Page 23 of By the Time You Read This

Lindsey’s use of it was a bit more violent.

This knife that cuts this flesh like butter, this heart that’s so easy to consume as this blood rinses out my mouth, this death. This death.

There was a bit of emo-poetry girl to it that didn’t quite match with the pictures Helen had up, but that was the beauty of writing. It revealed things people wanted to keep hidden.

“Not her,” Raisa announced. “For the letters. And obviously she couldn’t have killed Isabel, since Lindsey was already dead.”

“What gives it away?” Kilkenny asked. “In the letters, that is.”

“Lindsey is addicted to amplifiers,” Raisa said, throwing out just one of a dozen small things she’d noticed. “With a particularly notable preference for ‘deeply.’ She uses it sixteen times in the span of as many pages. Not a single amplifier within the letters themselves—to a strange extent, given that it’s signed from Isabel’s Biggest Fan.”

When Kilkenny didn’t say anything, Raisa’s shoulders tensed. “I know that sounds like a stretch, but it’s just one of the examples—”

Kilkenny cut her off. “No. I’m not doubting you. It just seems like magic to me. I like to appreciate it.”

Raisa flushed at her own defensiveness. Sometimes she couldn’t help it, even with Kilkenny. “I’ll have to do a more thorough analysis.”

Those involved graphs and statistics and equations that no one but the nerdiest linguists loved.

“But you have a sense,” Kilkenny said. “It’s okay to be so good at your job you don’t have to go through every step to come up with a general conclusion.”

“Watch me be wrong,” Raisa said, because she was far more comfortable at self-deprecating remarks than she was with accepting compliments. “But yeah. With the voices and styles as different as these, I can pretty confidently say that they were written by two different people.”

“So, what does Lindsey have to do with Isabel?” Kilkenny asked.

“It looks like she was taking inspiration from the way Isabel got away with her crimes, but not much else.” There were a few mentions of Isabel throughout the journals, but it was often just a passing thought. Lindsey had listened to at least one of the podcasts that had detailed the murders that had been Isabel’s ultimate downfall, but Lindsey had also listened to a lot of other popular true crime content.

“But Isabel knew about her,” Kilkenny mused. “And now they’re both dead.”

“Two dead psychopaths,” Raisa murmured.

“Possible,” Kilkenny warned.

“Two dead possible psychopaths,” Raisa amended. “Well, one dead psychopath, one possible. You get what I’m saying. And it’s weird, right?”

“Very,” he said, though neither of them had a chance to speculate further before Kilkenny pulled to a stop in front of the Gig Harbor police station.

They had to flash their badges a couple of times, but eventually they were directed to the lead detective in the department.

Maeve St. Ivany.

St. Ivany had a face that would send photographers into raptures—prominent cheekbones and wide-set eyes that probably looked fantastic in pictures but seemed a bit too much in person. She wore her strawberry-blonde hair in gentle waves, but that was the only soft thing about her. Her shoulders were those of a swimmer, and her mouth had been pressed into a serious, annoyed line for the ten minutes it had taken them to fill her in on everything that had happened since Raisa had opened that envelope.

“You have an unsigned letter,” St. Ivany said, with the same tone she’d probably use on a bunch of flat-earthers if they’d barged into her office.

“Yes, but it’s from Isabel,” Raisa said, trying to keep her own patience.

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“No,” Raisa said slowly. “But I got it when she died.”

“Near the time she died,” St. Ivany corrected, gazing at the wall behind them, her mind clearly working. “It could have been a cruel prank, no?”

“Someone who knew she had died in the middle of the night before the facility even found her body?” Raisa asked, and St. Ivany tipped her head, seeming to acknowledge that scenario was unlikely.

“She was an otherwise healthy woman in her early forties who had been involved in a violent confrontation not even two months earlier,” Raisa continued. If a woman with Isabel’s profile had shown up in a normal emergency room, the medical examiner would’ve been all over the death.

“You’re right, that is suspicious,” St. Ivany agreed, but something about the way she said it rankled.

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