Page 42 of The Truth You Told

Pierce exhaled through flared nostrils, then shifted ever so slightly to cup the back of Conrad’s head. A second later, Conrad’s face hit the table, a loud thunk of bone and metal.

“I can make your last forty-eight hours very painful,” Pierce said, stepping back as if he hadn’t just assaulted a handcuffed man.

Conrad touched his nose, which somehow, miraculously, wasn’t broken or bleeding. Pierce seemed to know just how to cause pain without leaving a mark. Not that Raisa gave two shits about Conrad’s health and happiness, but it was interesting to note. “I’d probably enjoy it more than you’d like, Agent Pierce.”

Raisa wrinkled her nose. She could have gone her whole life without learning such a thing about Conrad.

“Why me?” Kilkenny asked into the tense silence that dropped. “You wrote that in a letter one time. That if I ever found outwhy me, then I would be able to find you.”

It was a vulnerable admission from Kilkenny, an acknowledgment that Conrad had gotten into his head, at least a little bit. But for the first time, Raisa saw something like approval slip into Conrad’s smile. Isabel had worn a similar expression when Raisa had finally stumbled on the right question to ask.

Whatever the answer was, it was important. At least to Conrad.

“I like the trope,” Conrad said, a little too casually. “FBI psychologist, serial-killer mastermind.”

As he said each, he waved first to Kilkenny and then to himself.

Raisa shook her head slowly. Conrad was watching her closely, seeing if she would get to the right conclusion. That meant he might have handed them enough clues in this interrogation that she could figure it out.

Why Kilkenny?

Conrad had given them almost nothing. But maybe it was what hehadn’tgiven them that was the revelation.

Why Kilkenny?Why spend five years engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with an FBI agent? Why arrange for a shocking reveal in order to grab that man’s attention, and then ... barely talk to him when he flew all the way down to Texas?

If Conrad were obsessed with Kilkenny, she’d expect him to be reveling in his victory right now.

There was no reveling. Even the gloating seemed both toned down and, once again, directed at Raisa.

She didn’t for a moment think that made her important—she was just a new piece in this chess match, and he seemed to like shiny objects.

In the end, Kilkenny was just an afterthought.

Raisa went over every word, then stuttered once again at that moment—that moment she’d thought,Huh. She remembered what she’d said to Kilkenny at the airport, in a bit of an exhausted daze.

“Or maybe you had nothing to do with it at all.”

“You say Shay’s name like you knew her,” Raisa murmured.

Kilkenny made some kind of punched-out sound, but Raisa didn’t dare let herself look over at him.

Sometimes there were stories that people told themselves so many times ... they couldn’t see that the stories weren’t always true.

Conrad smiled, close-lipped but pleased. Another secret uncovered before he went to the grave.

“Kilkenny has spent ten years thinking he dragged Shay into the crosshairs,” she said slowly. “But it was the other way around.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Shay

March 2010

Four years before the kidnapping

Shay found Beau sitting on the floor of the kitchen, in the dark, clutching a mostly empty fifth of rum. She didn’t flip on the lights, simply slid down the cabinets until she was shoulder to shoulder with him.

He leaned his head against her. “Dad died.”

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