Page 80 of By the Time You Read This

As circumstantial as it might be, the evidence was starting to stack up in ways she didn’t want to let herself believe. But Delaney had been linked now to two separate victims in the days before their possible homicides.

It was easy to rule Lindsey out as the author to the Biggest Fan letters and the hiking reviews. Those had been written by someone in control of their idiolect enough to know how to hide it. As she’d thought many times before, that was harder than it seemed.

Delaney would certainly be capable of doing it, though. She was a language genius—had she pursued the study, she’d probably be a better linguist than even Raisa, who was at the top of her field.

Confirmation bias,Kilkenny said.

“Yeah, yeah,” she muttered.

The Kilkenny not in her head slept on.

Raisa turned to Emily Logan’s essay and blog posts next.

What struck Raisa the most was that Emily seemed incredibly earnest.

Her idiolect was also extremely easy to track between her essay and her blog posts. Written material in formal settings like college tended to be tighter, more grammatically accurate, and contain fewer misspellings on the whole than casual communication like blog posts. But for Emily, her authorial voice remained strikingly consistent over both mediums. Her errors were consistent, which told Raisa that she’d probably read them over the same number of times. Maybe that was once; maybe that was ten times. She also kept the same chatty tone throughout, like she was gossiping rather than defending a thesis statement.

On a whim, Raisa pulled out a tablet and scrolled through a few common social media sites in search of the FreeBell community.

After landing on a pretty niche subthread on Reddit, she poked around for a while until she found a post that was signed “E.L.”

Ok it’s late, don’t @ me if this comes off sounding cray. But. I think IP’s case did a lot to shine light on the benefits of the armchair movement, just like “Unsolved Mysteries” and faces on milk cartons did back in the day. Collective knowledge and attention can only be a net positive. I know. I know. Think of the families. But don’t you get it? I am. The more eyes on a case, the quicker it will get solved. Just look at Mitchell Johnston’s death. It would never have been solved—just another cold case. Do you remember that movie where the activists were fighting against the death penalty and they wanted a foolproof case to show that innocent people could be killed? And one of the characters was dying of cancer? And they staged it so that it looked like the dude killed her even though she was dying anyway? I feel like the armchair community needs that kind of thing. E.L.

Raisa had to read it a couple of times, because it only vaguely made sense, a common trait with this particular author, who didn’t always follow through on her thoughts.

Emily seemed to be tightly focused on drawing positive attention to her cause, and in making the argument that there should be more eyeballs on the movement, she took a somewhat nonsensical path. Even the reference to Mitchell Johnston was a bit strange, considering it had been the team at the DA’s office who had tracked down that case and not armchairs.

But the actual message was irrelevant. After reading a half dozen samples, Raisa felt like she had a grip on Emily’s authorial voice.

Where that knowledge fit into the rest of it all, she wasn’t yet sure.

Raisa grabbed for Essi’s book. She was curious about how Essi would present herself in the thing when her audience was so wide-ranging. The cover looked like it was trying to be too many things—and landed on the worst elements of an important current-affairs think piece and a celebrity memoir.

The descriptive blurb reflected a similar confusion about what the book wanted to be. Apparently, Essi had talked to experts on thetopics of parasocial relationships, grief, and the psychology of cults. But through the entirety of the descriptive text—which would have been written by someone in marketing, Raisa realized—there was an aura ofcelebrity talking about her interesting life.

If Raisa had seen it in a bookstore, she would have picked it up out of sheer curiosity about how they were going to make the thing cohesive.

She supposed that was the point of it all.

“You want honesty?” Essi had said. “I don’t care. I want them looking at me.”

A knock on the door had Raisa looking up from Essi’s serious expression on the book flap.

Detective St. Ivany stood there, leaning against the doorjamb. She looked tired and pleased.

Raisa blinked at her, confused in that way of seeing someone unexpected and out of place. “What happened?”

St. Ivany grinned. “I found Delaney.”

Notes from Forensic Psychologist Callum Kilkenny’s Personal Journal

Although I would never diagnose Isabel without having seen her as a patient myself, I believe she has a severe attachment disorder that manifests especially strongly when it comes to her surviving family members, Raisa and Delaney.

We have access to Becks’s diary, but my suspicion is that in it she paints a far rosier picture of the girls’ childhood than actually existed.

We know that Tim Parker had schizophrenia, and that Becks was so worried about it that she was tracking good and bad days in the weeks prior to their deaths. In the diary, she also talks about how distant she and Tim felt from their children when the girls were babies. She makes sure to mention that Tim only cared about them when they started showing signs of genius.

Their work as mathematicians was paramount for both of them, and Becks was resentful of Tim that he seemed to be getting her pregnant just so that he could handcuff her career.

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