Page 22 of By the Time You Read This

The woman laughed again, and Delaney wondered if it was at her. She’d never been good at telling that, either.

“It is indeed,” the woman agreed.

Then she jerked her chin toward Delaney’s laptop. Reflexively, Delaney’s fingers tightened, even though the woman probably wouldn’t think anything of the notes if she saw them out of context.

Let’s play a game . . .

“I’m sorry, I’m being terribly rude,” the woman said, her eyes still locked on the computer. “Are you working?”

Delaney nodded in agreement, because the womanwasbeing terribly rude. But then she shook her head, because that hadn’t been the question. “No.”

The woman waited for more—as so many people did when they talked to Delaney. They never seemed content with the straightforward answers to their questions, as if Delaney were somehow on the hook for half of a conversation she’d never RSVP’d to.

The woman’s mouth quirked up on one side, and she held her hands up, palms out. “Got it.”

Delaney tilted her head, curious. “What did you get?”

“You’re not interested in chatting,” the woman said, shifting off her barstool.

“Oh, then yes. You’re right. I’m not,” Delaney said with a nod. “You did get it.”

The woman laughed, as she seemed prone to do, and then grabbed a bar napkin. She whistled to the bartender, and asked for a Sharpie.

Delaney watched, curious, as the woman scribbled something on the napkin and then dropped a twenty on the bar.

“If you everdofeel like chatting,” the woman said, handing the napkin over with a wink.

Then she turned and walked out of the bar, as easily as she’d come.

Delaney looked down at the phone number, a string of digits with a Seattle area code.

Above it, the woman had scrawled her name.

Maeve.

Chapter Eight

Raisa

Day One

All things being equal, Raisa would never interview people of interest in a case. She’d much rather spend time with words on paper than try to parse through someone’s lies. So, when they left Helen and her shrine to a—possible—psychopath behind, Raisa exhaled. Helen had let Raisa borrow the journals with the promise that she’d return them, and so now Raisa had two different writing samples to work on.

That always made her analysis easier. Instead of just creating a profile of an unknown subject, she could usually rule out if the two authors were one and the same.

Journals were different from letters—people tended to write with a slightly different voice when they didn’t think anyone else would read the thing. But there were always markers to pull out and compare, even if someone was trying to mask their idiolect.

The first thing people tried to do was dumb down their writing, which most would guess was easy enough. Only, it wasn’t. Authors who had a poor grasp of spelling and grammar tended to make mistakes in a way that was difficult for proficient writers to mimic. It becamea dead giveaway—like when an author spelledcopswith akbut thencashwith ac.

It was hard to change writing tics, especially for anyone who wasn’t trained on what they were and how to spot them.

Raisa did a rough job of comparing the letters and Lindsey’s journals on the drive back from Helen’s. There were almost no similarities. Though she had noted on the way out that the letters seemed to be someone trying to change their authorial voice, it had been done by someone proficient at miscommunication, not a nineteen-year-old psychopath who was a middling writer at best.

The differences were ones few would think to employ.

Notably, Lindsey used discourse markers—phrases to organize thoughts, such asI mean,on the whole,although—in about 60 percent of her sentences. The letter writer used them in about 5 percent. Lindsey also liked anaphora—using the same phrase at the beginning of subsequent sentences for emphasis.

One of the more famous examples of the linguistic device was fromA Tale of Two Cities:It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness ...et cetera.

---