Page 93 of By the Time You Read This

She could be wrong, but it was a risk she was willing to take.

“Regroup in the morning?” Raisa asked, when St. Ivany pulled to a stop in front of the boutique hotel.

“Yeah,” St. Ivany agreed, though she sounded lost in thought.

“What?” Raisa asked.

“I don’t know,” St. Ivany admitted. “I can’t get a handle on this thing. And you’re leading me astray.”

Raisa laughed. “Yeah, maybe.”

St. Ivany shot her a grin. “Get some sleep. Maybe in the light of day this will all make sense.”

Before Raisa closed the door, she threw St. Ivany a salute, though she had no intention of actually getting any rest.

She wanted to make it through Essi’s book.

Out of everything she had in terms of writing samples, that was the one she’d barely touched.

Raisa settled into Kilkenny’s hotel room—her own had plastic sheeting over the door.

And then she started, once more, from the beginning.

It took only three hours to get through.

When she was done, she didn’t feel like she had any answers. She wondered if she’d just completely wasted her time.

But studying words was never a waste.

She went back through, marking key passages that had come across as particularly voice-y, and she started to build an analysis on them.

Essi was conversational. Her use of contractions—which often gave writing a natural feel—became an idiolectic marker. She never usedI amwhen she could useI’m. She used metaphors and similesso rarely that Raisa wondered if the ones that showed up on the page had been edited in.

Her grammar was harder to judge because she’d likely had several professionals work on the book. But whoever that was had done a nice job.

What was striking to Raisa was that it didn’t sound like anything she’d worked on to this point in the case. Narratively, Essi was able to close a circle when she started drawing one—unlike Emily. She never slipped into any of the psychopathic tics that Lindsey did with her writing.

The closest she sounded to any of the players in the case was to Isabel herself. Namely the way they both wrote as if they were addressing the reader.

Do you hate me yet?Essi had asked in one of her opening paragraphs. It was achingly similar to how Isabel had always includedmy friendwhen writing, even just to herself.

It was something performers did. Not professional performers, necessarily, but people who performed for others as their main type of presentation to the world—which described Essi to a T, if Roan was to be believed. It was a hard habit to turn off, apparently.

Essi did use a few idioms that were slightly left of center, which Raisa assumed were English translations of Finnish originals.

To run with one’s head as a third leg.

There are two ends of a sausage.

To pick up one’s bones.

The last one—meaning, to finally get around to leaving a gathering—was so interesting that Raisa searched it in a few of the databases she used for her investigations.

The Communicated Threat Assessment Database—the brainchild of Jim Fitzgerald, a prominent agent who worked on the Unabomber case—pinged back a result.

It came in an email written by Mikko Halla, Essi’s father.

That wasn’t ... completely strange. Children often used idioms passed down by their parents or grandparents, especially ones that came from their country of origin.

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