Page 13 of By the Time You Read This

It was split into two distinct groups.

On one side, women dressed all in black carried flowers as they hugged each other, wiping at tear-streaked cheeks and even wailing from the ground.

“What ...?” she murmured as she realized they were ... they were inmourning. The other side, the one with revelers drinking out ofchampagne glasses while holding signs declaring the witch dead, made far more sense than whatever the first group was doing.

“Isabel has gained a bit of notoriety in the past two years,” Kilkenny said, as he crept toward the gate. It couldn’t have been more than five or six hours since Isabel’s death had been announced, but there were plenty of people here already. “There’s even a hashtag-FreeBell movement that’s picked up speed in the last couple months.”

“She never went by Bell,” Raisa said, bereft of anything sensical to say. Maybe Isabelhadgone by Bell—she had barely known the woman, after all.

“They don’t care, it wasn’t really about her. They were just projecting an image onto someone,” Kilkenny said, ever the psychologist. “They call themselves fans.”

“Yuck.”

“Yeah,” Kilkenny agreed. “You see all sorts of similarities to cults in these kinds of groups.”

“Yeah,” Raisa parroted. Her eyes slid to the ladies who were celebrating. She didn’t blame them, but she did wonder who would make the trip. “And the other side?”

“There’s a fairly vocal ‘anti-FreeBell’ response. They were worried she was going to get her trial thrown out because of her popularity with true crime podcasts,” Kilkenny said, and Raisa was amazed she hadn’t heard of either side. “The group is led by a woman named Essi Halla.”

“Finnish?” Raisa guessed. While she didn’t specialize in foreign languages, she could usually at least get the country.

“Her family, maybe,” Kilkenny said with a shrug. “She’s from California.”

“And she kick-started this we-hate-Isabel movement?”

“Or at least she’s become the most vocal member,” Kilkenny said. “She’s positioned herself as something of an advocate for victims’ families, though she focuses heavily on things that put her in the spotlight and not so much on the things that actually help people.”

The scene all of a sudden made a whole lot more sense. There were always going to be people who flocked to national spectacles. Attention and the money that went with it were powerful drugs. “How is she even involved?”

“She claims her father was one of Isabel’s unaccounted-for victims,” he said. “Mikko Halla.”

Raisa shook her head. She’d memorized all the confirmed kills, along with a good number of probable ones they weren’t able to use in court. “Is he?”

“Honestly, who knows,” Kilkenny said with a shrug. “But it’s not impossible, so ...”

“Hucksters gonna huck,” Raisa murmured, and then waited for Kilkenny to flash his badge to the security guard at the gate. “Were they seriously worried she was going to be freed? She was serving multiple life sentences for crimes with strong evidence against her. It was the most slam dunk a trial could be.”

“Not so much that she would be freed, realistically. This was ananti-movement,” Kilkenny said. “Those only arise in repudiation of something else. They didn’t think a court of law would overturn her sentencing—they were worried the FreeBell would have success in redeeming Isabel’s name.”

She stared at him. “How was that even a legitimate fear?”

“Well, the reason she had fans was because of the erroneous belief that she had only ever killed bad guys,” Kilkenny said, before quickly climbing out of the SUV as if he didn’t want to see her face after the pronouncement.

Raisa hurried after him. “How onearthdid they reach that conclusion?”

Kilkenny tilted his head back and forth. “There are a good number of examples where shedidkill bad guys. Like Delaney’s professor.”

As a teenager, Delaney had been so advanced, she’d been able to take college classes when she was still in high school. One of her professors had tried to corner her in his office to pressure her into an affair. Not long after, he’d purposefully overdosed and been found in a pool of his own vomit beside a suicide letter.

“Those tended to get more attention than the ones where she just didn’t like the look of the victim’s face,” Kilkenny said. After a thoughtful pause, he added, “I hate this, but I also think it has to do with the fact that she’s a woman. The vigilante angle is a more compelling and believable sell when it comes to women serial killers.”

That much was true. Society saw women a certain way—and that didn’t mesh well with the fact that some of them were simply sadistic psychopaths who liked torturing people. “I suppose the fact that only a few of her murders were graphic also lends itself to that story.”

“The most personal ones were,” Kilkenny observed. “But yes. The fact that a lot of her victims died in ‘accidents’ seems to have added to the mythology that she’s simply ridding the world of rapists and pedophiles.”

“Yikes,” Raisa said, glancing back toward the mourners. Did they imagine they’d lost some kind of superhero today? “Even if that were the case, she shouldn’t have just been let out on the streets to continue murdering ‘bad guys.’ We’re not Dodge City circa the late 1800s.”

He laughed at that. “Does it sound incredibly stuffy to blame movies and popular culture for glorifying vigilantes?”

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