Page 6 of The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto #2)

CHAPTER FIVE

Raisa

Now

Kilkenny had to come home eventually.

Raisa held on to that thought as she passed the third hour sitting outside his apartment in her car.

They were thirty minutes from midnight, which would make it forty-eight hours until Conrad was executed.

She had her tablet out, the one she liked to use to run her analysis on writing samples. She’d pulled three of Conrad’s earliest letters. And she’d pulled the three that were sent to Kilkenny after Shay was taken.

As much as she hated to admit that Isabel had been right, they didn’t match.

There were complicating factors, of course.

Conrad had written his letters using a cipher. While the FBI had been able to decode all of them eventually with the keys from the victims’ arms, the process could have theoretically messed with Conrad’s idiolect. He might have made deliberate choices because the word was easier to encrypt rather than because it came naturally to him. And on the FBI’s end, Raisa was trusting that the agents hadn’t made any mistakes. A typo from Conrad might have actually come from someone else.

He had also sent the messages in blocks without any spaces around the words so that anyone trying to decode them couldn’t use inevitable patterns in language to help with the process. There were only so many one-letter words in English, only so many two-letter words. If he’d written out the message with proper spacing, it became like playing hangman with the highest stakes possible.

Conrad had even added extra letters in the beginning and throughout to mess with any attempts to predict the words. Once the message was decoded, it was easy to discard the extra stuff as so much gibberish, but it would have thoroughly screwed with the decrypting efforts in the seventy-two-hour window the victims had until they were killed.

Still, Raisa had worked with ciphers before and had taken an entire seminar on the Zodiac Killer’s letters. Since then, she’d dealt with plenty of other criminals who’d written to law enforcement in some kind of rudimentary code.

Raisa was trained to see the bones of a writing sample, even with all those complicating factors.

No matter how many caveats she added to the early, confirmed Conrad letters and the ones after Shay had been taken, she couldn’t deny that the truth was obvious.

There had been two separate writers.

Everything from their grammatical mistakes to the use of similes, ten-dollar words, and slang was different.

Just in the first two letters, Conrad used six similes, two of which centered on animals— clever like a fox , as black as coal , as sharp as a razor , as gentle as a lamb , as bright as the moon , as silent as the grave —to describe either himself, his victim, or what he was doing to his victim.

There was not a single simile in Shay’s letters.

In the earlier letters, Conrad also frequently used double comparatives—a rhetorical device to amplify increasing or decreasing returns.

The more I take from the girls, the brighter their auras burn.

It was obvious he liked his own voice. Whereas the author of Shay’s letters was just trying to get the job done. They didn’t use any rhetorical devices to pretty up the writing.

They did, however, have a strange tendency to drop articles and vowels from long words that ended in -ly . Raisa had seen the same patterns in people who wrote frequently and quickly for a living—journalists, court reporters, medical techs, jobs of those natures.

None of that alone would make a foolproof case, but that’s why she built analyses that accounted for every aspect of an author’s idiolect. And in this instance, when she started adding up the patterns, a profile started to emerge.

Or, rather, two profiles.

That didn’t automatically mean Conrad was completely innocent in Shay’s murder. Maybe he had an accomplice. Maybe he’d drastically changed his voice, either because he had been trying to mislead any possible experts brought in by the FBI or because his writing really had evolved.

That wasn’t unheard of, per se, especially since it would have happened over the course of four years while he was still young. She’d need to go through all the letters to see if there had been a gradual shift throughout—which would take time she didn’t have.

In the quiet of her car, with just herself as the audience, she could admit that she was starting to doubt that Nathaniel Conrad had been the one to kill Shay.

And yet, she had never before wanted to be so wrong.

Right now, Kilkenny at least had closure, had whatever passed for justice in this modern era.

If they opened the door to doubt, how much more of his life would this case consume?

Was that fair to think? She should want to catch Shay’s killer over anything else—if the second killer existed. But what Raisa really cared about was Kilkenny.

It took until midnight for Raisa to jump through all the hoops required to make her computer secure, but once she did, it was easy enough to pull up the official details.

Everyone thought of Kilkenny when they remembered the Alphabet Man case, but he hadn’t actually been the agent in charge—even before Shay had been killed.

The man leading the investigation had been Xander Pierce.

Raisa had a flash of tall, dark, and handsome in her memory, a cowboy who’d wandered in off the range to strap on a badge and a firearm. She’d worked with him only a time or two, but she had come away from the investigations respecting him. He’d called Raisa in before shit had hit the fan. The same couldn’t be said for many of the agents she’d had to deal with—ones who viewed her as a party trick at best.

Because of her particular skill set, she didn’t spend a ton of time in the field. The most she had in recent years was in Everly hunting down Isabel, and that had been because she’d technically been tagging along with Kilkenny. Most of the time, she didn’t even have to leave her apartment to do her job. Everything was digital these days—even communicated threats from criminals.

Agents who worked in the field tended to look at her as weak. Some of that was because she was a woman, she was sure. But she knew plenty of female agents who garnered respect. They were usually the ones clearing a building in a terrorist situation instead of the ones behind their computers figuring out which hate group wrote the threatening letter in the first place.

Add to all that the fact that she got shipped around the country more often than she worked out of any one particular field office, making it almost impossible to build a wide stable of allies in the bureau.

She got by fine. But she did tend to remember the agents who treated her well.

Pierce had been one of them.

He had also quickly assessed what was going on after the first victim was found in the Alphabet Man case. The tattoos, the naked body, the signs of torture—they had all pointed in one direction: serial murderer.

With that in mind, Pierce had dispatched local law enforcement and grunt agents to start scouring for more victims, both in cold-case archives and with search dogs at likely body-drop sites.

Two more were found within the week, which made Raisa think that the Alphabet Man had always wanted the bodies discovered and had simply caught “lucky” breaks on his first victims.

Morally, Raisa cared about all their names. But practically speaking, she didn’t think they mattered much at the moment. She opened a fresh notes page on her tablet and wrote down only two of them.

Tiffany Hughes, the victim found first.

Sidney Stewart, the Alphabet Man’s first kill based on time of death.

Raisa moved on to the tattoos, which were arguably the most unique part of his signature.

The Alberti Cipher was one of the simpler ones—each letter had another assigned to it to create two rows of the alphabet, one in order and one all jumbled up. A perhaps went with T , D with S , and so on. To encode a message, the author would simply need to know all twenty-six of those assigned pairs, but to decode it, someone would need to know which letter went with which. That was the hard part.

All Raisa kept thinking was that this case had been tailor-made for a linguist. She flipped through the file, searching for the name of a consultant.

Forensic linguistics as a science was decades old, but the FBI could often be decades behind the times. Until recently, the bureau had relied on experts from think tanks and universities, and outsourced any linguistic work that came in. With the rise in popularity of both the internet and texting—which played large roles these days in crimes ranging from bombing threats to terrorist attacks and school shootings—came two formal positions.

Raisa’s East Coast counterpart was a fast-talking New Yorker named Emerson Bird. Bird specialized in international differences in idiolects. Raisa knew some of those basics, such as that native Spanish speakers didn’t capitalize the days of the week or the names of the months. That could transfer over even if the person was writing in English, and could help narrow down a suspect list. But it wasn’t her strong suit.

She and Bird barely spoke beyond emails divvying up cases. They had one department meeting every six months or so, and then sat through an awkward lunch with each other for exactly forty-five minutes afterward. Other than that, they were never in the same place at the same time.

Bird had come on after Shay’s death, though. And if she was reading the notes correctly, the linguist who had worked on the Alphabet Man investigation hadn’t been brought in for Shay’s case.

Resources better allocated elsewhere, was the reasoning Pierce offered.

A budget decision.

Part of her wished she could look at the choice as suspicious, but it wasn’t. Raisa’s own involvement on task forces rested on the same calculations, and she pulled a salary instead of the per-day cost of a consultant. She’d been given that excuse multiple times during her three years with the bureau—usually when she went knocking on doors about why she hadn’t been invited onto an investigation that had gone tits up.

Light washed her laptop screen white, and she flipped the rearview mirror up to avoid being blinded by the car parking behind her. She quickly x-ed out of everything she had open on her laptop and then shut it down completely. By the time she had shoved her tablet in her bag, Kilkenny was already halfway up the town house stairs.

He’d seen her, obviously. He was even probably going to let her in. But he wasn’t happy about it.

“You can tell me to go to hell,” Raisa said as she caught up with him.

Kilkenny didn’t turn to look at her, just slipped his key in the door. “It’s not your fault.”

The reassurance came out through gritted teeth, like he was convincing himself, and she grimaced at his back.

In the technical sense, it was true. But she was the reason Kilkenny had brought emergency backup to that clearing three months ago. She was the reason Isabel was facing trial instead of rotting in the ground.

It was a little bit her fault.

Kilkenny waved Raisa into his living room and then reemerged a minute later with two beers in hand.

Even after what had to have been a long, rough day, Kilkenny looked effortlessly perfect in his expensively tailored suit, polished tan shoes, and slim tie that still sat snug against his throat.

Raisa simply sprawled on the sofa in an undignified lump, the stress of everything catching up to her, but he lowered himself gracefully into a beautiful midcentury modern recliner as if he were the model paid to sell it.

She eyed him, trying to get a read on what he was thinking. The problem was, Raisa didn’t even know where she stood on this.

Isabel had been convincing. But she was a charismatic con artist; of course she was convincing. Why would Raisa believe anything that came out of her mouth?

Because the idiolects didn’t match.

As much as Raisa liked to think of her work as an art, it came down to statistics and probability at the end of the day. Science didn’t lie. The letters, the discrepancies, and the patterns—she was almost a hundred percent certain there was a second author.

She nearly giggled at the phrase, a little delirious probably. Would they have their own version of a grassy knoll as well?

Maybe they even had their own Zapruder film in the form of Kate Tashibi’s miniseries. Would seeing the actual interview help them assess whether Conrad was lying? Kilkenny had hunted him for five years, but after he’d caught the killer, he’d famously turned down any and all chances to talk to Conrad. Did Kilkenny actually know him well enough to tell if he was lying?

Raisa realized then that she hadn’t filled him in on her visit with Isabel yet. She did so, including her own analysis, which backed up what Isabel had said.

“Is there any chance he could have faked the idiolect?” he asked.

“It’s possible,” she said. “But why do that? No one ever talked about his writing style before. And then to go back to his old voice for the subsequent letters? That doesn’t make sense.”

He sighed in what sounded like agreement.

“There are other possibilities,” Raisa offered. “Someone else wrote the letters for him, for example. Or ... something I can’t think of right now because my brain is a bit mushy at the moment.”

“Yeah,” Kilkenny said. He knew how to hedge just like she did. But he could tell beneath those possibilities her science and expertise were screaming one thing.

Conrad hadn’t killed Shay.

“By the time Shay was taken, the public knew everything about the Alphabet Man,” Kilkenny said. “There were articles every day. The media pored over every detail. His body-disposal methods. The tattoos. How long the victims were held for, the fact that they were taken in broad daylight. If someone wanted to fake it, they could do a decent job just by reading the newspaper.”

“What did you keep back?” There was always something—a little detail that could mean the difference between deciding if someone who confessed was the real killer or not. It was standard operating procedure.

“The tattoo ink Conrad used was dark gray, not black,” Kilkenny said, meeting her eyes. “Shay’s was dark gray.”

Well. That wasn’t nothing.

Raisa chewed on her lip. “That would have been difficult to find out, huh?”

He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Yeah.”

“Okay, so maybe I’m wrong,” Raisa said, and held a hand up when Kilkenny went to immediately defend her to herself. “What if this is just all ... Conrad trying to get into your head again? Some just-graduated filmmaker isn’t necessarily going to be able to judge the veracity of the interview if a psychopath known for being charming sells the story well enough.”

“Kate Tashibi.” Kilkenny slid her a look. “Did she contact you?”

“Yeah,” Raisa admitted. “She tracked me down in person, actually.”

His brows shot up. “Ballsy.”

“Stalker-y,” Raisa countered, and he tipped his head in agreement. “You?”

“She reached out, I politely declined.”

Raisa laughed. “You’re a better person than I. I threatened to have her arrested.”

Kilkenny’s lips twitched. “It’s easier to be mad on someone else’s behalf.”

“True,” Raisa acknowledged.

“She would have had to prove the truth of what Conrad said in some way,” Kilkenny said softly after a moment. “No credible company would buy her film otherwise. She must have some kind of evidence beyond his word.”

Raisa deflated, knowing that was true. “Yeah.”

“So, there it is, then. He didn’t kill Shay.”

He sounded entirely too calm. She didn’t want him to fall apart, but she knew better than anyone that when someone kept it together this well, it usually meant they were headed toward a nuclear meltdown in the near future.

Raisa couldn’t quite picture what a nuclear meltdown from the cool and composed Callum Kilkenny would look like, but she also didn’t want to be able to picture it. Or experience it. “Maybe we should sleep on all this.”

He glanced at the time; it was nearing one o’clock in the morning. “We have less than forty-eight hours until we lose our chance to speak with Conrad.”

“You want to talk to him?” Raisa asked carefully, not wanting to sway his decision either way.

His eyes flicked to something over her shoulder. She glanced back and noticed the bookshelf for the first time.

On the middle shelf sat a framed picture of Shay.

Raisa swallowed hard and fought the urge to go get a closer look. She’d seen a few photos of the woman, but they had been ones that were provided to the police.

Here, Shay had been caught midlaugh, her eyes crinkled, her head thrown back.

Kilkenny’s expression was so wistful as he rubbed a thumb over his wedding ring, Raisa nearly had to look away, unable to shake the feeling that she was seeing something private. Intimate.

“We have to go to Houston,” Kilkenny finally said.

Raisa didn’t blink at the fact that he’d included her in the plans. She had taken time off to attend Isabel’s trial, and this was a much better way to spend those days. “Okay.”

He smiled at her easy acknowledgment, but he didn’t offer any other sign of gratitude. He didn’t need to.

“You know what they’ll all say, right?” Kilkenny asked, still staring at the picture. “If Conrad is telling the truth. If we prove he’s telling the truth.”

Of course she did. It might not have been her first or second thought—those had centered around Isabel and all the ways her sister had managed to continue to upend her life.

But it wasn’t hard to reach the next conclusion. Raisa might be a linguist, but she was also an FBI agent.

It was always the husband.

“They’re going to say you killed her,” Raisa said, grimly meeting his eyes. “And that you framed the very serial killer you were famous for hunting.”