Page 72 of By the Time You Read This

He laughed but there was little humor in it this time. “A full life reduced to a single sentence.”

“I’m sorry,” Raisa said, meaning it. She knew what that was like.

“No, I’m sorry. You’re not responsible for your sister’s crimes,” Roan said, sounding like it was a line he’d practiced hoping he’d believe it. “He was far from the perfect victim. Everyone told me he was killed in some drug deal gone wrong or a gang initiation or something where he would have brought his death upon himself.”

“Was he mixed up in those kinds of things?” Raisa asked.

“Yeah, a little bit,” Roan said, lifting one shoulder in a careless shrug. “He’d sobered up three months earlier and cut most of his friends out of his life. But he was at a bar when he died, and that apparently was enough to convince a lot of folks he’d relapsed.”

“Even if he had, it’s not as if he deserved to get stabbed for it,” Raisa said, annoyed on his behalf.

“Preaching to the choir,” he said, holding his hands up. “We got lucky when Isabel was arrested. She’d apparently been active in the area, and there were some photographs in some old Facebook albums linking her and my brother together that night. But she probably picked him because she knew no one would care what happened to him.”

“You cared,” Raisa said.

“Right,” Roan said. “Fat lot of good that did.”

“So how did you get involved in the anti-Isabel group?” Raisa asked.

“I was fairly active in the cold-case community for a lot of the years after my brother was killed,” he said. “I still lurked sometimes, and the group got a big surge with Isabel’s arrest. Lots of people trying to connect their unsolved murders to her.”

Raisa nodded—the thing about a prolific serial killer who’d taken her victims mainly via accidents and suicides was that anyone could latch on to her as the answer to the biggest question in their lives.

“Once you’re in that space, it’s kind of easy to find things like the FreeBell groups and then the antis, as we’re called,” Roan said, rolling his eyes. “As if not wanting a psychopath unleashed on the country warrants the ‘anti’ label.”

The way he saidpsychopathrang an alarm bell in her mind. Because the second part of that pissed-off-family-member theory was that they’d redirected their rage toward anyone displaying psychopathic tendencies.

And this man had a connection to both Emily and Isabel.

“Have you ever heard of someone named Peter Stamkos?” Raisa asked, as neutrally as possible, so as not to put him on the defense.

He pursed his lips. “No. But people don’t always use their real names online.”

“How about Lindsey Cousins?”

Roan shook his head. “Nope. Doesn’t sound familiar.”

Raisa nodded, not sure she believed him. “Okay, so this ‘anti’ community. That’s where you met Essi?”

He laughed. “Oh, Essi.”

“What’s the reaction mean?”

“Sorry, she’s just. Funny,” Roan said, shaking his head. “Her shtick is playing outrage queen and then you get her alone and it’s all,I don’t care.”

“You think she’s performative?” Raisa asked.

“Yeah, but it’s both ways,” Roan said. “No one ever seems to realize that, and it’s actually pretty fascinating.”

Raisa tilted her head, curious. “What do you mean?”

“Everyone thinks that the blasé thing is her true form, right?” Roan said, truly engaged in the conversation now. This was a topic that he found interesting. “But they never stop to consider who they are as an audience might be playing into Essi’s decision to put on that mask.”

“Huh.”

“Right,” Roan said. “It’s a trick to get you to think about her a certain way, just as all that faux outrage is a performance. I don’t know what Essi actually believes but she’ll tell you whatever it is she thinks you want to hear. Or see. Or experience. And the brilliance is that you think she’s being honest because she’s ‘letting you in on a secret.’”

Raisa had to admit she had completely fallen into the trap, because who would want other people to think they were a money-hungry, callously ambitious bottom dweller instead of an actually outraged victim?

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