Page 15 of By the Time You Read This

“No, we boxed them up already,” Aileen said, moving toward the door. “I’ll have my secretary help you retrieve whatever was left.”

They were closely watched the rest of the time in the facility, quickly handed a box, and then shown the door.

Raisa couldn’t be too upset with the haul, though.

There were the clothes and accessories Isabel had come in with—a dress, Doc Martens, a watch, her wallet. There was also a small landscape painting that, with its soft colors, looked like it had been done in a therapy class. But the two most intriguing things were a leather-bound journal and a stack of letters.

A quick glance at the latter revealed that many of them were signed “Your Biggest Fan.”

“I think we should check out the address Isabel included before we circle back to the locals,” Raisa said, holding the box on her lap as they drove out of the correctional facility.

Kilkenny gestured toward the SUV’s GPS system, where he’d already punched in the location.

The pleasant British voice informed them that the drive would take forty-five minutes, so Raisa settled back to skim the letters.

She would need to run her full analysis on them, which involved her laptop, linguistic software, and several Excel spreadsheets. But usually she could get a feel for a voice anyway. She’d been doing this long enough to pick up tics and quirks and habits—enough to buildthe bones of a profile in her mind. These letters were strange, though, stripped down—as if whoever had been writing them had known Raisa would, in the future, read them, and they wanted to hide their voice.

That in itself made Raisa feel itchy. Like she’d been dropped into a world that spoke in a language she didn’t even recognize, let alone know.

“Maybe we can get a warrant for the name of the inmate involved in the shiv incident and any bank account information they might have,” Kilkenny said, once she re-stashed the envelopes in the box. He’d been quiet as she did her thing.

Raisa nodded. “You think they were paid to do it.”

It was what she was thinking, too, but there was a slim possibility that Isabel had simply made an enemy in prison, one who’d tried shanking her and then switched to a different method when that had failed.

“Yeah, because of the shifting MO,” Kilkenny said. “If this was just one inmate who wanted Isabel dead, we likely would have seen another violent altercation. Not some devious plan to make it look like natural causes.”

“Well, paying someone to kill Isabel is certainly one way to get revenge while avoiding getting your own hands too dirty,” she said. Plenty of people imagined they’d go allBatmanif a loved one was killed, but most people weren’t murderers.

Kilkenny hummed in agreement. “Aggrieved family member who wanted the death penaltyis quickly rising to the top of my list of suspects.”

“Yeah,” Raisa said. “I wonder why they waited six weeks to try again.”

“Give it time for the incident to fade from memories?” Kilkenny guessed. “And if so, they were successful. The superintendent didn’t seem to think it was connected to Isabel’s death.”

“She doesn’t want to entertain the idea that there might have been a homicide in her facility,” Raisa said. She didn’t add that the superintendent might also believe Isabel had gotten her just deserts, but she thought it.

Raisa was a cynic most of the time. But she’d joined the Bureau when she could have done something else. She truly believed that it mattered how the government treated its “worst” citizens, because it maintained the integrity of the system overall. Everyone deserved a lawyer, everyone should be treated humanely.

If they didn’t fight for the rights of the most dangerous offenders, then those rights couldn’t be considered innate.

They were conditional.

And human rights should never be conditional.

Both things could be true, though. The world was better off with Isabel dead. And they should put in the best effort possible to figure out who killed her.

If this was indeed homicide.

“Revenge as the motive doesn’t really narrow anything down for us,” Raisa said. “I can think of at least a hundred people who wanted her dead. And I’m sure there are hundreds more.”

“Maybe we should ask Essi Halla. She’s a lawyer by day, but in her spare time runs the anti-FreeBell group,” Kilkenny said. “She might be helpful at least in directing us to the right people, the ones who are angriest at Isabel.”

“Maybe itwasEssi Halla,” Raisa offered, but Kilkenny tilted his head back and forward.

“I’m not sure she would have drawn so much spotlight to herself if she was plotting to kill Isabel,” Kilkenny said.

“Or she’s using it to blind everyone to her real motive,” Raisa pointed out.

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