Page 37 of The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto #2)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Raisa

Now

Raisa tried to remember exactly what her old mentor had said about Pierce, but yesterday morning felt like a lifetime ago. It had been something about him using shady sources, she was pretty sure.

She tapped out a quick text to Matthew Nurse.

That tea you had on Pierce—was there anything more to it?

He responded quickly.

Like was he crooked?

Yeah.

The typing bubbles appeared, disappeared. Finally, a text came through.

I asked around about him as I was resurfacing that report that clears Kilkenny. Word on the street is that he’s got a good moral compass, but he’s an ends justify the means kind of dude ... even with his eyes on the top spot, he still bends the rules. One person said they wouldn’t put it past him to plant evidence, but only if he a hundred percent knew it was the guy.

Raisa exhaled. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t at least hinted at in their first conversation, but it was interesting to have it confirmed.

Zero rumors about him on the take?

Unanimously said he was a good dude with questionable tactics.

Raisa wasn’t sure those two things could exist together, but she sent a thumbs-up emoji and a thanks.

Then she moved on to her next call.

Delaney picked up the phone once again on the first ring. “What do you need?”

It should have come off as abrupt, but instead Raisa could tell Delaney was just being succinctly helpful.

“Did you ever do any research into Xander Pierce?” Raisa asked.

“Hmm, no, not really,” Delaney said, sounding regretful that she hadn’t thought twenty steps ahead of Raisa. “Maybe the basics, but no deep dives.”

“Okay,” Raisa said. She couldn’t expect Delaney to know everything, even if she wanted her to.

“You think he’s your second killer?” Delaney didn’t wait for an answer. “Vigilante.”

“Right,” Raisa said. She didn’t want to give up too much, but was that really revealing anything?

“All those deaths I found, those people fit the profile of the Alphabet Man. So our second author might have been targeting people he thought was the serial killer,” Delaney said, mostly talking to herself, it seemed. She certainly didn’t need the logic confirmed. She was good at that. “Did something happen?”

He gave me a weird feeling, Raisa thought, but didn’t say.

“I asked him about Shay and he got tense,” she offered, even though that wasn’t much better. “Not in a way I’ve seen before, either. He thought I figured something out that I didn’t. It’s probably nothing.”

And with that, she remembered the real reason she’d called Delaney. She relayed everything that she’d found with the double code, and asked if Delaney could figure out a way to decrypt the rest faster.

“Of course. Send me what I need,” she said.

Her phone buzzed in her hand, a message from Kilkenny.

Conrad here in less than ten.

“Gotta go,” she told Delaney, and hung up without waiting for a response. Delaney would understand. Then she quickly fired off the email she’d already prepared with the codes and took off at a quick walk-trot through the hallways.

She beat Conrad by two minutes—enough time not to look out of breath when he came in but not enough to fill Kilkenny in on everything.

“A meeting with the feds,” Conrad said, as he was locked to the table. “What a way to start my last day on Earth.”

“You wanted me here,” Kilkenny said softly.

“I did,” Conrad agreed. “I wanted you to see my final show.”

My final show. Something about the wording of that struck Raisa as strange. Perhaps it was the use of my . As if he were putting on his own execution.

“You don’t care about Kilkenny, though,” Raisa said, just hoping to throw him off enough to get some kind of reaction out of him. “Your letters weren’t even meant for him.”

Conrad’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, you are a clever one. No one else figured that out. Not even your sister.”

“You were talking to your ... partner?” Raisa tried. She didn’t think that would be how he would describe the relationship, but she thought she might get more out of him if she let him correct her.

He scoffed and looked away. “I take it all back. Not clever at all. No, that was not my partner. That was ...”

Conrad broke off, shook his head once, and inhaled like he was gathering his own control.

“That was someone who thought they could stop me,” he finally said.

“You didn’t know who it was?” Raisa asked.

“I did and I still do,” Conrad said, grinning. That dark space where his canine should be winked at her. “But, like I said before, I have no interest in doing your job for you, though.”

“You say it was someone who thought they could stop you,” Kilkenny said in that tone of voice she’d learned to pay attention to. Serious, thoughtful. Leading.

Conrad narrowed his eyes as if trying to decode the sentence. “That’s what I said, yes. A-plus comprehension, Agent Kilkenny. You could have used a little bit more of that in the five years it took you to catch me.”

“Who thought ,” Kilkenny repeated, completely ignoring Conrad’s little gibe.

Again, Conrad missed a beat while searching for a trap. Finally, hesitantly, he said, “Yes.”

“They didn’t just think they could stop you,” Kilkenny said, devastatingly calm. “They did.”

Conrad’s nostrils flared. “You’re wrong, though that’s not surprising given your track record. They had nothing to do with it. That was my own sloppy mistake.”

That had to be a lie. The second author had deliberately used an old code, which was what had led to Conrad’s eventual downfall. The motive for why they had done so might still be up for debate, but the fact that it had happened wasn’t. At least in Raisa’s mind. So why would Conrad—a noted perfectionist who liked to think himself superior to everyone in every room—not set the record straight there?

Kilkenny seemed surprised as well.

“You would rather say that, after five years of perfectly getting away with more than two dozen murders, you made an error instead of admitting that someone else turned you in?” Kilkenny asked, though it wasn’t a question. It was, perhaps, a revelation.

“My final girl, the one that got away. She died five years ago, you know,” Conrad said, back to being silky smooth. Like he’d regained the upper hand, but even Raisa, who felt a step behind, could see that he hadn’t. “A car crash. How pedestrian.”

He grinned again at his own wordplay, while Kilkenny tensed. Raisa fought off her own grimace. How terrible, to have just barely sidestepped a serial killer only to die a few years later from something so ordinary. Fate was a funny thing. If she were the type, she’d say it had corrected itself.

She wasn’t that type.

“Why would you rather us think it’s a mistake?” Kilkenny asked, a dog with a bone now, refusing to be put off by Conrad’s tactics. “You want to set the record straight about Shay. Even though you could have died knowing, I would always wonder. Wouldn’t that have been sweeter torture?”

“I don’t care about you,” Conrad finally said. “You are not interesting to me, and you’ve served your purpose. Isabel Parker had a price for her silence about my secrets, and that was that Ms. Tashibi drop her news at a particular time. Ms. Parker cares more about you than I ever did or will.”

That was probably more of a lie than he would ever admit—Conrad had just admitted that he wanted Kilkenny to see his final show. There might be some truth to it as well, though, and it did drive home the fact that the narratives built up around the case didn’t seem much rooted in fact.

She tried to forget everything she’d thought before and look at the facts.

Better luck next time.

The cat and mouse game had never been between Kilkenny and Conrad. It had been between their two killers.

And if this was a game, their second author had effectively won. They’d made sure Conrad was caught. Him sitting in prison, so diminished, hours away from death, was a victory they could claim.

So why was Conrad—who’d presumably orchestrated an entire documentary to make sure his name was remembered long after he died, who’d figured out a way to gain control of the timing of the reveal of his biggest secret—letting the other person win?

The only answer was ... that he wasn’t.

If he wanted the person caught, all he had to do was give Kilkenny the name. He knew it, of course; that much was obvious. And he wasn’t holding it back just because he didn’t want to do their jobs for them.

He could win, or at least make sure it was a draw.

Both cat and mouse dead.

My final show.

He liked language, plays on words.

My final show. Like the documentary. Created by Kate Tashibi. She was a part of whatever he had planned.

“That was someone who thought they could stop me,” Conrad had said. Who thought. Past tense.

Raisa stood, her chair dragging against linoleum with a terrible screech.

She pounded on the door, and the guard popped his head in.

“Where was Conrad before he was brought to us?” Raisa asked.

Kilkenny stood, too, now hovering at her shoulder, backing her up even though he didn’t know what was going on.

“He was in the special visitation room,” the guard said. “Inmates are allowed to receive guests there on execution day at any time.”

“Please call and find out if Ms. Tashibi has an appointment with Nathaniel Conrad scheduled for tomorrow,” Pierce had said.

“You don’t have to make that poor woman go through all that work just to make your point. Okay, you’re right. I have an appointment with Mr. Conrad in the afternoon.”

Kate had wanted to make sure she got to Conrad first. Her appointment had been in the morning, and she hadn’t wanted to risk them finding that out. So she’d admitted to a half lie to make it seem like she was telling the whole truth.

Whatever Kate and Conrad had planned together depended on Kate getting a head start on Raisa and Kilkenny.

“Who was he visiting?” Raisa asked, just so she could have it confirmed.

The guard held up a finger and pulled out his walkie-talkie.

“He met with Katherine Tashibi,” he said after a quick consultation. “For twenty minutes before he came here.”

Raisa pressed her lips together.

The only way to win was for the impostor to die sometime before Conrad.