Page 20 of By the Time You Read This

Raisa was about to answer when she caught sight of something that had been behind the books Kilkenny had removed.

Journals.

Three of them that she could see, maybe more beyond.

Raisa reached for one and flipped it open.

The first few pages looked like nothing in particular—a dry diary entry about breakfast calories and drinking plans for the night.

Then Raisa got to a sketch. It was a graphic drawing of a man being tortured, bodiless hands peeling the skin from his bones.

How long would you live without your largest organ?

Carefully, Raisa skimmed through the rest, most of which were sadistic diatribes and lists of people’s names with what looked like possible “accidents” next to them.

Raisa exhaled a soft curse and realized Kilkenny had come to look over her shoulder. He didn’t seem surprised at the contents.

“A classic marker of an antisocial personality disorder is a lack of fear,” Kilkenny said, his voice grim. “It would have been noticeable even as a child.”

She thought of those letters that Isabel had kept. They had been signed “Your Biggest Fan.”

If they were looking for the author of those, a psychopath in training might be the exact place they should start.

But if that were the case, if Lindsey Cousins had been Isabel’s Biggest Fan, then that made two psychopaths who had died under mysterious circumstances.

Maybe ... maybe they weren’t hunting psychopaths at all.

Maybe they were hunting someone who killed them.

Chapter Seven

Delaney

Day Four

Disappearing was the easy part.

Delaney had never struggled with that. Leaving her tiny apartment in Seattle behind had hurt more than putting other places in the rearview, but she was still good at it.

What she needed to do now was regroup and figure out a way to beat Isabel at her own game.

Hopefully, she had left whoever was tracking her behind in Seattle.

They might find her again. But she’d bought herself some time.

Let’s play a game . . .

It had been those words that kick-started this whole thing six months earlier. Isabel loved her games, and she loved pulling Delaney’s puppet strings. She must have been so bored in prison.

Delaney decided to circle back toward Seattle, after her ferry ride to Bainbridge. That was probably the last thing anyone following her would think she would do. Most of the time, they would have been right. She would have bought a ticket to someplace in Latin America and lost herself for a few years to the anonymity of a different country.

She couldn’t live with another death on her conscience, though.

They were already starting to stack up.

Delaney didn’t go all the way to Seattle. Hotels were expensive, even the ones that rented rooms by the hour. Instead, she drove through Gig Harbor, past the correctional center where Isabel had spent the last year and a half of her life, and continued on down to Tacoma.

Her two sisters, so close to each other.

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