Page 38 of The Truth You Told

Shit, she was tired. She’d meant to keep that close to the vest. Still, when she glanced over to Kilkenny, he simply shrugged. So she explained the two-author scenario to Pierce.

“I was going to say, though, that you wouldn’t have been able to tell that before decrypting it, of course.”

Pierce rubbed his hand over his face. “I’m not sure that would have been enough to convince us anyway. He might as well have left a neon arrow pointing at himself.”

Or someone else had. Raisa wasn’t going to continue banging her head against that brick wall.

“Well, it’s enough to convince plenty of judges,” Raisa said, coolly. “Okay, just because we have time, let’s go do some wild theorizing. Hypothetically, do you have any gut instinct on who would have killed Shay and framed Conrad?”

Pierce looked to Kilkenny, his eyes clearly telegraphing,Can you believe this?

But Kilkenny just stared back, waiting for an answer.

Something warm and pleased bloomed in her chest at his silence. She and Kilkenny? They were a team. They would provide a united front even if they disagreed, because that’s what partners did.

She swallowed against her suddenly dry throat, and turned her attention back to Pierce.

He lifted one shoulder. “It seems like a pointless exercise.”

“Does it?” Raisa asked, and then looked around the room, reminding them all where they were. They had enough doubt that they were currently tap-dancing to Conrad’s tune. A little bit of brainstorming didn’t seem like it would hurt.

Pierce exhaled, his nostrils flaring with his frustration.

“Her family was a mess.” He grimaced. “Sorry, K.”

Kilkenny shook off the apology. “That wasn’t a secret. I’ve already filled Raisa in on some of it.”

“Yeah, well, there’s some of it you might not know,” Pierce said. “Hillary, the mother, was into everything in the borderlands of legal. And most things over the line as well. Drugs, guns, prostitution. It was usually her boyfriends running the deals, but she didn’t exactly object to the paydays.”

“But Hillary was never arrested?” Raisa asked.

“No, that woman was Teflon.”

Raisa gamed out a scenario where a mother could torture and kill her daughter. She knew better than most that familial ties didn’t always matter, not to a narcissistic sociopath. But if Hillary’d had violent tendencies, it was doubtful she would have been able to keep herself out of jail her entire life. “Was she still in contact with Shay?”

“She didn’t even come to the funeral,” Kilkenny said, the bitterness as sharp as if it had happened recently. “She’d swing by every once in a while, try to steal some money, use the house as a place to crash, and then leave town again.”

Even if Shay had gotten caught up in something Hillary was doing, it was hard to imagine a drug lord or pimp going to the effort of coveringtheir tracks in such a way. When men like that had a body to get rid of, they had more efficient means than pretending to be a serial killer.

When she explained that, Kilkenny nodded, thoughtful.

“So, seems a stretch to say that had anything to do with it,” Raisa said, and Pierce made a sound that was somehow both agreement and derision.

“Right, because Conrad is lying,” Pierce said, as if talking about it for five minutes and dismissing the most obvious alternate theory were really proving his point. “He’s the one who killed Shay.”

“Maybe, but not necessarily,” Raisa said. “What about the siblings? Did they have alibis?”

She was mostly thinking about Max, the half sister. But Beau interested her as well. He was a nurse, which meant he was more comfortable with the reality of death. The brutality of it. Maybe he’d become numb enough to be able to tattoo a cipher on his dead sister’s arm.

Pierce rocked back on his heels. “Max was at home. No one could account for her whereabouts, but she didn’t have a car.”

That was hardly an issue for an ambitious young woman. “And the brother?”

“He worked at the hospital,” Kilkenny chimed in. “Security footage puts him there for most of the window of her kidnapping.”

“You can believe he wasn’t happy that I checked that, either,” Pierce said.

“Why did you?” With everything else he was saying, he hadn’t even seemed to have considered anyone outside of the Alphabet Man.

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