Helen: Damn, I think you could be right. But without a confession, I don’t see how they’d ever prove this. But it all adds up. You have to wonder if those neighbors saw something or knew something—

Julia: So they were “business” kills, while the ones she and Brady did and recorded were for fun?

Helen: If you add up the victims we think Lena killed on her own and the victims she and Brady killed together, the number jumps to serious double digits.

Julia: We might never know how many she really killed, because she didn’t hack them up, like, “Look over here, y’all. These are some murder victims!” She was sneaky.

Helen: And the victims she and Brady chose were so random, so dissimilar from each other, that it seems deliberate.

Julia: No way Lena would let Brady accidentally kill two white teenage runaways instead of just one.

Helen: So she was hard to predict. Her early crimes, if they were crimes, were opportunistic ways to get rid of people she knew, while the later ones were highly planned, but the victims were random. Only the timing—six months apart—was regular.

Julia: So now that the pattern was disrupted, would she keep killing solo? Would she feel compelled to keep killing someone at the six-month mark? Or would she go back to sneaky kills whenever she felt like it? Had Brady messed up the whole system? Would she blame Michael and come after him? How many people would Lena kill?

Helen: Take a breath, honey. We’ll get to everything.

CHAPTER

23

WHEN I WOKE, Grace wasn’t in her crib and sunlight was streaming into the basement windows around the edges of the woven bamboo blinds. I sat up, calling out, “Mom?”

I could hear my parents’ voices in the other room, and then my father crooning in his talking-to-a-baby voice. They had Grace. Everything was okay.

Swiping the sleep from my eyes, my head still heavy, I glanced around the room. No clock. I picked up my phone to check the time, and texts were waiting, even though it was an hour earlier in Texas. I had a reply from Elizabeth and another from Alondra. Nothing from Rahmia, but it was a weekend, and she probably hadn’t gotten up with Emir yet.

Alondra’s read What am I looking at?

I answered: The woman with her back to the camera. Lena?

Her reply took just seconds: Don’t see it. Will forward to police. Stay put.

Then I opened Elizabeth’s: Is that Lena? Where are you?

Not my picture. Saw online.

Did you send it to the police?

Alondra’s on it.

Do you know the other woman, the one next to her?

Yes, from a long time ago.

You should warn her.

If I warned Aimee, would she even believe me? Then I thought about the postcard Lena had sent. Working on another surprise for you.