Page 58 of By the Time You Read This

“Or what?”

Raisa shrugged. “Someone wanted revenge on Isabel, couldn’t get to her, so instead just started playing vigilante and killing psychopaths.”

St. Ivany’s brows shot up. “That would mean you think Lindsey, Emily, and Peter were all psychopaths.”

“It could be what connects the victims,” Raisa said. “We know Lindsey had signs of an antisocial personality disorder, and Peter abused his child. Isabel speaks for herself. So that leaves Emily.”

“There’s nothing that points to her being one,” St. Ivany said carefully, but Raisa could tell she was intrigued.

“And nothing that doesn’t.”

“True,” St. Ivany said, and then scrubbed her hands over her face. She was sitting on the floor in front of her coffee table, amid her stacks of file folders. And ... she looked small, almost defeated. That lasted only for a second, before she stood, brushing off her pants. “I don’t have the bandwidth to figure anything out tonight. I’m going to getsome sleep, you can look through anything you want. Consider yourself officially invited onto the case.”

And with that, St. Ivany left the room. Water started running a few seconds later.

Raisa stared out at the mounds of papers, most of which probably meant absolutely nothing, and instead went back to read through Emily Logan’s final essay.

It was immediately clear off the hop how much Emily cared about this topic. She truly believed that the surge in true crime hobbyists was going to be a turning point in solving more cold investigations across the country. In fact, she seemed so passionate about it that Raisa searched for her name in the Bureau’s unsolved cases, curious if Emily had a relative or loved one who had never received justice.

Nothing came up and Logan was too generic a last name to return anything helpful in a broader search. But Raisa noted to herself that Emily might have a personal stake in all this. That could always influence a person—radicalize a person, even. If the system had failed her, if a loved one’s cold case was collecting dust somewhere, maybe that frustration had led her down the path to discovering something that had ultimately gotten her killed.

That’s not the crime we’re trying to solve,she heard in Kilkenny’s voice. Raisa considered herself a competent agent and a fairly skilled linguist. But she wasn’t perfect. She could get distracted when she got pulled in multiple directions. She knew her strengths and weaknesses—and a supervising agent she would never be.

She followed the rabbit down its hole too many times.

“What are we trying to solve?” Raisa asked the room, wishing she were asking Kilkenny himself.

Isabel’s murder.

Raisa chewed on the inside of her cheek. Emily, Lindsey, and even Peter were all connected, and that path would lead back to Isabel, she was almost certain of that.

But the other path is clearer. Focus on Isabel first.

“No, it’s not,” she muttered, just to be annoying. Still, she dug in her bag for the Biggest Fan letters, the ones with the hiking trails mentioned in all of them. The ones that had been found in Isabel’s cell, the ones that might be the key that Raisa was ignoring because she couldn’t read her dead psychopath sister’s mind.

There was something here that Isabel wanted Raisa to find; otherwise she would have left the letters and the rest of her possessions for Delaney.

The hiking trails, of course, stood out the most.

Whatever she was trying to communicate wasn’t about the hiking trails themselves—a good thing, considering Raisa was a city girl through and through. All the letters that came in and out of the correctional facility had the chance of being read. It was even such common practice to infuse paper with drugs such as fentanyl that some prisons had moved toward scanning any incoming letters and sending them to the inmates as a digital copy.

Isabel and her Biggest Fan were using the hiking trail names to talk about something that would slip past all those guardrails.

It made Raisa think about how Delaney had communicated with Isabel when they were teenagers. She’d simply created a blog where she “talked into the void” about people who had grievously wronged her. Isabel had been there waiting to read it all and then act on it.

Not only had it been easy, but there was plausible deniability on Delaney’s side of things. Enough that the DA hadn’t even bothered to throw some conspiracy charges her way.

Of course, online blogs or forums like that would be a great way for someone to communicate with Isabel behind bars as well. Prisoners didn’t have access to the internet beyond educational classes and monitored email—in theory. But Raisa had read enough memos from the Bureau to know there were plenty of creative ways to successfully smuggle cell phones into prisons. Once you had that as a tool, it was easy enough to find Wi-Fisomewhere. In one case, an inmate had even used the Wi-Fi set up for the nurse’s printer.

Raisa didn’t think Isabel would be able to run roughshod on the dark web, but it was believable that she would’ve been able to access someone’s blog.

Or someone’s . . .

Her eyes slipped to the hiking trail mentioned in the first letter.

“Holy shit.” Raisa sat up, scrambling for her computer. She grabbed it from her bag and booted it up.

When she got to a blank internet page, she simply ran a search on the trail name. The very first response was from a website designed especially for hikers to track the summits they hit.

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