Page 16 of The Truth You Told

Raisa

Now

Kilkenny had to come home eventually.

Raisa held on to that thought as she passed the third hour sitting outside his apartment in her car.

They were thirty minutes from midnight, which would make it forty-eight hours until Conrad was executed.

She had her tablet out, the one she liked to use to run her analysis on writing samples. She’d pulled three of Conrad’s earliest letters. And she’d pulled the three that were sent to Kilkenny after Shay was taken.

As much as she hated to admit that Isabel had been right, they didn’t match.

There were complicating factors, of course.

Conrad had written his letters using a cipher. While the FBI had been able to decode all of them eventually with the keys from the victims’ arms, the process could have theoretically messed with Conrad’s idiolect. He might have made deliberate choices because the word was easier to encrypt rather than because it came naturally to him. And on the FBI’s end, Raisa was trusting that the agents hadn’t made anymistakes. A typo from Conrad might have actually come from someone else.

He had also sent the messages in blocks without any spaces around the words so that anyone trying to decode them couldn’t use inevitable patterns in language to help with the process. There were only so many one-letter words in English, only so many two-letter words. If he’d written out the message with proper spacing, it became like playing hangman with the highest stakes possible.

Conrad had even added extra letters in the beginning and throughout to mess with any attempts to predict the words. Once the message was decoded, it was easy to discard the extra stuff as so much gibberish, but it would have thoroughly screwed with the decrypting efforts in the seventy-two-hour window the victims had until they were killed.

Still, Raisa had worked with ciphers before and had taken an entire seminar on the Zodiac Killer’s letters. Since then, she’d dealt with plenty of other criminals who’d written to law enforcement in some kind of rudimentary code.

Raisa was trained to see the bones of a writing sample, even with all those complicating factors.

No matter how many caveats she added to the early, confirmed Conrad letters and the ones after Shay had been taken, she couldn’t deny that the truth was obvious.

There had been two separate writers.

Everything from their grammatical mistakes to the use of similes, ten-dollar words, and slang was different.

Just in the first two letters, Conrad used six similes, two of which centered on animals—clever like a fox,as black as coal,as sharp as a razor,as gentle as a lamb,as bright as the moon,as silent as the grave—to describe either himself, his victim, or what he was doing to his victim.

There was not a single simile in Shay’s letters.

In the earlier letters, Conrad also frequently used double comparatives—a rhetorical device to amplify increasing or decreasing returns.

The more I take from the girls, the brighter their auras burn.

It was obvious he liked his own voice. Whereas the author of Shay’s letters was just trying to get the job done. They didn’t use any rhetorical devices to pretty up the writing.

They did, however, have a strange tendency to drop articles and vowels from long words that ended in-ly. Raisa had seen the same patterns in people who wrote frequently and quickly for a living—journalists, court reporters, medical techs, jobs of those natures.

None of that alone would make a foolproof case, but that’s why she built analyses that accounted for every aspect of an author’s idiolect. And in this instance, when she started adding up the patterns, a profile started to emerge.

Or, rather, two profiles.

That didn’t automatically mean Conrad was completely innocent in Shay’s murder. Maybe he had an accomplice. Maybe he’d drastically changed his voice, either because he had been trying to mislead any possible experts brought in by the FBI or because his writing really had evolved.

That wasn’t unheard of, per se, especially since it would have happened over the course of four years while he was still young. She’d need to go through all the letters to see if there had been a gradual shift throughout—which would take time she didn’t have.

In the quiet of her car, with just herself as the audience, she could admit that she was starting to doubt that Nathaniel Conrad had been the one to kill Shay.

And yet, she had never before wanted to be so wrong.

Right now, Kilkenny at least had closure, had whatever passed for justice in this modern era.

If they opened the door to doubt, how much more of his life would this case consume?

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