Page 70 of By the Time You Read This

On her way out, she informed Joy of the damages, while assuring the girl she could stay in Kilkenny’s room. Not that Joy had shown any signs of distress at the news either way.

Raisa then grabbed her laptop—thankfully unharmed, as she’d thought to lock it in the room’s safe—and headed toward the prison.

The visitor logs were easy to access—they were technically public documents—but the front desk regretted to inform her that they couldn’t filter the records by inmate.

So she was given a conference room and a thick stack of notebooks.

She stared at them, wondering if it was a waste of time.

What else could she be doing, though?

Watching Kilkenny’s heart monitor, rereading those letters from Isabel’s “Biggest Fan,” which Raisa was half-convinced was actually Delaney. Scouring Lindsey Cousins’s journals to confirm that she was indeed a psychopath.

That wouldn’t change anything besides maybe confirming a possible motive for her death.

It took Raisa an hour before she got to Isabel’s first visitor. It had been a woman named Sadie Richardson, who’d made a documentary about Isabel. Raisa hadn’t watched it, but she knew it had been the most-viewed movie for a month on one of the big streaming services.

It took her another forty-five minutes to get to Delaney.

“Crap.” She’d known it was going to be there, but it still was upsetting to have proof.

Raisa let herself imagine it. Had Delaney come crawling back, or had Isabel threatened her? Either way, it had ended up in the same place—Isabel telling Delaney what to do. Delaney protesting, but likely doing it anyway.

Delaney had visited one more time, a few months before Isabel had died.

In all that time, Isabel had only received one other visitor.

The name . . . looked familiar.

She had never met the person, but she had seen the name somewhere recently. It was beautiful, unique, and that was why it had stubbornly stuck to her brain like a bur.

Raisa thought through all the material she’d parsed through over the past forty-eight hours or so. Emily’s and Lindsey’s journals; the Biggest Fan letters and the hiking reviews; Gabriela’s murder board.

None of those were right, though.

She closed her eyes and pictured where she’d seen it. Long, pink nails. A blinking cursor. A swaying dock beneath her feet.

Essi.

When they’d first interviewed Essi Halla, they’d asked her to give them a list of “true believers”—family members who actually hated Isabel enough to do something as drastic as hiring someone to kill her. It had been the first motive Raisa had come up with when she’d been trying to figure out who would have done this. How simple it would be, if there was no protégé, there was no copycat, there was no need to parse the ethics of fandom and true crime.

This really might have been it all along, just a pissed-off family member.

Raisa quickly thumbed over to her notes app and then held the phone up next to the visitor log.

And there it was, matching Isabel’s last visitor.

Roan Carmichael.

Transcript of Emily Logan’s Interview with Roan Carmichael

Emily Logan:Can you tell me your name and a little about yourself?

Roan Carmichael:Uh, Roan. Roan Carmichael. And, uh, I don’t know what I should say? I work in the tech industry in Seattle. My brother was murdered ten years ago. That’s ... that’s it.

Logan:That’s great, that’s all great. Now, from what I understand, you were a large part of the unsolved mysteries community online.

Carmichael:I was, yeah. No one knew who killed my brother, and it drove my mom to, well, give up. On herself for years, really. She shut down, couldn’t hold a job to save her life. I was paying her rent, I was getting her groceries delivered. She just ... she wanted to know, you know. What happened to Mitch. I think if she’d justknownshe would have been okay to move on.

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