The Lies You Wrote, page 1
PRAISE FOR BRIANNA LABUSKES
What Can’t Be Seen
“The book’s well-constructed plot matches its three-dimensional characters. Psychological-thriller fans will be eager for more.”
—Publishers Weekly
A Familiar Sight
“A horrific brew for readers willing to immerse themselves in it.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A strong plot and unforgettable characters make this a winner. Labuskes is on a roll.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A Familiar Sight has everything I crave in a thriller: a shocking, addictive female lead; unexpected twists that snapped off the page; and an ending that made me gasp out loud. I never saw it coming, but it was perfectly in sync with the razor-sharp balance between creepy and compelling that Labuskes carries throughout the novel. This is a one-sitting read.”
—Jess Lourey, Amazon Charts bestselling author
Her Final Words
“Labuskes skillfully ratchets up the suspense. Readers will eagerly await her next.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Labuskes offers an intense mystery with an excellent character in Lucy, who methodically uncovers layers of deceit while trusting no one.”
—Library Journal
Girls of Glass
“Excellent . . . Readers who enjoy having their expectations upset will be richly rewarded.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
It Ends with Her
“Once in a while a character comes along who gets under your skin and refuses to let go. This is the case with Brianna Labuskes’s Clarke Sinclair—a cantankerous, rebellious, and somehow endearingly likable FBI agent with a troubled past. I was immediately pulled into Clarke’s broken, shadow-filled world and her quest for justice and redemption. A stunning thriller, It Ends with Her is not to be missed.”
—Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author
“It Ends with Her is a gritty, riveting roller-coaster ride of a book. Brianna Labuskes has created a layered, gripping story around a cast of characters that readers will cheer for. Her crisp prose and quick plot kept me reading with my heart in my throat. Highly recommended for fans of smart thrillers with captivating heroines.”
—Nicole Baart, author of Little Broken Things
“An engrossing psychological thriller filled with twists and turns. I couldn’t put it down! The characters were filled with emotional depth. An impressive debut!”
—Elizabeth Blackwell, author of In the Shadow of Lakecrest
OTHER TITLES BY BRIANNA LABUSKES
Dr. Gretchen White Novels
See It End
What Can’t Be Seen
A Familiar Sight
Stand-Alone Novels
Her Final Words
Black Rock Bay
Girls of Glass
It Ends with Her
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2023 by Brianna Labuskes
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781662511363 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 9781662511356 (digital)
Cover design by Damon Freeman
Cover image: © Sahana M S / ArcAngel; © Cosmic_Design / Shutterstock
To all the linguists out there,
from an author who has a new and deep respect for how hard your job is
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE RAISA
TRANSCRIPT FROM JENNA SHAW’S BELOW THE SURFACE PODCAST, EPISODE 2
CHAPTER TWO RAISA
CHAPTER THREE DELANEY
CHAPTER FOUR RAISA
EXCERPT FROM BECKS PARKER’S DIARY
CHAPTER FIVE RAISA
CHAPTER SIX DELANEY
CHAPTER SEVEN RAISA
SAMPLE OF MESSAGES POSTED ON THE “ALEX IS INNOCENT” INFINITY9 THREAD
CHAPTER EIGHT RAISA
CHAPTER NINE DELANEY
CHAPTER TEN RAISA
TRANSCRIPT FROM JENNA SHAW’S BELOW THE SURFACE PODCAST, EPISODE 4
CHAPTER ELEVEN RAISA
CHAPTER TWELVE DELANEY
CHAPTER THIRTEEN RAISA
EXCERPTS FROM TERRI HARDEN’S CASE REPORT ON ALEX PARKER
CHAPTER FOURTEEN RAISA
CHAPTER FIFTEEN RAISA
CHAPTER SIXTEEN DELANEY
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN RAISA
EXCERPT FROM EVERLY EARS GOSSIP COLUMN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN RAISA
CHAPTER NINETEEN DELANEY
CHAPTER TWENTY RAISA
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE DELANEY
EXCERPT FROM LANA PARKER’S DIARY
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO RAISA
EXCERPTS FROM BECKS PARKER’S DIARY
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE RAISA
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR DELANEY
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE RAISA
EXCERPT FROM ISABEL PARKER’S DIARY
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX RAISA
TRANSCRIPT FROM JENNA SHAW’S BELOW THE SURFACE PODCAST, EPISODE 5
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN RAISA
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT RAISA
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE DELANEY
CHAPTER THIRTY RAISA
EXCERPT FROM ALEX PARKER’S CONFESSION LETTER
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE RAISA
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO DELANEY
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE RAISA
EXCERPT FROM EVERLY EARS GOSSIP COLUMN
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR RAISA
EXCERPT FROM RAISA SUSANTO’S LINGUISTICS SEMINAR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE RAISA
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX DELANEY
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN RAISA
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT DELANEY
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE RAISA
CHAPTER FORTY DELANEY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE RAISA
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO DELANEY
EXCERPT FROM PIA SUSANTO’S DIARY
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE RAISA
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR DELANEY
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE RAISA
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX DELANEY
EXCERPT FROM DELANEY MOORE’S DIGITAL JOURNAL
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN RAISA
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER ONE
RAISA
FBI forensic linguist Raisa Susanto tucked the twenties into her bra strap as the men gathered around her. They were eager for a show, and she would give them one.
She hopped off the desk where she’d been sitting cross-legged and walked over to the glass board that spanned most of the wall of the Seattle FBI field office’s main room.
There was one sentence written there.
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Raisa grinned as she turned back to the group. Six G-men stood in a half circle around her, all of them watching this play out with varying levels of smugness and doubt.
As a forensic linguist, she was used to skepticism. These field agents didn’t exactly like people they deemed paper pushers, let alone someone who promised she could name a suspect on a sentence or two alone.
Raisa didn’t have any allies in the bureau who would go to bat for her, either. Because of how specialized her field was, the FBI lent her out to cases rather than stationing her in one region. Making friends—or even cultivating some friendly colleagues—required spending more than one investigation with the same people.
But Raisa had found ways to earn respect and earn it quickly. What she was about to do amounted to a parlor game that she would never have agreed to perform had there been another linguist in the room. She did have some shame, after all. While it might be a cheap ploy, though, it had about a hundred percent success rate in impressing laypeople.
Most of the time, she saved this particular trick for when she was working with a team and needed them to trust her without question. She wasn’t working with these guys. In fact, she’d only stopped by the field office to wrap up some paperwork. But one of them had made some snide under-his-breath comment about her being a waste of space and Raisa wasn’t one to back down from a chance to put him in his place.
She cracked her neck, scanning the group. The ability to read people quickly had been a survival mechanism back in foster care. After losing her parents to a car crash at the tender age of ten, Raisa had been dumped in enough broken homes to be able to tell in a single glance who posed a threat.
These men gathered around her now were as easy to understand as the sentence on the board.
There were six of them. Three wanted to be convinced; one was along for the ride; one was skeptical but wasn’t going to be rude about it. And then there was the cocky one, who was staring at her with such contempt she started to wonder if he’d had a bad run-in with a linguist in his life.
She didn’t even need to look at the board to know he was the one who’d written the sentence.
But what fun was a magic show without a little pizzazz?
“This was written by a male, of course,” she started to a few snorts since that was the only option. Raisa was amused that none of them seemed to realize the real joke was that out of seven FBI agents, only one of them was a woman—and she was being forced to prove her own expertise to win their respect. “In his mid to late forties, educated at a small, non-Ivy, liberal arts college. Northeast, probably, by both birth and schooling.”
“Please, that could describe half the bureau,” the cocky one said. Andrew Cabot, if she remembered correctly. Sometimes she longed for the days when she’d been a scrappy kid, able to simply throw hands at someone who had such an obvious problem with her.
“He majored in statistics or political science,” Raisa continued, without acknowledging the interruption. “Not English. His coworkers might admire his work ethic, but he has few actual friends in the department.”
That was her grown-up, professional-FBI-person version of a right hook. It was nearly as satisfying.
There were a few coughs at that and darting eyes, though, notably, no one looked at Cabot.
“How did you get all that?” one of the men asked, the one along for the ride.
“This is a common pangram, the one most people know if they know any,” Raisa said, tapping the board. “A pangram is a sentence that uses all the letters in the alphabet. This one was popularized with the rise of computers, as it was often used as dummy text in code. But I don’t think as many young people recognize it, which gave me his age. There’s no period at the end, which an English major who was trying to show me up would have certainly included. Because I know he’s an FBI agent, that left two probable majors. I suppose it could have been history as well, but I’m guessing it was poli-sci.”
“And how do you know he wasn’t Ivy League?”
“Because he would have used something esoteric rather than the most common pangram,” Raisa said with a little shrug that she knew would annoy Cabot. “It might seem obscure to anyone who hasn’t studied language, but it’s pretty basic for us word nerds.”
“Would you have been able to tell the gender if you didn’t know it was one of us?”
“It’s hard to guess what I would have been able to do.” That got an approving nod from one of the guys. “But I would say yes. I asked that one of you write down whatever came to mind, and from that I’d be able to narrow down a pool of people to build a profile.” She tapped the board again. “This was meant to trick me because the person thought it would give none of himself away. The same as using lorem ipsum as filler text. But every time we engage with words, we make choices. It was a choice to try to give nothing away.”
“How does that tell you about the gender?”
“When I ask women to do this, they tend to write something that would test me, not humiliate me in front of a group of colleagues,” Raisa said, direct but not rude. As was her brand. “Everything comes with context. If I had picked up a piece of paper out on the street with just this pangram, I wouldn’t be able to tell much about the writer at all. But I didn’t pick it up on the street. And in investigations, we usually have evidence to work with.
“That’s where you all would come in. You give me the context.” She shot them an over-innocent smile. “Isn’t teamwork beautiful?”
When none of the men said anything, she clapped. “Okay, stakes have been laid. Who was it?”
The man next to Cabot nudged his shoulder, and the other men shuffled a bit awkwardly.
Raisa turned to one of the younger agents, who now stared at her with just a hint of awe. “How accurate was I?”
“Spot on,” he said with an eager little lilt, then coughed and slid a glance toward Cabot.
“Bucknell, political science major,” Cabot finally admitted to some good-natured slaps on the back. “Forty-seven years old.”
“And the friends in the department?” Raisa asked sweetly. When the man next to Cabot grimaced, she plucked the twenties back out of her bra strap. “I’ll take that as a yes. And I’ll take these winnings, as well.”
She slipped the cash into the back pocket of her jeans and then caught movement out of the corner of her eye.
FBI forensic psychologist Callum Kilkenny leaned in the doorway watching them all, wearing a tailored suit with a matching tie and belt and shoes. His dark hair was swept back, silver at the temples to give him a distinguished air.
Raisa hid both her surprise and a wince.
Like her, Kilkenny got farmed out to investigations across the country. He also had a troubling tendency to come across her in her more cringeworthy moments. This one wasn’t particularly bad—not like the time he’d witnessed her actually crying after a sniper case had gone south. But Kilkenny would never bet on a parlor trick just to convince some G-men that he could do his job.
All of a sudden, she felt young and foolish, like she was a class clown who had been caught out by the school’s cool principal.
She lifted a hand in an awkward hello as the men behind her dispersed.
Kilkenny tipped his head to the hallway, and Raisa followed. He didn’t stop there, though, just kept walking until they got to a little auditorium with movie theater–esque rows where the Seattle agents held larger debriefings. It was empty, and they took two fold-out seats toward the back, one apart so that Raisa could face him, her leg drawn up under her.
“You’re scaring me,” she said without preamble. It was a weird greeting. They hadn’t worked together in four months, though she’d seen him in passing at an airport in Wisconsin in June. They weren’t friends and they weren’t partners, but they were the odd ones out when it came to any task force they were lent to. When they got a case together, they tended to pair up.
He looked serious now, but she could never really tell with him. No matter how good anyone was at reading people, no one could read Callum Kilkenny. He was one of the best forensic psychologists working in the bureau, and he had walls that were several layers thick, made of pure concrete. They had been hard-earned.
“I heard you were here,” he said.
“We just wrapped up a case down near the border of Oregon,” Raisa said, even though she had no reason to explain herself to him. “A kidnapping.”
“You got your man.” It wasn’t a question.
She had, of course. A family friend who had been close enough to be called “uncle” had kidnapped a seven-year-old girl, demanding a ridiculous sum for her safe return. He’d given them fourteen hours. Raisa had needed only ten. She’d been able to parse through past emails and texts the man had sent and match up three unusual misspellings. It had been enough to get a judge to sign a warrant to search his place.
At another time she might have humblebragged a bit, as agents did when trading war stories. But that you got your man grated on raw nerves so soon after the Scottsdale incident. Kilkenny must have heard about it, everyone in the bureau had—or so it seemed. Where Raisa had always had a hard time fitting in with all her new teams, in the two months since the botched case in Arizona, she’d started seeing more and more outright doubt.
It was probably what had prompted her to do the parlor trick, even more than Cabot’s smug face.
Raisa had always been the girl with something to prove, but now it seemed crucial for her career that she could.
“Yeah, we did,” was all Raisa ended up saying.
“Do you have any assignments next?” he asked.
“Paperwork,” Raisa said. She was about seven cases behind in filing her reports to her boss. The overachiever in her, the one who had got her from poor foster kid to doctoral candidate, cringed at the thought. But she was one of two linguists who worked full time for the entire FBI. As long as the paperwork wasn’t urgent for court cases, her boss tended to grant her some leniency.
“Can I show you something?” Kilkenny asked, but he was already pulling out his phone. He tapped at the screen a few times and then looked up. “I should warn you. It’s graphic.”
Raisa nearly rolled her eyes. She waved to the ceiling as if to encompass the building they were in. She might be a word nerd, but she was also an FBI agent—and, Scottsdale aside, a pretty good one. “I’m not exactly expecting a picture of a cute puppy here.”
“Right,” he said, with a half smile before handing over the phone. “It was filmed by the killer themselves.”
“Jeez,” she breathed out. Then she pressed play.
Two bodies lay on a bed, a man and woman, their hands nearly touching.
The video zoomed in on the plink of blood dripping from the oversaturated mattress onto the wooden floors. A fly buzzed into frame, landed on the man’s hand. He was older, maybe in his sixties, with a paunch. He was still wearing his shoes, a distant part of her cataloged.
