Page 27 of By the Time You Read This

She watched as Maya paused on the sidewalk on the way home, staring at Peter’s house for a beat too long to be considered normal.

There was an art to this.

And while she was no Isabel, Delaney had to admit she wasn’t half-bad at it.

Chapter Ten

Raisa

Day One

Gig Harbor only had one hotel in its town limits. It was cute and boutique and right on the water, within walking distance of three coffee shops, two restaurants, and a bevy of tourist shops.

Raisa had simply stuck her luggage from her work trip in the back of Kilkenny’s SUV—and he always carried a go-bag in his car. They would probably need some reinforcements in the name of cheap T-shirts if they stayed more than a couple of days, though.

Something Raisa wasn’t planning on doing.

Kilkenny was on his phone as Raisa took care of the logistics of getting them adjoining rooms.

“Emily Logan,” Kilkenny said. He’d dropped his bag on his bed and then come through the connecting door to her room. “St. Ivany’s homicide victim. She was killed about two weeks ago after a late-night shift. Apparently, sometime during her walk home from the restaurant she waitressed at, she stopped responding to her boyfriend, who was out of town at the time.”

“He called the cops?” Raisa asked.

“No, he called her mom the next day,” Kilkenny said. “At six a.m. Apparently he’d been worried the whole night.”

“Could be that he wanted her found while he had an alibi.” That was the cynic in her talking, of course. But they’d both seen this movie before.

“Maybe.” No one would guess it, but Kilkenny was the optimist out of the two of them. “The mother found her in bed. She’d been stabbed twenty-three times.”

Raisa let out a low whistle. No wonder Maeve St. Ivany had been stressed. “That’s quite the overkill. No suspects?”

“Looks like they brought someone in a week ago, but they were released without any charges.”

“Must not have been anywhere close to solid.” Usually, if the cops had someone in mind and just couldn’t find the evidence, they’d focus their attention on producing said evidence. From the quick glimpse of the murder board in that conference room, Raisa didn’t think they’d zeroed in on any one person.

“You think it has something to do with Isabel?” Kilkenny asked, sounding—reasonably—doubtful.

“No,” Raisa said, mostly believing it. “I don’t know. Even taking Lindsey Cousins’s death out of the equation, that’s still two homicides in a relatively short amount of time, in a small radius, without any obvious suspects.”

“And adding Lindsey back into the equation makes three,” Kilkenny said. “What ties them together?”

“It would be interesting to see if Emily Logan was a psychopath, too,” Raisa said, and then held up her hand. “Possible psychopath.”

“Someone’s taking out psychopaths?” Kilkenny mused. “What if it’s the loved one of one of Isabel’s victims?”

“Oh,” Raisa drawled out. “That’s a hot tamale.”

Kilkenny stared at her. “What?”

“I don’t know.” Raisa laughed, running her hands over her face. “It’s an interesting idea. Like, what if ourUnsub—rightly—blames Isabelfor the death of someone they loved? They pay to have her killed, but it doesn’t actually make them feel better.”

“Or it creates some kind of psychotic break,” Kilkenny added.

“Wait, wait,” Raisa said, shaking her head. “Sorry. Isabel died after the other two. So maybe it is a loved one, but they were radicalized against psychopaths? Now they’re just killing them indiscriminately?”

“Radicalized against psychopaths,” Kilkenny said, with a laugh. “Aren’t we all radicalized against psychopaths?”

“Work with me,” she all but yelled, though it came out amused.

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