Page 32 of The Truth You Told

“Sixteen,” he said, and they met each other’s eyes. Other people might say that was too young to commit a crime like the one that had been done to Shay. But they’d both just seen how dangerous Isabel Parker had been at that age—she’d murdered three members of her family to kick off a twenty-five-year killing career.

“Are you still in contact with her?” Raisa asked.

“No, she left Houston about a year after Shay died,” he said. “She cut all ties with everyone here, and to be honest, I didn’t try very hard to find her. She had no love lost for me.”

“Is Beau still in the city?”

Kilkenny nodded. “Still lives in their house, still works at the hospital.”

Yet both of his sisters were gone. “Was there ever any talk of Max coming to live with you guys when Shay moved up to Seattle?”

“No, Beau didn’t want to leave Texas,” Kilkenny said. “Neither did Shay, honestly. I put in a request for a transfer, but it was denied. Then Shay got pregnant and that forced her hand.”

“Oh,” Raisa murmured softly, surprised but trying not to show it. Kilkenny was staring hard at the seat back in front of him, his jaw tight and his hands clenched together. No one had ever mentioned a child, so it didn’t take much to guess what had happened. There was no need to push him further on a loss that would have been made all the more heartbreaking for what had followed.

“It was hard on Shay,” he continued. “Living in Washington, leaving them behind. And then we lost the baby ...”

Raisa nudged his knee again, this time in silent support. “Did she want to go back to Texas?”

“At that point, no.” He looked out the window, at the sunrise that was creeping along marshmallow clouds. “She was depressed. I’m sure of it, though she didn’t receive an actual diagnosis. I was away so much, she was alone so much.”

There was another story to tell. What had Shay been up to in that time period? If this were a different case, Raisa might have starteddigging. Had there been a lover? One who’d seen a way out of some complicated situation when he realized exactly who Shay’s husband was?

Replicating the Alphabet Man’s MO would have been brutal for any non-psychopath, though. The postmortem tattooing alone would probably dissuade the cruelest of them when they started to consider it. It sounded like anyone who wanted to kill Shay simply could have faked a suicide and had a chance of getting away with it.

“Why were you denied a transfer?” Raisa asked.

Kilkenny was like her—he got shipped around where he was needed far more than he worked out of any one office. Stationing him in Texas almost made more sense than having him on one side of the country.

“They never gave me a reason,” Kilkenny said. “It always made me wonder, though.”

“Did Xander Pierce make that decision?” Raisa asked, trying to remember how high he’d been in the chain at that point. “You would have thought he wanted you close by for the Alphabet Man investigation.”

“I don’t know,” Kilkenny said, with a shrug. He didn’t sound suspicious, though. “I suppose it’s possible Pierce could have poisoned that well even if he wasn’t making the actual decision, but I doubt it. We were good friends at the time. Why wouldn’t he have wanted me down there?”

Raisa hummed in acknowledgment, not agreement.

She didn’t know the answer to that, but she thought it might be a more interesting one than he seemed to want to consider.

CHAPTER TEN

Shay

January 2010

Four years before the kidnapping

Callum Kilkenny sat at the end of the bar.

Shay smiled at the sight of him, told herself not to, and then frowned for real when she saw the man next to him.

He was tall, broad shouldered, and dressed just like Callum. Not like Callum, she corrected. Callum wouldn’t be caught dead in that tie or jacket with its too-short cuffs.

But the man was in a suit, and he had the distinct, watchful air of law enforcement.

Xander Pierce.She hadn’t realized until that moment that Callum had talked about him enough that she could guess who he was without ever having met him before.

Shay ducked back into the kitchen, running into Melissa as she did.

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