Page 61 of The Truth You Told

She hesitated. “Kilkenny.”

There was a pause, and then the distinct absence of ambient sound that meant he’d read her tone for the request it had been and had taken her off speakerphone. “What’s up?”

“Profile-wise, what did you make of the anomaly at the time?” she asked, feeling freer now without Pierce’s hairpin trigger hanging over the conversation.

He didn’t answer for a second, and then she heard a door close behind him. “He was testing it out to see if he got the same thrill from killing men.”

Raisa pulled a face he couldn’t see. “Oh.”

“I know that sounds crass,” Kilkenny said. “Conrad wasn’t attached to the victim type, though. We already knew that.”

“So, the men were an experiment.”

“That he didn’t take to,” Kilkenny said. “He went back to women only. And that became his only real constant. I know it looks strange now. Knowing what we know. But ...”

“At the time it made sense?” Raisa guessed.

“Honestly, yeah,” Kilkenny said on a sigh. She pictured him running a hand through his hair, leaning against a wall, maybe. He was tired. They all were.

“What would you say about someone who only killed three people and framed the Alphabet Man for it?” Raisa asked. “And then turned him in to the FBI.”

“I’d say they had incredible self-control,” Kilkenny said. “Which would have made them even more dangerous than Conrad himself.”

Before Raisa could meet with the journalist, she had one pressing matter to attend to.

She couldn’t stop thinking how strange it would be if their killer had taken three victims and then stopped completely. She paced in front of her car, the contact pulled up on her phone, but she couldn’t quite make herself hit the “Call” button.

To say she had complicated feelings about Delaney Moore would be putting it mildly. Delaney hadn’t exactly aided Isabel’s killing spree—and she had enough plausible deniability to avoid charges on any of the murders—but she’d certainly known about it. Her silence and inaction had damned her in Raisa’s eyes.

But her sister was incredibly skilled at research, primarily with finding patterns that other people couldn’t see. She was also a computer guru who had written algorithms that the FBI would kill to get its hands on.

In Raisa’s opinion, Delaney owed the world a whole lot of free public-service work, and Raisa was going to make sure she paid up.

Only ... she didn’t exactly relish talking to Delaney. Nor asking her for a favor.

“Do it, do it, do—” Her finger hit the screen.

“Hello,” Delaney said after one ring.

There was no surprise—no emotion whatsoever—in her sister’s voice, despite the fact that the last time they’d talked, Delaney had been holding a gun on Raisa.

“You need help with the Kilkenny stuff,” Delaney continued before Raisa could find her tongue.

“Yes.” If Delaney was going to make it easy on her, Raisa wasn’t going to make it hard on herself. “I’m looking for more victims in the Houston area.”

There was a pause. “No tattoos?”

And this was why she’d called Delaney even though half of her regretted having to. For some reason, she and Delaney had been able to follow each other’s thoughts as if they’d worked together for years.

A more fanciful person would think their familial connection had something to do with it. Raisa thought it was probably just genetics. Their brains were wired similarly.

“No cipher,” Raisa confirmed. “Unsolved murders, men in their twenties to thirties, Houston area. A wide net, though. Think four to five surrounding counties.”

“Anything else?”

Raisa chewed on her lip. She had a gut feeling, but it wasn’t strong enough yet to limit the searches. “No.”

“Okay.”

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