Page 48 of The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto #2)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Raisa

Now

When the clock ticked over to midnight, Raisa clinked her beer bottle against Kilkenny’s.

It wasn’t in celebration but rather in acknowledgment.

Kilkenny was here, in the sand, on a small stretch of beach in Galveston, rather than in a cramped execution-viewing room watching the death of the serial killer who had consumed five years of his life, and then another ten after he was caught.

Raisa would never say something cheesy in this moment, but she was proud of him.

They went back to staring out at the ocean in silence as the minutes passed by.

Kilkenny’s phone buzzed.

He closed his eyes before checking it and then exhaled when he did.

“It’s done,” he said.

“How do you feel?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. He was wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt, which felt akin to seeing him in his underwear. His hair was mussed by the breeze coming off the ocean, and he even had the makings of a five-o’clock shadow. Was this a Kilkenny who had slayed his demons and come out the other side realizing perfection wasn’t the answer to being a human?

Or was she romanticizing the exhaustion of a man who’d just spent the last seventy-two hours the way he had?

She liked to think it was at the very least a combination of both.

He ran his thumb over his wedding ring, a habit she hoped wouldn’t disappear but would take on new meaning. Before, when he did it, he was reminding himself of all the ways he could fail if he made the wrong choice. Maybe now it would just be him remembering Shay the way she was when he loved her. Not the way she’d looked in crime scene photographs.

Especially now that he knew, with certainty, that her killer was dead.

They’d found Victoria Langston, a.k.a. Tori Greene, in her parked car near an abandoned Little League baseball field. It looked like she’d eaten her own gun, though Pierce had made sure Max’s letter was submitted into evidence. Was it enough to issue an arrest warrant? Probably not. Especially if the scene was as clean as Raisa suspected it was.

Max had been planning that kill for ten years. She might get away with it.

Raisa shouldn’t think it, but she secretly hoped she would.

They had found a treasure trove—along with Kate Tashibi—at Tori Greene’s apartment. Kate had fumbled with a story about interviewing the psychiatrist about her work with violent children. She hadn’t hidden the gun tucked in the back of her jeans well, but it was Texas. No one was going to jail over carrying a gun.

And anyway, no one paid attention to her for very long. In Tori’s office, local agents had uncovered boxes and boxes of “research” into children who’d gone through violent experiences during crucial stages in their development. Raisa had no interest in whatever manifesto Tori had penned beyond what she could learn about her idiolect for teaching purposes.

The long and the short of it was that Tori had found ways to worm her way into the lives of these children in hopes of identifying the ones who could prove her thesis correct. She especially targeted children she thought might have been responsible for the violent episode in their youth.

The two male victims were examples of that. Stahl and Marchand—one who’d killed his mother’s boyfriend in self-defense and the other whose mother had died in a suspicious house fire. Tori had posited that the latter had been set on purpose. Both boys had shown potential, and so she’d stayed in their lives for long enough to leave an impression.

Why she killed them wasn’t yet clear—they would probably find an explanation in the records she so meticulously kept. But for now, Pierce thought it was because they’d blackmailed her once the Alphabet Man started making headlines. Like Max, they’d known enough to connect the dots back to Tori.

Kilkenny had a different theory, one that made more sense to Raisa.

He suggested she’d become so attached to her thesis about childhood trauma and serial killers that when one of her prime examples failed to deliver the results she’d expected—read: they’d become healthy and well-adjusted adults—she lost her ability to cope. So she’d gotten rid of the data point.

That would explain the other deaths Delaney had turned up as well.

And it would make sense as to why she’d turned Conrad in instead of killing him. He was her greatest success. She wanted him to go through the justice system, to be found guilty and be killed for being exactly what he was. Everyone would know Nathaniel Conrad had become a serial killer.

They hadn’t uncovered much about Shay yet, but Pierce had filled in a crucial piece of the puzzle.

Apparently, frustrated that they weren’t getting anywhere with the case, he’d sought the help of a specialist without going through the proper channels. Dr. Tori Greene was well known and well respected throughout Houston for her work with childhood trauma and serial killers. Throughout the years, Pierce had been sent her name but hadn’t wanted to step on Kilkenny’s toes.

He’d invited Tori for coffee and to the headquarters a few times. They’d all been casual meetings, none that had materialized in any insightful conversations about the case, and so, to avoid any drama with Kilkenny, Pierce had logged the meetings as general instead of related to a specific investigation—so Kilkenny had never seen her name on any case files related to the Alphabet Man.

There had been a strange confluence of events that had led Shay to the FBI offices the same day Tori had a meeting scheduled with Pierce. She’d never shown up for it, and now, with hindsight, they were all left wondering if that was because she’d run into Shay in the parking lot.

That also hadn’t been the only thing Pierce had been keeping from them.

He’d been hiding the fact that he and Beau had some kind of friendship or relationship that had sent him personally chasing after the man to stop him from confronting Tori instead of bringing the full weight of the FBI down on him. Because Max had simply sent Beau to an empty house, nothing was ever going to come of it. Pierce hadn’t known that, though.

All Raisa cared about now was Kilkenny. The cards would fall as they may with the rest of them. Kate would get an explosive ending for her documentary. Beau would probably get off for his fifteen-year-old murders, because all the evidence had likely been lost and Max wasn’t exactly going to testify against him. Pierce might live with some guilt, but would, in the end, likely cover up enough of his mistakes to keep climbing up that ladder of success at the Bureau. Conrad was dead. Tori was dead.

Raisa no longer felt like she was going to lose a few hours to panic if she was reminded of sisters and all they could do to each other.

And Max? She was a survivor. That had been clear from meeting her only once in a hot parking lot, where she’d managed to find shade, and also the only spot that couldn’t be picked up on the security cameras.

Raisa wasn’t too worried about what would happen to her. After she had translated the more complex code from Max’s letter, she’d taken a picture of it. In the hours of waiting for Conrad’s death, in waiting for news from Tori’s house, in driving down to Galveston because Shay had always talked about how much fun she’d had there, Raisa had managed to decode the simple message written in the Alberti Cipher.

Once she had, she knew it had been written to Kilkenny.

She didn’t care about happiness. She cared about family. You were her family.

When she’d showed him, he’d stared at the screen for a long time, and she could tell he wished that he had the physical paper it had been written on.

Now he touched his ring again as he watched the ebb and flow of the ocean at his feet.

“What are you thinking?” Raisa asked quietly.

“Everyone believes that my biggest regret is dragging Shay into the serial-killer case,” he said, like he’d just been waiting for the right question. “And of course that was. But something I hadn’t been able to talk about was how unhappy she was. Our tragedy flattened us into a perfect couple, and I allowed that to happen. It wasn’t their business, and it felt like I was protecting Shay that way.”

She didn’t care about happiness. That was hard to say about anyone and make it believable. Everyone wanted to be happy. But desire and value were two different things. Raisa could believe that Shay cared more about being with someone who loved her than having a perfect life full of sunshine days.

And now maybe Kilkenny could believe that, too.

“Happy days are overrated,” Raisa said, a little sardonically. But that was okay—that was the mood tonight. “I like a good storm.”

He huffed in agreement, and she thought about the storm that had been her last three months. Right now, sitting here, she was almost—almost—glad everything had happened with Isabel. She deserved to be behind bars, where she couldn’t hurt anyone else, but maybe it didn’t have to mean nothing that Raisa was related to her. Maybe it could be a benefit instead of the thing that brought Raisa’s whole world down.

Because she looked at Isabel and saw what she was capable of being.

And then she looked in the mirror and saw what she was.

Every day became a choice, and Isabel became a reminder.

Someone didn’t have to bring happiness into your life to be a good thing for it overall.

“Family, huh?” Kilkenny said.

“Can’t live with them,” Raisa said, toasting the ocean, toasting life, toasting her sisters and sisters everywhere.

Kilkenny lifted his own bottle and said so quietly she almost missed it, “Can’t live without them.”