Page 57 of By the Time You Read This

“Declan O’Brien,” St. Ivany murmured before leaning forward and typing his name into her computer. A minute later she shook her head. “No priors.”

“He was in Mexico the night Emily Logan died,” Raisa said. “Or at least says he was. Seems easy enough to check.”

“I’ll make sure someone gets the details in the morning,” St. Ivany said, and Raisa nodded in thanks. It always sucked when she didn’t have the full resources of the FBI behind her. “So, two girls in the same class, now dead.”

“Both of them were involved in the true crime community,” Raisa pointed out. “And the professor said everyone in town is interested in Isabel.”

“Two deaths in the past two months,” St. Ivany said, running a frustrated hand through her hair. “Goddamn.”

“And Isabel,” Raisa said. “And maybe a fourth.”

St. Ivany squinted at her. “Get out of here.”

“Gabriela Cruz flagged it with her formula,” Raisa said.

“Gabriela,” St. Ivany said on a sigh.

“What’s your read on her?” Raisa asked.

“She’s been working for or volunteering at the department for years now in various iterations of junior programs and internships,” St. Ivany said. “I think she has the potential to be a great detective. I do worry about the way she latched on to Isabel, though.”

“It will impede her career if she gets attached to every charismatic psychopath out there,” Raisa agreed. “But I think shewasright about Peter Stamkos’s death being connected to all this. Isabel wrote his name in her journal—I’m guessing for me to find.”

“Like I said, she’ll make a good detective one day, if she can just get it together,” St. Ivany said and then studied Raisa for a long moment. “What do you think Isabel was hoping to accomplish with that letter she sent you? The first one?”

Raisa thought again about what Kilkenny had said.Isabel wanted you in Gig Harbor.

“She wanted me to find her killer.”

“Did she?” St. Ivany asked. “Because if she did, she would have said, ‘This is the information I know, here is who I suspect is behind this, and this is why.’”

Raisa blinked at that. “Well. Yeah. But it’s Isabel. She would never do something so straightforward.”

“Even if she was trying to get whoever killed her locked up?”

“I never said that was the goal,” Raisa parried before realizing what she was saying.

St. Ivany’s expression turned smug. “Then what was the goal?”

To control me,Raisa thought, but didn’t say. It felt too vulnerable. “To pretend she knew more than she did.”

And that, finally, felt like the truth.

Isabel always wanted to be the mastermind in the room, and when she wasn’t, she would try to fool everyone into thinking she was.

She had known she was being targeted—she was too smart and paranoid to write off that incident with the shiv as random.

But she hadn’t known who it actually was, when it would happen, or how. Raisa guessed she’d simply paid someone to send Raisa that letter. She wasn’t all knowing or all seeing.

She was dead.

“So you think we have a copycat on our hands,” St. Ivany said with a sigh. “One who killed the person they were copycatting.”

“There’s still some logic to straighten out,” Raisa admitted.

“A protégé who tried to run over Agent Kilkenny because you guys were getting too close to an answer?”

“That makes sense to me,” Raisa said, not letting herself think of Kilkenny, fractured skull in her lap, face ashen. “And killed Emily Logan because she found something out, something damning. Or ...”

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