Page 76 of By the Time You Read This

Something that would be harder to do with Roan Carmichael on her tail.

Had he been the one who’d found Delaney in Seattle? The one who’d sent her fleeing in the first place? Had he then followed her to that hotel, rented a room, slept with her, lied to her? All to ... what?

Well, the answer to that was obvious. Kill her.

She tried to picture Roan with a knife at her throat. Or maybe a syringe of something so it would look like natural causes. Just like what must have happened with Isabel.

Delaney sucked in air. She could picture it because she could picture anyone a killer.

But then a memory nudged into the frame. Roan smiling at her on the boat, handing over his sunglasses.

He could have killed her so easily out there.

Not a single person in the whole world knew she was in Gig Harbor. It would have taken days, if not weeks, for her body to wash ashore somewhere.

Maybe he wanted to torture her instead of making her death quick and easy.

Get over it,she told herself, and then returned her attention to Gabbi.

The girl was nervous—her fingers curled tightly around the strap of her bag.

Delaney’s own heart beat strongly at her pulse points. Maybe Gabbi was just going out for a drink with friends.

Maybe Delaney had gotten this all wrong.

But Delaney had been on this hunt now for six months. She wasn’t often wrong for that long.

Although ... she hadn’t been sure. Gabbi had told Delaney about Lindsey Cousins in their private conversations.

They went to the same school, although Lindsey attended most of her classes online. She must have rubbed Gabbi the wrong way at some point, because Gabbi had confessed to Delaney—well, to Delaney’s online persona—that she’d used her algorithm to figure out the likelihood that Lindsey’s father had actually drowned. The results had come back that the chance he’d died of natural causes had been less than 10 percent, given weather and ocean patterns on the day of his demise.

Lindsey, Gabbi had posited almost gleefully, was a murderer, and had been since she’d been a young girl.

Find the killer.

Kill the killer.

Delaney had been intrigued by Lindsey. Not that Delaney was going to kowtow to anything Isabel said, but if there was someone out there killing people, Delaney wanted to know about it.

So she had set a trap.

A trap by the name of Peter Stamkos.

Isabel had wanted him dead. Delaney had offered him up on a silver platter to anyone who’d wanted to prove themselves to her sister. She’d taken all the steps Isabel would have, by making sure someone—someone other than her, because that could get messy—had called CPS as a concerned citizen. Peter’s story was all set up for someone, the perfect suicide candidate.

Find the killer.

Kill the killer.

If only it were that easy. There was a reason Delaney had taken twenty-five years to stop Isabel—and even then it had been when Isabel herself had flown too close to the sun.

Delaney had been watching Peter’s house. She’d set up cameras around the perimeter for anywhere she couldn’t see.

And yet, whoever had killed him had avoided being spotted.

It made her wonder why she always tried so hard and came up short. Why couldn’t her genius plans ever turn out like Isabel’s did? Why was she so smart on some matters and yet constantly failing when it came to the important ones?

Delaney had been sure it was Lindsey Cousins, though. The girl was a psychopath. She was interested, at least tangentially, in true crime.

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