Nobody I knew would be awake now, but sending a text would be okay. Anybody worried about being woken up would have their phone on silent.

Holding my breath, I sent the picture separately to Elizabeth, Alondra, and to Rahmia.

No explanation. No commentary about who Aimee was or how I’d found this or even a Didn’t want to bother you, but … I didn’t want to cloud their judgment or color their response. I just sent the picture and the words What do you think about the woman on the right? A puzzle I couldn’t solve alone.

In only a couple hours, Grace would be awake again. My eyes were dry and tired from staring so hard at the screen in the dark. Hitting send seemed to have sent my worry out into the ether. It would be waiting for me in the morning.

C2C TRANSCRIPT

12

Helen: Investigators are looking for Lena in Texas. They’ve reinterviewed the aunt—

Julia: The one she was supposedly visiting.

Helen: And they’re not buying her “my niece wasn’t supposed to visit, I never saw her, this is all a total shock” story. They start pulling footage from traffic cams, and lo and behold, there’s Lena’s car on the interstate the night before everything blows up with Brady and the neighbor.

Julia: So he didn’t kill her.

Helen: Nope. And all he would have had to do was not kill anyone else or at least not invite anyone else into a crime scene until she got back. But he screwed that up.

Julia: If he wasn’t in jail, she’d probably have killed him. I might have.

Helen: Seriously. So the cameras also show her driving back towards Sugar Land, presumably to abandon her car by the Brazos. But after that, there’s no trace of her. She’s got cash, access to properties under construction all over Houston, and nobody knows what she plans to do next. She could just disappear, start a new life as someone else.

Julia: Kill more people.

Helen: Maybe. When you look back at her life, there were a number of deaths even when she was young. A local kid drowned in a creek, a great-uncle fell down the stairs.

Julia: If you look far enough back in anyone’s life, there are some deaths.

Helen: The most suspicious one is a neighbor from the year before she met Brady, a young woman found dead in her apartment below Lena’s.

Julia: Dead in her apartment like Lena and Brady’s neighbor was found dead in his house?

Helen: What?

Julia: Both living alone, both found dead from a slip and fall, and both living next door to Lena.