Page 41 of The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto #2)

CHAPTER THIRTY

Raisa

Now

Nature, nurture, or life-altering trauma.

“All the kids,” Raisa said softly. “All the kids we keep coming back to.”

“The one thing that bound them together,” Kilkenny said, easily following along. “Life-altering childhood trauma.”

Raisa clicked into the description for the book itself. “Dr. Harold Pall is the author. Does that name ring any bells?”

Kilkenny shook his head and then made a face after he pulled up the message the social workers’ office had sent over, the one that had the list of names of the people Conrad had met with on his interview day. “Not on here, either.”

“It could be a pen name,” Raisa said. “If they were trying to hide their identity, it would be easy to do. They didn’t have to pass any peer reviews to publish this.”

“But that doesn’t help us now,” Kilkenny pointed out, and Raisa sighed.

All their promising leads kept coming up blank, and Raisa was tired of it. Tired of it and also terrified for Kate, as abrasive as she might have been. Had she found their second killer yet? Was she still alive, or were they about to have yet another dead woman on their hands?

Her phone rang in her hand, and she nearly dropped it. A shaky laugh escaped as she answered. “What did you find?”

“I’ve got all the hidden messages,” Delaney said. “That was genius-level work on your part, but my computer is an even match for you.”

Raisa didn’t want the praise. “What do they say?”

“I’m going to email you the list,” Delaney said. “But there were some ones I found more interesting than others. Including in the letters that probably weren’t written by Conrad.”

“How do you know about those?” Raisa asked, immediately suspicious.

“I mean, how many times do I have to tell you I’m good with—”

“Logic and patterns, yeah, got it.” Raisa huffed out a breath. “So what did you find?”

“The first one: ‘You didn’t even remember me,’” Delaney said, her voice changing, like she was reading off a list. “In the first impostor letter: ‘You are my greatest success.’”

Raisa sucked in a breath.

“Those are the ones that are interesting, but I’ll send the rest,” Delaney said, sounding like she was going to hang up.

“Wait,” Raisa said. “What did the last letter say? The one where the second killer gave away the next victim?”

“‘The world needs to see what I’ve accomplished,’” Delaney said.

“Okay, thanks.” Raisa’s voice sounded distant to her own ears. She hung up and tossed the phone on the table before relaying the messages to Kilkenny.

“They take credit for him,” Kilkenny said, summing up the messages with succinct precision. “Our second killer thinks they created the Alphabet Man.”

Raisa thought about one of the lines from the Origin book.

Because even the best minds in the world still cannot pinpoint how a serial killer is created.

This wasn’t a vigilante trying to rid the world of the Alphabet Man. This had been someone who’d tried to create a serial killer out of traumatized kids. And they’d succeeded.

The person had identified a child who had potential, and they’d nurtured that violence.

“They must have known him as a kid, right?” Raisa asked. “If they took credit for creating a serial killer, they must have known him long before he’d become one.”

The first victim.

Conrad had been triggered into killing Sidney Stewart while driving home from interviewing for a social worker position. What if Kate’s tip really had been right? What if the list the office had sent over hadn’t been complete? All it would have taken was a glimpse of someone in the hallways or in passing. Someone, maybe, who’d worked on his case when he’d entered the system.

“You don’t even remember me,” Raisa murmured, then locked eyes with Kilkenny. “What if our second author had pretended not to know who Conrad was when they ran into each other again? When he was interviewing in Houston. What if that enraged Conrad?”

“That could have absolutely been his trigger,” Kilkenny agreed. “And maybe even why he accepted the job in Houston. He became fixated on the person.”

“Understandably so.”

“Right,” Kilkenny said, running a hand through his hair. “But I can’t think of a single person who fits that bill. Not on his case from when he was young.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’ve memorized the entirety of his DFPS file from when he was ten,” Kilkenny said. “He didn’t meet with anyone who would have been grooming him to become a serial killer.”

“How do you know that?” Raisa asked.

“He had a social worker, a child advocate, and a police liaison,” Kilkenny said. “We checked all of them once we finally caught Conrad. There’s no way any of the three were involved in this.”

Part of her instinctively wanted to fight back, to wave to the rest of the case and point out how much had slipped under the radar because they hadn’t been looking for a second UNSUB.

“But there had to be other people who had access to him,” Raisa said. She tried to think about everything she’d gone through. It had felt like she’d met so many people in such a short amount of time. Three seemed unfathomable to her.

She tapped back into Isabel’s CPS file, opening it for real this time to see if she was remembering through the lens of a traumatized child.

Even just skimming the summary and table of contents, she could identify a handful of adults who would have interacted with Isabel. Doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, and a speech therapist, for some reason.

“Do you remember the social worker?” Raisa asked.

“Uh, Cathy or Cassie something,” Kilkenny said, already pulling out his phone. It took a couple of minutes, but he eventually found her last name. “Carly. Carly Nolan. I have an old email from her with her cell phone.”

Thank god for cloud storage.

He punched in the number and then put it on speaker.

“This is Carly Nolan,” a woman answered. Sometimes it could be hard to tell on the phone, but Raisa guessed she was older, maybe even postretirement age.

Kilkenny introduced both of them, reminding Carly of the case and giving the broad strokes of what they were working on.

“Oh, I know what day it is,” Carly said after Kilkenny finished. “I’ve had it marked on my calendar.”

“To celebrate?” Raisa couldn’t help but ask.

“No, dear,” Carly said. “I went to church to pray for Nate. He was such a sweet boy. I don’t know what happened to him.”

And wasn’t that the $64,000 question. “He said he had a rough time working his way through the system before he was placed with his adoptive family. Do you recall any reason that would be?”

“Oh, no,” Carly said, clearly distraught. “No. It was my job to shepherd him through the process and protect him as much as possible. I don’t know what could have happened that would have made him say that.”

“It was a smooth process?” Raisa asked.

“Yes, surprisingly smooth, given his history,” Carly said. “Usually children who go through such traumatic events need extensive help. But he was one of my easier cases.”

Raisa didn’t want to judge someone based on such little information. But she had only lost her adoptive parents in a car crash, and it had wrecked her to the point where she’d stopped talking for four years. Nathaniel barely escaped being poisoned by his father; likely saw the rest of his family die; and then was lost for several days—hungry, scared, and dehydrated. At ten years old.

In no world should Nathaniel Conrad have been one of Carly Nolan’s “easiest” cases.

“Did he see a psychologist?” Raisa asked, because that seemed like the bare minimum.

“No,” Carly continued, seeming unaware of Raisa’s tone change. “The poor dear was shaken up, but not so bad that he needed all that.”

Raisa inhaled sharply, and Kilkenny lightly tapped the table to get her attention. He shook his head and she exhaled, counting backward from one hundred. He was right—this wasn’t the time or place to litigate what actions were taken after Conrad had become a ward of the state.

But she was starting to understand why he’d said it wasn’t the best experience. At the very least, he’d been neglected, some fairly basic needs going unmet because he didn’t make a fuss. That stank of an old-school mentality that had led plenty of children down the wrong path.

A good psychologist also would have noticed that Conrad might not be reacting quite as expected. They might have realized he had a personality disorder that could have been managed. One good psychologist could have saved nearly thirty lives.

Maybe.

“Although,” Carly said, sounding like she’d just stumbled over a long-buried thought, “I did get an odd message one time about Nate.”

“An odd message?” Kilkenny prompted.

“Yes, I think ... I think it was from maybe a doctoral candidate doing research on traumatic life experiences in children,” Carly said, her voice gaining confidence the longer she went on.

Raisa met Kilkenny’s eyes. His were wide and alert, and they were both holding themselves incredibly still, as if any sound would spook Carly into forgetting whatever tidbit had surfaced.

“Yes, that’s right. I remember thinking how inappropriate it was,” Carly said. “I, of course, responded that I had no interest in letting them run experiments on a child who’d just been through what Nate had survived.”

“Is there any way they could have circumvented you to contact Nate directly?” Raisa asked.

“No, no,” Carly said. “Although ...”

Raisa was beginning to both love and hate that word in Carly’s mouth. “Yes?”

“Well, I, of course, wrote my follow-up reports,” Carly said. “And by the second year, Nate’s adoptive parents told me they had tried out a therapist for a few sessions. It didn’t work out.”

“That wasn’t in the report,” Kilkenny said, voice sharp.

“Well, it was only a few introductory sessions,” Carly said, going defensive. This time it was Raisa who tapped lightly on the table and shook her head.

“So the psychiatrist who contacted you might have been the same one Nate saw while with his adoptive parents?” Raisa asked.

“No, it was a different name, I do remember that,” Carly said. “Though to be honest, I don’t remember either at the moment. I’m sure I could find them somewhere.”

“Please look them up,” Kilkenny said, and rattled off his email address. After a curt “Thanks,” he hung up on Carly.

“Our guy doesn’t want their name attached to the files,” Raisa said.

“No,” Kilkenny said. And then, slowly, his eyes dropped to Raisa’s phone. “In Texas.”

“What?”

“This is their hunting ground,” Kilkenny said. “They can’t have their name associated with any Department of Family Protective Services case in Texas. But what if they kept an eye out for cases across the country where they might intervene?”

The Parker family massacre had made national news. No one had thought Isabel was responsible, but if someone had been watching for stories about children and extreme violence, she fit the pattern.

“If they didn’t want to be connected to Texas, they might have used a different name when they went out of state,” Kilkenny continued slowly, like he was feeling out the idea himself as the words came out. “This was where they lived. This was where they wouldn’t want to be found out.”

“They might have used a name we’ll recognize.” Raisa finally caught up to his logic and scrambled for her phone. She pulled up Isabel’s file, the one Delaney had sent over.

There, as an aside, was a note that Isabel had met with a psychiatric consultant, an expert in children who’d experienced some life-altering violent event.

She stared at the name on the file, then grabbed for the list from Conrad’s interview in Houston. It wasn’t the exact same, but it was close enough.

Her laugh was one of shocked disbelief.

They’d finally found their match.