage, and that had happened only a week later. “How did you get here?”

“What a way to greet your sister,” Max said, teeth chattering. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

“Yes, yes, get in here,” Shay said, tugging her inside and positioning her on the welcome mat so that she wouldn’t slip on the floor from the puddle she made. “Hold on.”

Shay grabbed her fluffiest towel from the linen closet, threw a mug of water into the microwave, and then wrapped Max up, rubbing her arms in that way mothers did for little kids when they came out of the pool.

Through sheer muscle memory, Shay dug out tea bags, dropped a couple in the boiling water, and settled them onto the couch.

“What’s going on, babe?” Shay asked once the threat of hypothermia had passed.

“I took a bus,” Max said, answering the first question that had tumbled out of Shay’s mouth. “I slept in a bus station in ... Colorado? Maybe. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter.”

“I would have bought you a plane ticket,” Shay said.

“That would have been a whole thing.”

“And this isn’t?” Shay asked, trying to keep her voice as light as possible. Her fingers itched for her phone. Did Beau know where Max was?

“You know what, you’re right. This was a mistake,” Max said, shrugging off the blanket Shay had draped over her.

“No, no, no.” Shay grabbed her wrist, stopped her. Again, she asked, “What’s going on?”

Max hesitated, but then relented, reaching for her bag. “You can’t tell Callum about any of this.”

“Oh, Max,” Shay murmured, picturing the worst—another gun? That would explain why she hadn’t wanted to fly.

“How many times do I have to tell you I’m not a psycho?” Max muttered, but she was distracted, pulling files and articles from her bag. Once she had everything on the table, she began rearranging them. “You have to promise not to tell Callum, or I’ll leave.”

“All right,” Shay said, a little reluctantly. But what was she supposed to do? Just let Max walk out of here in the midst of some kind of emotional emergency?

“Okay,” Max said, as if the agreement weren’t monumental at all. And of course, it wasn’t to her. She’d known what Shay was going to say. “Remember the beach?”

When Shay had told Max about the baby she’d thought had been a new beginning. She swallowed back tears and managed a “Yeah.”

“When I asked if you thought I could hurt someone because I was interested in the Alphabet Man”—Max forged ahead—“you said yes.”

That jolted Shay enough to get hold of her emotions. “Hey, I didn’t say yes.”

“Close enough,” Max said, rolling her eyes. “You said, ‘I think you’re a survivor.’”

“Well, I do think you’re a survivor. It wasn’t just a dodge,” Shay said, a little huffy at being read so easily.

Max laughed. “It’s fine, dude. I get it. Anyway, I was kind of asking because of a reason.”

Shay tensed. “Okay.”

“I’m not having violent fantasies or anything like that. Unclench,” Max said. “I wondered if you could believe I was violent on such little evidence. It kind of ... validated a theory I had.”

“A theory?”

“Stay with me,” Max said. “You’re going to want to argue, but just wait for it, okay?”

Shay didn’t know if she could actually promise that, but she nodded.

“You know how I’ve read every article printed on the Alphabet Man case?” Shay just stared at her, until Max rolled her eyes. “It was a rhetorical question. You used to be quicker than this. Anyway, in addition to all those, I went to the library and found some people online who were discussing the case.”

“Max,” Shay couldn’t help but chide. “Stranger danger, babe.”

“I didn’t ever talk to them,” Max said. “I just, you know, lurked.”

“Still.” Shay had been born in the era where it had been drilled into their heads that every stranger on the internet could be a pervert, but it was different these days. The thought alone made her feel incredibly old.

“Oh my god, you’re so old,” Max said, both reading Shay’s mind and sounding her age. Shay had wanted nothing more than for Max to have her bratty teen years, and here they were. “Okay, okay. So between the articles and the lurking, I started seeing a recurring thing.”

“A thing?” Shay asked.

“Don’t sound so skeptical,” Max said, pulling out a map. There were purple x’s all over it. “These are the body drops for all the known victims.”

Shay couldn’t help herself, she leaned forward. She knew a lot of people loved digging around in serial killers’ brains, but Shay usually hated this stuff. It was why she’d been so panicky about that stupid goddamn gun years earlier. People might have looked down on her job at the bar, but she had gotten to chat with people, joke with people, make them happy and then go home and turn her mind off. She’d take that any day of the week over what Callum did.

And she would never do anything like this if she wasn’t being paid for it.

“They look pretty random, right?” Max said. She held up one of those pencil-metal things that every kid used in sixth-grade math. A compass. She stuck the point in the center of the map and then drew a circle using the tool.

Whatever radius she’d set it to was perfect, because it went through about 40 percent of the body drops. And while the line didn’t touch all the x’s, there were none inside the circle. “What?”

Max’s finger touched the small indent left behind by the pointy end of the compass.

Shay squinted. “The hospital?”

“At the very center,” Max said, as if she were saying something monumental.

“You really think he took a compass and measured out from, what, his home base?” Shay asked.

“No, but I think he made sure he didn’t come within a certain distance of anything that could be tied to him,” Max said, and then held up a finger. She put the compass down once more and drew a second circle. That picked up about another 30 percent of the body drops. Max tapped the two indents. “I think he lives somewhere around here, and works at the hospital.”

“That could be said of half of Houston,” Shay pointed out. She was exaggerating, of course. But the circles were large, especially if you took in the area covered by both of them.

“Not really,” Max said, calling her on the hyperbole. “You could say a lot of people who work at the hospital also live close to it.”

Shay randomly thought of Nathaniel Conrad. He’d said he lived only a few minutes away from their house. And while he might not work at the hospital exclusively, he was there enough to have been recognized by security that one time they’d gone in together. The thought itself was foolish, but it just went to show how many people could fall within the two circles.

“This isn’t exactly going to convince a jury,” Shay said. There had to be thousands upon thousands of employees. It wasn’t just hospital staff who used the campus. It was cafeteria workers, gift shop employees, janitorial staff, anyone with admitting rights.

“Right,” Max said. “That’s why I don’t think you can dismiss the Dallas victim.”

“The Dallas victim?” Shay asked. She should know all this stuff. She was sure she had at one point. But tuning out the details had kept her sane.

“The first woman, chronologically. She wasn’t found first,” Max clarified.

Something changed in Max’s demeanor, and Shay felt her own body tense in response. Whatever Max was going to say next was the reason she’d hopped on a bus and crossed half a country to see Shay. Some part of Shay knew it must be serious, and she fought the urge to slap her hand over Max’s mouth. Why couldn’t she just swallow back whatever words were about to change their lives?

Max licked her lips, suddenly looking so nervous and so young. “Sidney Stewart. Her body had deteriorated because of the elements and the time it took to find her. But they were able to give a seventy-two-hour time window for when she died.”

“Okay.”

“Shay,” Max said, her name so soft. “That window? Was only a week after Beau went up to Dallas to meet with that doctor. Remember that? To talk to that specialist who thought he might be able to help Billy.”

“No,” Shay said, though she must have known this was what Max was leading up to. She’d known and hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. “Beau is not the Alphabet Man.”

“You’ve heard him talk about his grandfather, right?” Max asked. “He was in the war—he taught Beau about ciphers and codes. And Beau used to always be obsessed with those puzzles in the paper.”

“Max, no, hon.” Shay was actually feeling calm about this. There was no way Beau was the Alphabet Man. “Lots of people like word puzzles. Lots of people have relatives who fought in the war.” She tried to remember the rest of the profile Callum had put together. “Lots of people look professional and are employed in positions that garner trust. That doesn’t mean they’re serial killers.”

“He was abused,” Max continued, her certainty growing stronger in the face of Shay’s denial. “He had major trauma in his childhood. That’s one of the hallmarks of Callum’s profile.”

“Again, as sad as that is, it covers a lot of people,” Shay said, trying desperately not to sound condescending. How many people had had these conversations with families over the past few years? Sending each other sideways glances as each new detail was delivered from the task force. That sounds like Uncle Bob. Or, You know, if you squint, our dad fits that mold. And then they would all laugh and call themselves crazy, and some tiny part of them would think, Well, maybe .

Someone had to be right. Someone had to recognize their loved one when enough information had been gathered about them.

This was like horoscopes, though. She respected Callum and what he did, but his profiles could always fit a large swath of people. It was a design feature, not a bug.

Shay took Max’s hands in her own and held tight as her sister tried to yank them back. She looked Max in the eyes and said, “I don’t think you’re crazy for thinking this. I just can’t believe Beau is a serial killer. And if you look inside yourself, if you actually think through all the implications, you’ll realize that, too. This isn’t a book or Unsolved Mysteries . This is our brother, who is caring and loving and kind and generous.” Shay drew in a breath but squeezed Max’s wrist to keep her silent. Where the emotional appeal might fail, the logical one might actually change her mind. “And beyond all that, he doesn’t have a basement to hold the girls in for three days. He’s not renting one, either. We barely ever had enough money to pay the electricity bill.”

Max stared down at their locked hands.

“Why did you get so worried about my serial-killer box?” Max finally asked.

That was one of the last questions Shay had been expecting. The surprise had her blinking at Max, a little dumb. “You know why.”

“I need you to say it.”

She didn’t want to. They hadn’t ever acknowledged the fact out loud, had only ever danced around it. But if Max could drop a bomb, so could Shay.

“Because you killed your father,” Shay finally said.

And Max? Max smiled. “I didn’t shoot him, Shay. Beau did.”