Page 105 of The Truth You Told

“Logic and patterns, yeah, got it.” Raisa huffed out a breath. “So what did you find?”

“The first one: ‘You didn’t even remember me,’” Delaney said, her voice changing, like she was reading off a list. “In the first impostor letter: ‘You are my greatest success.’”

Raisa sucked in a breath.

“Those are the ones that are interesting, but I’ll send the rest,” Delaney said, sounding like she was going to hang up.

“Wait,” Raisa said. “What did the last letter say? The one where the second killer gave away the next victim?”

“‘The world needs to see what I’ve accomplished,’” Delaney said.

“Okay, thanks.” Raisa’s voice sounded distant to her own ears. She hung up and tossed the phone on the table before relaying the messages to Kilkenny.

“They take credit for him,” Kilkenny said, summing up the messages with succinct precision. “Our second killer thinks they created the Alphabet Man.”

Raisa thought about one of the lines from theOriginbook.

Because even the best minds in the world still cannot pinpoint how a serial killer is created.

This wasn’t a vigilante trying to rid the world of the Alphabet Man. This had been someone who’d tried to create a serial killer out of traumatized kids. And they’d succeeded.

The person had identified a child who had potential, and they’d nurtured that violence.

“They must have known him as a kid, right?” Raisa asked. “If they took credit for creating a serial killer, they must have known him long before he’d become one.”

The first victim.

Conrad had been triggered into killing Sidney Stewart while driving home from interviewing for a social worker position. What if Kate’s tip really had been right? What if the list the office had sent over hadn’t been complete? All it would have taken was a glimpse of someone in the hallways or in passing. Someone, maybe, who’d worked on his case when he’d entered the system.

“You don’t even remember me,” Raisa murmured, then locked eyes with Kilkenny. “What if our second author had pretended not to know who Conrad was when they ran into each other again? When he was interviewing in Houston. What if that enraged Conrad?”

“That could have absolutely been his trigger,” Kilkenny agreed. “And maybe even why he accepted the job in Houston. He became fixated on the person.”

“Understandably so.”

“Right,” Kilkenny said, running a hand through his hair. “But I can’t think of a single person who fits that bill. Not on his case from when he was young.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’ve memorized the entirety of his DFPS file from when he was ten,” Kilkenny said. “He didn’t meet with anyone who would have been grooming him to become a serial killer.”

“How do you know that?” Raisa asked.

“He had a social worker, a child advocate, and a police liaison,” Kilkenny said. “We checked all of them once we finally caught Conrad. There’s no way any of the three were involved in this.”

Part of her instinctively wanted to fight back, to wave to the rest of the case and point out how much had slipped under the radar because they hadn’t been looking for a second UNSUB.

“But there had to be other people who had access to him,” Raisa said. She tried to think about everything she’d gone through. It had felt like she’d met so many people in such a short amount of time. Three seemed unfathomable to her.

She tapped back into Isabel’s CPS file, opening it for real this time to see if she was remembering through the lens of a traumatized child.

Even just skimming the summary and table of contents, she could identify a handful of adults who would have interacted with Isabel. Doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, and a speech therapist, for some reason.

“Do you remember the social worker?” Raisa asked.

“Uh, Cathy or Cassie something,” Kilkenny said, already pulling out his phone. It took a couple of minutes, but he eventually found her last name. “Carly. Carly Nolan. I have an old email from her with her cell phone.”

Thank god for cloud storage.

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