Page 30 of The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto #2)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Raisa

Now

The hotel sheets were scratchy against Raisa’s back. It was late, past midnight. Less than twenty-four hours until Conrad “rode the lightning,” as Kate Tashibi so eloquently put it—as wrong as she’d been about the method.

Raisa couldn’t sleep despite the fact that she also hadn’t slept the night before.

She considered breaking into the minibar to try to numb her brain into complacency, but instead she swung her legs over the bed. She stared into the darkness for a moment, then headed for the door in her sleep shirt, shorts, and bare feet.

Kilkenny was exhausted. She would feel incredibly guilty if she woke him up, but she promised herself she would knock softly. He opened his own door three seconds after her knuckles touched wood.

He still wore his dress pants and button-down but had shed his jacket and tie, at least. His hair was ruffled, like he’d run his fingers through it too many times.

They’d spent most of their evening focused on the footage Kate had turned over, zeroing in on any mentions of Dallas, or Conrad’s early victims.

There was just too much for any one thing to stand out. Pierce had recruited a couple of young agents to keep at it through the night, but Kate had effectively rendered her evidence useless.

If so much weren’t riding on this, Raisa would have admired her grit.

Kilkenny didn’t say anything in greeting, just stepped back to let her inside. By some unspoken agreement, they moved to the tiny balcony—a little luxury Raisa enjoyed whenever she was in warmer climates.

She curled her legs up onto the plastic chair as Kilkenny handed her a beer and then took his own seat.

“Do you own pajamas?” she asked.

Kilkenny laughed, probably in surprise more than anything. “HR wouldn’t approve of this conversation, but I sleep naked.”

“You cannot tell me you lounge around in that,” Raisa said, waving toward his suit. She was the type to strip out of anything confining before her front door swung fully shut. Kilkenny had always come across as perfectly poised and polished, but she’d imagined that when he went home, he unbent enough to put on comfy sweatpants and ratty T-shirts. This new image was just too sad to bear.

“I have been known to don the garments of the peasants on the odd occasion,” Kilkenny said, the corners of his mouth twitching. Raisa laughed fully for what felt like the first time in twenty-four hours.

They settled into comfortable silence, and she took a swallow of her beer as she stared out at the city lights. “Would you have been happy living here?”

“I would have been happy anywhere Shay was.”

Two days ago, Raisa might have believed that completely. Now, because she was just so tired, she asked, “Do you ever think you buy into the mythology?”

“Of me and Shay?” Kilkenny asked, following along as usual. “Sure, of course. It’s easy to love a ghost. They never change. All their faults fade, while everything you adored about them stays.”

“Maybe not easy,” Raisa allowed. “But less complicated.”

“We weren’t perfect,” Kilkenny said. “I never said we were, though. I let everyone else fill in their own blanks.”

That much was true. This was the most she’d ever heard him talk about Shay.

“It was hard, us, our relationship,” he continued. “I was away so much, and she was so isolated. And sad, toward the end. Something would have broken—but not us.”

“You have such faith,” Raisa said, not doubting, but envious, maybe. She wasn’t sure she’d ever believed in the strength of any relationship—romantic or platonic—to that extent. To know that no matter what, it wouldn’t break.

Kilkenny lifted a shoulder, as if having that kind of faith were easy. As if it were a given.

“Do you know what was the hardest part?” he asked, and continued without waiting for an answer. He seemed to want to talk tonight, and she was game. “Not being able to share anything. That created more space between us than the distance itself.”

There were plenty of jobs out there that were either sensitive or boring enough that a spouse might not be able to or even want to share details about. But the work they did was taxing. It was seeing the worst of the world and then having to keep that locked up inside. Raisa knew that Kilkenny wasn’t thinking about sharing details like what color ink the Alphabet Man used, but not being able to talk about having to see those tattoos and think about the man who pressed a needle into dying flesh was difficult.

“Is it strange when people talk about your relationship?” Raisa asked, almost shocked by her own boldness. But it was past midnight, and her tongue had been loosened by a number of factors. And Kilkenny was a big boy as well as a master at dodging questions he didn’t want to answer. If he wanted to end the conversation, he would.

“Yes,” Kilkenny admitted. “Like you said, it’s become myth now. She’s been deified, and, honestly? Shay would have hated how they’ve made her into this perfect person. She was just ... she was just a woman. A flawed and funny and hot and smart and stubborn woman. And that’s reason enough to mourn the loss to the world. She didn’t have to be perfect to be missed.”

It was strange how people only liked certain types of victims. Good, pure, honest—white and blonde. Otherwise they deserved to die for one reason or another. They wore too short a skirt, or they drank too much at a strange location, or they ran when they should have complied.

Shay was one of those perfect victims. A pretty body that became a blank slate to be written on. Over.

“I never get to talk about her,” Kilkenny said softly.

“You can now,” Raisa offered.

Kilkenny huffed out a breath. “I’m too rusty.”

“I can wait.”

“It might be a while,” Kilkenny said. “Maybe not tonight.”

“I can wait,” Raisa repeated.

They sat in silence for a while before Kilkenny shifted toward her, his eyes clear and sharp now. She braced herself.

“You’re keeping something from me.”

He was probably right, but Raisa couldn’t for the life of her remember what it was. “What?”

“I don’t know how I know with you,” Kilkenny admitted. “We haven’t worked together enough for me to tell. But you’re keeping something from me.”

She squinted at him for a minute before it hit her, and she almost laughed. “Oh, Jesus. Right. I brought Delaney in on all this.”

“Delaney,” Kilkenny said, his voice completely neutral, not judgmental at all. He felt fonder toward Delaney than Raisa did, though. Or was at least more understanding.

“If we have a second killer, which we both agree, yes we do?” Raisa asked, checking in. He nodded. “Then it’s weird that they only killed three times. Delaney’s looking for patterns.”

“Patterns and logic,” Kilkenny murmured, like it was an inside joke. “You trust her?”

“Enough.”

“You weren’t doing well with it,” Kilkenny pointed out. “Everything.”

That was a gentle understatement. Raisa thought back to what she’d been forced to tell Isabel.

Do you have nightmares about me?

Most nights.

She thought of the list Kilkenny had sent her of therapists who could help her work through the trauma of her entire life being upended. She hadn’t wanted to talk to any of them, but this wasn’t Kilkenny the psychologist asking.

This was Kilkenny the friend.

And turnabout was fair play. She’d just spent a half hour pressing on his bruises; she couldn’t balk when he did the same back.

Raisa said, “Yeah, well, when your sister turns out to be a psychopath serial killer, and your other sister turns out to be someone who aids and abets said serial killer ... well, you have to start to wonder about yourself.”

“Do you come down on the nature side of psychology?” Kilkenny asked. “Your life didn’t shape you at all, or not enough to win out against blood?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know,” Raisa said. She didn’t want to think she was someone who believed there were those who were born to be serial killers. Or born to be evil. But ... maybe she was. “It’s terrifying, though. Looking at the sliding-door image of yourself, of what you could have become under different circumstances. To know that’s within you, only a traumatic life event from being unlocked. And it wasn’t just my sisters—from what it sounds like, my brother wasn’t exactly proving the theory wrong, either.”

Her brother hadn’t been the one to kill their parents, like everyone had thought for twenty-five years, but in his short sixteen years, he’d left other kinds of victims behind.

“But none of them are sliding-door images of you,” Kilkenny pointed out. “They’re their own people.”

Raisa nodded not because she believed it but because she wanted him to think she did. “When do you think it happens? That point of no return? What age was it that Isabel and Delaney and Alex became what they were going to become? What moment?”

Kilkenny shook his head. “If we knew that ...”

“Right. We might not be here today, talking about Nathaniel Conrad,” Raisa said. “Do you think he would have turned out any differently if his father hadn’t poisoned his whole family?”

“No,” Kilkenny said. “I think he’s wired to be evil and nothing could have stopped him.”

That was not the Kilkenny she knew. He was an optimist. He believed in the good in people, even when he saw the monstrous in them day in and day out. “Nothing?”

“No, I’m being a dick,” Kilkenny admitted. “We’re learning more every day. You know they’ve found a link between head trauma, psychological stressors at a young age, and serial killers? Maybe that means intervention is possible.” He paused. “I have to believe it’s possible.”

“It would be pretty grim if it wasn’t,” Raisa said. She herself had often wondered about budding psychopaths. If you could identify them, how did you protect both them and the world from themselves? If they hadn’t done anything yet, you couldn’t just lock them up. And yet, could you live with letting them roam free until they killed? “And, hey. Maybe my parents dropped the three older children on their heads, but learned their lesson when it came to me.”

“That’s the way to look at it,” he said, holding his beer bottle out to her so they could clink necks.

“You seem ... ‘better’ isn’t the right word,” Kilkenny observed. “But something like that. This case has been good for you. To get back in the field.”

He was right. Raisa felt more settled in her skin than she had in months, tired and brain-hazy as she was. It helped to move forward. The past three months she’d been stuck in that clearing, Isabel’s gun pressed to her spine. The memory had kept her paralyzed. “‘Better’ is the right word. I needed a reminder that monsters can be beat.”

“Yeah.”

“And your monster is about to be yeeted out of this universe,” Raisa said.

“Yeeted,” Kilkenny repeated. And then he lost it. Absolutely lost it. Full-on bellyache laughs, then giggles, back to bellyaches until he finally tapered into erratic hiccups of amusement.

“Wow. That was ... that was glorious,” Raisa observed as Kilkenny wiped at the corners of his eyes.

“Jesus,” Kilkenny muttered. “Yeeted. That’s terrible.”

“Maybe, but no less true,” Raisa pointed out. “Are you going to see him tomorrow?”

“Of course,” he said without hesitation.

“What are you going to ask him?”

Kilkenny opened his mouth, closed it. “Something.”

Raisa cackled. “Brilliant. Practically Sherlockian.”

“Shut up,” Kilkenny said, completely out of character and endearing. “Honestly, though? I don’t know. When we were chasing him, I had a million questions I knew I’d ask if I ever got to face him down. But now, I’m so uninterested in anything he has to say. He killed those girls because his brain is wired wrong. We’re killing him because that’s how we’ve figured out how to deal with people like that.”

He shrugged. “And I’ll continue to try to keep the cycle going.”

“Hey,” Raisa said, because she didn’t want him to go grim about the mouth again just yet. “Tell me something about Shay that no one else knew.”

“She loved being a bartender,” Kilkenny said, without hesitation. “Everyone thought she was just doing it to make a wage, I guess. But, God, she loved talking to people. About things that interested them. That was her favorite thing—to really get someone going about something they loved. No matter how trivial or foolish it might seem to anyone else. All you had to do to see someone at their most beautiful was to ask them a question. That was her philosophy.”

“What did she ask you about?” Raisa realized after the words had already tumbled out that it might have been mean. Kilkenny had interests, she was sure. Most people didn’t know about them; she didn’t know about them. That didn’t mean they didn’t exist.

“Wine,” Kilkenny said. “I’m a big wino.”

“You are not,” Raisa said, but she didn’t push for a real answer. There was one, she was sure. But it was private. Raisa wouldn’t intrude where only ghosts dared tread.

“Have you ever loved someone like that?” Kilkenny asked.

“No.” She would have danced around it with someone else. But here, wrapped in the protective bubble of night, she was truthful. “There was grad school and before that college and before that, you know, surviving. There’s always an excuse, always a reason to be too busy.”

“But?” he asked, because he was a psychologist before he was anything else.

“It’s always an excuse, isn’t it?” Raisa said, with a shrug. “I don’t want to be hurt anymore. So I make sure I won’t be.”

“Mmm. Sometimes I worry,” Kilkenny said.

“About what?” Raisa asked, hoping the answer wasn’t about her.

“That I can’t ever be hurt again.”