Page 117 of The Truth You Told

It wasShay.

Of course it wasShay.

The process was still tedious, but now that Raisa had shaken off the cobwebs, it went faster.

When she got to the end, she was proven right.

Those wasted minutes hadn’t mattered.

DECODED MESSAGE FROM MAXINE BAKER TO NATHANIEL CONRAD ON EXECUTION DAY

She thought I didn’t have the temperament to kill. Isn’t it sweet that the last lesson she learned was just how wrong she was?

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Raisa

Now

When the clock ticked over to midnight, Raisa clinked her beer bottle against Kilkenny’s.

It wasn’t in celebration but rather in acknowledgment.

Kilkenny was here, in the sand, on a small stretch of beach in Galveston, rather than in a cramped execution-viewing room watching the death of the serial killer who had consumed five years of his life, and then another ten after he was caught.

Raisa would never say something cheesy in this moment, but she was proud of him.

They went back to staring out at the ocean in silence as the minutes passed by.

Kilkenny’s phone buzzed.

He closed his eyes before checking it and then exhaled when he did.

“It’s done,” he said.

“How do you feel?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. He was wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt, which felt akin to seeing him in his underwear. His hair was mussed by the breeze coming off the ocean, and he even had the makings of a five-o’clock shadow. Was this a Kilkenny who had slayed his demons and come out the other side realizing perfection wasn’t the answer to being a human?

Or was she romanticizing the exhaustion of a man who’d just spent the last seventy-two hours the way he had?

She liked to think it was at the very least a combination of both.

He ran his thumb over his wedding ring, a habit she hoped wouldn’t disappear but would take on new meaning. Before, when he did it, he was reminding himself of all the ways he could fail if he made the wrong choice. Maybe now it would just be him remembering Shay the way she was when he loved her. Not the way she’d looked in crime scene photographs.

Especially now that he knew, with certainty, that her killer was dead.

They’d found Victoria Langston, a.k.a. Tori Greene, in her parked car near an abandoned Little League baseball field. It looked like she’d eaten her own gun, though Pierce had made sure Max’s letter was submitted into evidence. Was it enough to issue an arrest warrant? Probably not. Especially if the scene was as clean as Raisa suspected it was.

Max had been planning that kill for ten years. She might get away with it.

Raisa shouldn’t think it, but she secretly hoped she would.

They had found a treasure trove—along with Kate Tashibi—at Tori Greene’s apartment. Kate had fumbled with a story about interviewing the psychiatrist about her work with violent children. She hadn’t hidden the gun tucked in the back of her jeans well, but it was Texas. No one was going to jail over carrying a gun.

And anyway, no one paid attention to her for very long. In Tori’s office, local agents had uncovered boxes and boxes of “research” into children who’d gone through violent experiences during crucial stagesin their development. Raisa had no interest in whatever manifesto Tori had penned beyond what she could learn about her idiolect for teaching purposes.

The long and the short of it was that Tori had found ways to worm her way into the lives of these children in hopes of identifying the ones who could prove her thesis correct. She especially targeted children she thought might have been responsible for the violent episode in their youth.

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