Page 45 of The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto #2)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Raisa

Now

Kilkenny tapped the guard on the shoulder to get him to keep playing the footage after Pierce approached Max.

They talked for about three minutes, and then Max left the visitor lounge. The angle had been terrible, both of them tilted away from the camera so there was no chance of reading lips even if Raisa had been an expert. And, of course, she wasn’t.

The guard helped them track her out to the parking lot, but then she disappeared behind a large media van and didn’t emerge where they could see.

Kilkenny cursed and straightened. “She told him something.”

If Max had been in the visitors’ lounge, there was a tiny chance she was still on the grounds. She’d come to witness Conrad’s execution—she wouldn’t just leave.

Raisa glanced up at the rows and rows of monitors that showed too many views of the prison. Now, two hours after the run-in with Pierce, Max couldn’t be seen on any of them.

“I’m going to go check the grounds outside,” Raisa said. “Can you try to get Tori Greene’s current address?”

“Yup,” Kilkenny agreed, pulling out his phone. Raisa took off.

She checked with the security desk in front to confirm that Max hadn’t come back into the prison.

After that, it didn’t take long to find the van where Max had disappeared, and when she asked, the journalist pointed her in the direction of the far end of the parking lot.

Raisa jogged over, and started scanning the cars for signs of life.

And there Max was, sitting in the shade created by a beat-up Toyota, her back against one of the wheels, an unlit cigarette clamped between her lips as she furiously wrote in a battered leather notebook. Raisa exhaled and then dropped down across from her, leaning against a much nicer BMW. She hoped the alarms wouldn’t sound.

“You’re a fed,” Max said, without looking up. She’d shown no signs of surprise at Raisa’s sudden presence, either.

“Sort of,” Raisa said, with a half smile that went to waste.

“There’s no such thing as a sort-of fed,” Max said, though there was some amusement in her voice.

“I’m a forensic linguist,” Raisa explained, and that finally got Max to look at her. While she’d been objectively beautiful on that security footage, she was magnetic in person, her eyes a shockingly pale green in contrast to her dark hair, her brows thick and expressive. Raisa felt pinned against the warmed metal.

“Sick,” Max decided, after a moment of studying her, sounding like the teenager she must have been when Shay was alive instead of the woman she was now. She went back to her journal.

Raisa decided to take the compliment. “You met with Xander Pierce this morning.”

Max snorted. “Dickhead.”

“Why’s he a dickhead?” Raisa asked.

“You know the first thing I did in my session with Tori Greene?” Max asked, dropping the name of their second killer like it was nothing. Like they hadn’t just spent the last few days desperately hunting for that answer, without sleep, without stopping to eat. Raisa could only stare at her.

“She gave me a book of sudoku puzzles,” Max continued, still scribbling away. “She didn’t ask me any questions, she just handed that over along with a pencil.”

“Okay,” Raisa said, still reeling.

“Do you know why?” Max asked, but then didn’t wait for Raisa to guess. “She said word-and-number puzzles are known to ease stress, anxiety, and depression. It was how she bonded with us assholes who didn’t want to be there. I’m sad to say it made me think she was pretty cool.” Max flicked a glance up at Raisa. “I looked it up. She wasn’t bullshitting about the benefits of word puzzles, either. There are studies on it and everything.”

“Word puzzles like figuring out an Alberti Cipher,” Raisa said, and Max touched her nose before pointing at Raisa.

“Got it in one.”

Raisa closed her eyes and pictured Nathaniel Conrad at ten years old, walking into an office with Dr. Tori Greene. Or Victoria Langston, at the time. Being asked if he liked puzzles. Would he like to try this simple cipher? Had she done it with all the children she met with? Had she done it with Isabel? The daughter of two math prodigies, a genius in her own right, would have scoffed at being given something so easy. But she would have remembered that moment.

It would have felt familiar if she’d seen the detail crop up in a serial-killer case.

“I just kept seeing all those articles about how the Alphabet Man used this stupid cipher,” Max continued. “And all I kept thinking was, Oh, that probably reduces his stress, anxiety, and depression .”

She snorted in dark amusement. “I wasn’t completely right. I thought she was the Alphabet Man. Wouldn’t that have been amusing? We’re such a fucking patriarchy we can’t even conceive of women being killers despite the fact that one of the defining characteristics of the murders was no intercourse.”

Raisa didn’t want to interrupt her to point out that it had been a man who’d killed most of the victims.

“I know, I know,” Max said, as if she heard the argument anyway. “But still. We shouldn’t have assumed.”

“No,” Raisa said softly.

Max’s lips twitched. “You’re humoring me because you want me to tell you whatever I told Pierce.”

“I want to know, but I’m not humoring you,” Raisa corrected. “Bias in investigations leads to a lot of killers walking free.”

“Hmm,” Max agreed. “You know, I’m talking like I knew this whole time. I didn’t. I didn’t know until they caught Nathaniel. And we knew him, you know? Beau was friends with him. And so I thought, Jeez, he was stalking Shay that whole time . It made sense.” She paused. “Like it fit perfectly that he would have killed her. So Beau and I shut the fuck up about knowing him, just in case that would throw something off with his trial, and we went on with our lives.”

“What changed?”

“I went to visit Nathaniel,” Max admitted. “I wanted to see him really there. Behind bars. On a long march to death.”

“Did he tell you?” Raisa asked. “Did he tell you he didn’t kill Shay?”

Max shook her head and swiped at her nose. “No. Not that first time. He asked about Tori, but it didn’t register. Not really. Who would have thought there were two killers?”

“But you went back?”

“Two more times,” Max admitted. “I could tell he wanted to confess something—he kept hinting at things. Like talking about Tori, how I should look into her research more. Talking about how he and I had things in common. Something about what he was saying must have, I don’t know, clicked in my subconscious, because I went back.”

Raisa couldn’t imagine what that must have been like for Max when she’d believed Conrad had brutally murdered Shay. Conrad, who had spent time with their family, who’d likely been to their house.

“On the last visit, he said—” Max paused, heaved in a breath. “He said, ‘You know I would never hurt Shay.’”

That wasn’t exactly a confession, not from a serial killer who had maintained his innocence up until a few days ago. But Raisa could see how it might have stuck in Max’s mind.

“I would have attacked him if the guard hadn’t stepped in,” Max continued, calm as anything. “I thought he was just being a dick, like, mocking me. It took a while for the rage to go away. But when it did, I don’t know, it changed the way I heard the words. Then I kept thinking about the stuff he’d said about Tori.”

“Did you go see him again?”

“No. But I started looking into Tori’s research, just like he’d suggested.” She huffed out a humorless laugh. “I was always good at digging. And I got obsessive about it. I found her marriage certificate.”

“That’s ... advanced,” Raisa said, surprised and impressed.

“Not really. It’s public information,” Max said with a careless shrug. “What was impressive was the name she put on there wasn’t Langston. It was Carter. Victoria Carter.”

That was probably what had stymied Kate if she’d made it that far.

“How did you get from Carter to Langston?” Raisa couldn’t help but ask.

Max smirked a little, clearly proud of herself. “She didn’t file a medical change under that name, so I figured it wasn’t hers for very long. Turns out she got married in Vegas and then divorced three months later.”

“And that led you to Victoria Langston,” Raisa said.

“Yeah, it took, like, a year of searching, but I found her,” Max said. “And there were enough photos of her from her grad school yearbook to confirm it was the same person.”

“You were determined,” Raisa said.

“Not much else to think about. And once I found her name, it was easy from there. She had all these grad school papers about the origin of serial killers. They included some real questionable ethics, about how we should go back to the early days of psychology, when you could just mess people up for the sake of knowledge.” Max glanced up. “They’re there. Online, digitized. Whatever. She must have done it herself. So fucking arrogant.”

“Did you suspect her then?” Raisa asked.

“I mean, of being interested in serial killers? Sure,” Max said, lifting one shoulder. “Of being a terrible psychiatrist, yeah, absolutely.”

“So what made you realize she killed Shay?”

“Beau’s phone,” Max said, her lips twisting. “He gave it to me unlocked one day. Told me to send myself any pictures of Shay on there that I wanted. Those were the days of dumb-phones, but even shitty photos are better than nothing.” She shrugged as if it weren’t a big deal, even though it clearly had been. “He still had Shay’s text messages saved, and I started reading through them.”

She rolled her eyes. “Which is a violation of privacy, sure. But I found the final piece there. It was a while back, like two months before Shay’s death. No one would have connected it to her disappearance. No one except for me, in that exact moment of time.”

“What was it?”

“A text where Shay mentioned that she’d run into Tori,” Max said. “She reminded Beau of how Tori had come to Billy’s funeral, and just how nice that had been. They met up for wine, and Shay had gotten too drunk and nearly passed out in a cab on the way back to her hotel.”

“What did Beau say to that?”

“He said he remembered, thought it was nice, too, and called Shay a lightweight in her old age,” Max said. “And they both completely moved on from the topic.”

“Two months,” Raisa said softly.

“Tori was nothing if not obsessively careful,” Max said. “She waited, and she was right. Two months was long enough. No one linked her to Shay’s death.”

“Except you,” Raisa said.

“Fat lot of good that did.”

“Why didn’t you tell the police about your suspicions?” Raisa asked, even though she knew it might make Max shut down completely.

“Because I didn’t have a good track record when it came to accusing people in my life. At one point I was convinced Beau was the Alphabet Man,” Max said, still writing. It was impressive that she could do so while talking. “Shay pretty much laughed me out of her apartment when I laid out my theory. So. I didn’t tell anyone.”

“But all these years—”

“I didn’t tell anyone right away,” Max corrected. “I was gathering information. I thought Tori killed Shay because Shay was onto her. Which I still think was true. But I was pretty sure Tori killed other people, too.”

At the very least, Marchand and Stahl. Probably some of the victims Delaney had found in her broader search.

“Could never confirm anything. But I must have talked to the wrong person,” Max said. “About six months after my last visit with Conrad, Tori shows up at my place. She knew I hadn’t gone to the cops, of course, knew I probably wouldn’t. Killing me would have brought too much attention to her. She’d already decided I wasn’t one of her pet monsters, and so her name was attached to my file. Which was something she was insanely careful about.”

“Not careful enough, apparently,” Raisa pointed out, and Max nodded.

“Anyway, she knew a secret of mine. She threatened to expose me if I didn’t leave town and cut off all contact with anyone here,” Max said. “I didn’t have any actual proof she’d killed anyone, either. Not Shay, not anyone else.”

“She knew that you killed your father?” Raisa guessed.

“She knew that I hadn’t,” Max said, meeting Raisa’s eyes again. Each time Raisa was knocked back by the intensity of that strange color, the directness of her stare.

Raisa’s mind made the quick leaps in logic. Beau.

The revelation must have shown on her face, because Max nodded once, quickly. “She wasn’t bluffing. It would be a risk to kill me, a risk to expose Beau to prison time. But it was still better than me spewing my theories to Kilkenny. And I couldn’t lose Beau. Not right after Shay.”

“So you cut him out of your life,” Raisa said. Everything she learned about him only added to his tragic narrative.

“Sucks,” Max said, succinctly. “But life sucks. At least he’s alive and not rotting away in prison.”

She stopped writing and dropped the pen to the ground. Her eyes moved over the paper and Raisa sat quietly, afraid to make a move. Finally, she folded it up into perfectly neat thirds and stuffed it in an envelope.

When Max didn’t do anything but stare at it in her lap, Raisa asked, “What did you tell Agent Pierce this morning?”

“Where to find Beau,” Max said, her frown sliding into a satisfied smile.

“Where is he going to find Beau?” Raisa asked, gently.

“At an empty house,” Max said.

“Why?”

“Because I told Beau that’s where he would find Shay’s real killer, and he wasn’t about to let her walk free.”

Raisa’s heartbeat kicked up. She didn’t want to think about why Pierce hadn’t told them that was where he was actually headed. “Why is it empty?”

“Because I let Beau pull the trigger for me once before,” Max said, still staring at the envelope. “And I wasn’t going to let him do it again. Then I told Pierce where to find him, so there would be no doubt that he had an alibi.”

Pierce was chasing after Beau, and Beau was chasing bad information. That left Kate Tashibi as a wild card. But Raisa had a feeling that point was moot.

“Kate Tashibi met with Conrad this morning,” Raisa said. “We believe he told her where to find the woman responsible for her sister’s death.”

Max’s chin jerked up at that, but she quickly hid her face once more. It had been long enough to get a glimpse of her expression, to confirm what Raisa had guessed.

Kate may have gotten a head start on Raisa and Kilkenny, but Max had gotten a head start on her. She would arrive too late to mete out the justice she so wanted.

That had already been done.

Raisa thought about the weight of her gun holstered beneath her blazer. Max was slight, but Raisa was small, too, as much as she didn’t want to admit it. The woman might have hidden strength that could put her out on top. “Will she find Tori?”

“I’m sorry she lost her sister,” Max said, her fingers tightening around the envelope. When she looked up, her eyes were completely dry, her mouth set in a determined line. There was not an ounce of guilt or regret there. “But I lost mine first.”