Page 79 of By the Time You Read This

“Priority shipping,” Raisa promised and then headed back outside.

Raisa ended up packing the thing next to all the other writing samples she had, before heading to the hospital.

The nurse behind the desk—the same one who had been working it when she’d first come in—lit up when he saw her.

“You can go back,” he said. “He’s not awake, but he’s stable. Room 114.”

Raisa’s rib cage went tight. “Thank you.”

Somehow she managed to find the room, and there, for the first time since she’d all but told him to go to hell, was Kilkenny.

She swayed on her feet at the sight of him, reaching out to the wall to steady her.

He looked so small, surrounded by machines with lines coming out of his hands, his arms. A steady beeping filled the room. At any other time it might be grating, but for now it was the sweetest sound she’d ever heard.

His heart beat on.

Raisa exhaled and inhaled, keeping pace with the inadvertent metronome.

Kilkenny was too pale, from what she could see beneath the bruises. The egg on his cheekbone was every color on the spectrum, from a deep violet to turquoise to just a hint of putrid green. His sheet revealed the shape of a cast on his leg.

But the worst part was the white bandage wrapped around his head. She knew that they’d removed part of his skull to relieve the pressure, and she just ... she couldn’t think about the ramifications of something that, in this moment, looked so clean and innocuous.

Raisa sank into the chair beside his bed, her eyes landing on his face, his chest, the bandage, his feet, the rise of his kneecaps, his hands.

Only after the third or fourth pass was she satisfied that she hadn’t missed some gaping hole in his chest.

Finally, she relaxed enough to pull everything she’d brought out of her bag. She nabbed a dinner tray so she could spread it all out in front of her.

Despite the fact that Raisa had worked with Delaney before she’d known they were related, she didn’t have any writing samples from her. The closest she came were the blog posts submitted to the DA that showed Delaney talking about two different people Isabel had gone on to kill.

Those had been written when Delaney was a teenager, though. While that could provide something of a baseline, Raisa would be hesitant to make any judgments off it.

What she did have were the reviews and the letters from Isabel’s Biggest Fan.

They were difficult to run analyses on because they had been written in doublespeak that only one reader was meant to understand. Doublespeak wasn’t considered a code in the truest sense, but it would absolutely alter the author’s idiolect into something mostly unrecognizable.

Still, both materials were worth working up an analysis on.

One particularly interesting typo in both the letters and the reviews was a missedtintheso the word becamehe. It happened three times in the reviews and four times in the letters.

It was a small thing, but it was something to build on and gave some credence to her notion that they were the same author.

There were a few other similarities—like the author’s tendency to splice a phrase with a comma. But she didn’t want to let her biases take over. There were plenty of differences, too, including that noticeable absence of amplifiers in the Biggest Fan letters.

Raisa put those aside and moved on to Lindsey’s journals.

She had recently read an article in a research journal about the connection between linguistic choices and psychopathy deviations. The author had found that people with antisocial personality disorders tended to self-reference frequently; use emotional phrases, though not ones connected to anxiety; favor past-tense words, articles, and concrete nouns; and employ shocking language meant to arouse a reaction in the reader.

Lindsey’s idiolect fit the model perfectly.

But it didn’t reveal much else beyond disjointed fantasies about killing all the people she hated.

Except ... except for one entry a few days before Lindsey’s death.

There was a total cunt ass bitch on the cruise today. Tried to threaten me, something about the dangers of being interested in true crime documentaries. I wanted to kill her right there. Scalp that braid right off her head and shove those hippie rags down her throat until she choked.

Raisa swallowed hard. That description could fit so many people, but itdefinitelyfit Delaney. And it matched the one Julia had given her about the woman sitting outside Peter Stamkos’s house.

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