Page 6 of By the Time You Read This

Broken.

Lana and Larissa aren’t broken.

But wouldn’t it be more fun if they were?

Chapter Three

Raisa

Day One

Raisa sat back on her heels and laughed, though there was nothing funny about the news that Isabel was dead.

The shiny-toothed broadcaster on her TV had adopted a very serious expression as he informed the audience that police didn’t believe any foul play was involved.

Isabel had been found unresponsive in her bunk at morning roll call. There had been no one else in the cell with her, and there were no signs of a fight. The medical examiner would proceed with the autopsy, but Raisa, and probably everyone listening, knew it would go to the bottom of the priority list. In another state her death would have been mandated by a jury of her peers. There were few out there who would look at this as anything other than justice served by Mother Nature.

When the broadcaster began detailing Isabel’s crimes, Raisa muted the TV. She was quite familiar with her sister’s body of work.

Raisa crossed to her desk and carefully laid the letter down, before picking up her notebook.

No foul play, the broadcaster had reported.

And Isabel’s note saiddead, notmurdered. But if the COD had been natural causes, how would Isabel have known to write to Raisa? How would she have known the exact night she was going to die?

Raisa read the note again.

By the time you read this, I’ll be dead.

The forensic linguist in her noted the use ofreadinstead ofget.

Raisa had been working in law enforcement long enough to know that most criminals weren’t the masterminds that TV portrayed them as. They usually stumbled backward into their success if they ever had any. In the case she’d just come from working, a woman’s boyfriend had taken her phone after he’d murdered her and had spent the night texting the woman’s friends to disrupt the timeline.

But he hadn’t tried to sound like the woman over the texts—even using Spanish slang despite the fact that his girlfriend hadn’t spoken the language at all. He’d been arrested ten days after Raisa arrived.

That wasn’t Isabel.

She was the rare exception: a criminal who actually was brilliant. That’s what happened when your parents were two world-famous mathematicians—which seemed to have translated into an extreme proficiency with language patterns in their children.

The difference betweenreadandgetwas a small thing, but Raisa’s cases were built on small things.

Isabel had help, Raisa wrote in the notebook. That much was obvious just from the method of delivery, but the person who had helped her knew the time she’d be dead by. That was interesting, considering it had been the middle of the night.

Below that note, she scribbled,Suicide?

She almost crossed it right back out again. Isabel was nothing if not dramatic. If she’d died by suicide, the whole world would know.

Raisa bit her lip before writing,Homicide.

No question mark.

Isabel had made plenty of enemies in her life, both outside and—Raisa presumed—inside prison. They’d identified more than a dozen of her victims from her twenty-five-year killing career, and Raisa knew there were ones who had never been found, who would neverbefound.

A list comprising the families and loved ones of those victims could fill a book.

And this was one of the many things Raisa hated about Isabel. Because if she’d known enough to know the date she was going to die, wouldn’t she have come up with an idea for the motive? Or even the killer themselves?

Why not just send that to Raisa—or better yet, the police?

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