Page 62 of The Truth You Told

Delaney hung up, and Raisa was left staring at her phone.

She laughed, and it came out slightly hysterical. “Okay.”

Her next call was Aleksander Malkin, who was an easy man to get hold of. He also suggested they meet right away. Sometimes she loved journalists.

When she told him where she was, he rattled off an address not far away.

Twenty minutes later she found herself across from the massive Russian at what had to be the only vodka bar within a hundred-mile radius.

“Call me Sasha,” he told her, and then promptly downed a shot.

Raisa liked him immediately.

“You drink?” he asked, though he didn’t seem to care much about the answer, already refilling his own glass.

“One,” Raisa conceded. She wanted him to talk, and despite the fact that she couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten, one shot wouldn’t incapacitate her.

His lips twitched as if he’d heard that many times. Like he’d heard it and ignored it. The liquor splashed over her fingers when she grabbed hers.

They clinked their glasses together. The vodka slid like silk down her throat before warming her belly. She’d been expecting the fire earlier, in the way of cheap university-level drinking, and she didn’t want to know how much this bottle must cost. Sasha looked unconcerned.

The place was dark and velvety and a nice respite from the warm weather.

“Did you ever try to figure out who the Alphabet Man was yourself?” Raisa asked, waving off his attempts for her to go again.

“No, not my job,” Sasha said.

“But you must have been naturally curious,” Raisa pressed. Reporters—especially crime reporters—were like bloodhounds, in her experience. “Never on your off days? Or late at night? You didn’t come up with any possible scenarios?”

“My pet theory was always Pierce,” Sasha said, with a casual shoulder lift, as if he hadn’t just accused the lead investigator of being a serial killer.

Raisa blinked, trying to catch up. “Why?”

Sasha squinted into the distance. “Pierce’s task force couldn’t catch him.”

“A task force couldn’t catch the Zodiac, either,” Raisa pointed out, as a shortcut to the plenty of serial killers who’d eluded authorities. That didn’t mean every lead agent was the serial killer themselves.

“Zodiac was back then. This was now,” Sasha said, and then tipped his hand back and forth. “Now-ish.”

Raisa knew what he meant. He was saying that with modern technology and crime-solving techniques, Conrad shouldn’t have been able to get away with what he got away with for so long. Except that mindset was influenced by movies and TV shows where every staff was well funded and had buckets of time to devote to the bad guy of the week. This was reality, and it certainly didn’t make Pierce guilty.

The fact that the second author could have been someone on the task force meant Pierce might be guilty of negligence, though.

“Was Conrad ever on anyone’s radar?” Raisa asked. “Even a fringe suspect?”

“Never once heard his name until he was arrested,” Sasha said. “I wish I could say I’d thought it was him all along.”

“He never tried to contact you? Anonymously, of course.”

“No, he was laser-focused on Callum Kilkenny,” Sasha said. “Always found that curious. Not Pierce.” He paused and saluted her with his glass. “Which lent itself to my pet theory.”

“Did you ever do any work to try to prove it?”

“Not my job,” Sasha said again with a jaunty smile, before downing his fourth shot since she’d joined him. He was a large man, so she guessed he wasn’t even feeling it yet. Meanwhile, the room had gone a bit wobbly since she’d had hers.

She gave him a look, and his smile widened to a grin.

“Maybe sometimes I tried to prove it, but then Pierce always had an alibi,” Sasha said. “And I worried if I dug too deep, it would all fall apart. And I didn’t want to let go of my pet theory.”

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