Page 69 of By the Time You Read This

The closets. The bed. The bathroom. The window, and the ground outside beneath it.

Only then did Raisa fully exhale and drop her gun to her thigh.

She finally let herself look at the damage.

The room was ransacked.

Her clothes were strewn everywhere, many of the shirts ripped apart. The furniture bore knife wounds, the guts spilling out. The curtains had been yanked down and were now pooled on the floor.

On the wall was one message in bloodred spray paint.

Leave

Raisa reholstered her gun and ran.

The young woman at the desk popped her bubble gum as Raisa stopped in front of her.

“Did anyone go up since you’ve been here?”

Joy—if her name tag was to be believed—rolled her eyes. “I don’t know.”

Raisa’s nostrils flared as she tried to control her irritation. Instead of shaking the girl, she flashed her badge. “Did anyone go up to the second floor since you’ve been here?”

The fact that Raisa was FBI did little to impress Joy, who began toying with her gum, pulling it out of her mouth into a droopy string. “Um, some of the guests.”

“Any strangers?”

“Not that I saw,” Joy said with a shrug. “There’s a back entrance, though.”

Raisa closed her eyes, inhaled for patience, opened them. “Does anyone secure that?”

That got her a derisive look. “Uh, no? We’re not Quantico.”

“Thanks,” Raisa gritted out. She took the time to do a sweep of the perimeter and then the hallways, but found nothing except a somewhat startled housekeeper.

She returned to the room. The door had been kicked open, she realized now, the flimsy wood hardly any challenge for someone’s boot. She would have to speak to the owners at some point about the damage. But, for now, she just stood in the middle of the mess.

Isabel would never have done something like this.

She thought,Erratic, hearing it in Kilkenny’s voice. He had theorized that killing Peter Stamkos had broken their UNSUB, and that all the moves since had been a product of their unraveling.

Raisa had looked at Emily Logan’s death as different from Peter’s and Lindsey’s because it hadn’t been staged as an accident or an overdose. She’d wondered if perhaps it had even been someone else who had killed Emily. But what if it had simply been the same killer who had lost control? Maybe that was why the girl’s death had been so brutal.

Kilkenny was better at all that than Raisa, but she thought he might agree. She tried to look at the room now through his eyes.

It was performative, over the top.

That made her think of Essi Halla.

It was immature.

That made her think of Gabriela Cruz.

It was reactive, which made Raisa think of everyone she’d talked to in the past twenty-four hours. Beyond the nurses at the hospital, that boiled down to Gabriela and Essi.

And Maeve St. Ivany.

It could’ve been any of the three or none of them, but it was a stark reminder that Raisa was in a small town, without any backup, and her partner had already been put in the hospital with life-threatening injuries.

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