But then his thoughts were interrupted when Julianne showed him the photos she’d taken.

Babies. One after another. All dead. Most of them were in the arms of their mothers, some lay in cribs or hospital bassinets.

Stress made the bugs worse. And he felt more of them now than he’d felt all day.

Don’t let her know. Don’t let her see.

Don’t let her find out about them.

He repositioned himself, but he did not did not did not did not scratch.

“It’s a way for me to help mothers move through difficult times, to process grief,” she said, then lingered over one of the photos. “This woman carried her baby for nine months. She loved him, she sang to him, she prayed for him, she painted a nursery, carefully chose his clothes, had a baby shower—and now he’s gone forever. They call them stillborns, and it’s a word that has two meanings. They were still when they were born, yes, but yet they were still born and they deserve to be remembered, to be grieved.”

He couldn’t tell how honest she was being. There was something about her explanation that didn’t ring true to him.

“So you take pictures of women holding their stillborn children. I’m not sure what this has to do with me. I write novels. I don’t write about dead babies.”

“In our culture we hide our dead. We shield ourselves from the sting of death. In India when someone dies, the newspapers will run a photograph of the person’s face—but not a recent smiling picture of them alive, but rather a photo of the face of their corpse.”

“I’m still not sure what you want from me, Miss Springman.”

“We start a new site. A photo album for people with similar interests to the ones we have.”

“And those interests would be?”

++++

Alright, just get it out there, she thought. Just say it.

“You kill people, Mr. Sabian. Here’s what I propose: you kill them, I photograph them, and I help you clean up the scene. Neither one of us wants to get caught. I’ll make sure we don’t.”

He was quiet for a moment, then scratched fiercely at the side of his abdomen. “You worked in law enforcement?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Can you help me solve a murder?”

“Whose?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I need to make sure.”

“What do you need to make sure of?”

“That I didn’t kill anyone. There are a couple of people that I know who’ve gone missing, and I want to make sure I wasn’t the one who killed them.”

“You don’t remember?”

He shook his head. “The voices tell me I have, but I don’t know.”