At the thought of food, Chinese food specifically, my nausea subsided, but my unease remained like a cloak over my shoulders.

Four cameras total. The two bathrooms and one in each of the small bedrooms. One had been hooked into the ceiling fan, the other into an outlet near the baseboard. Who wanted to monitor people’s ankles?

So many thoughts flooded my mind, from the charitable—fancy child monitoring system—to the heartbreakingly awful—human trafficking and porn.

Before bed, Michael checked every outlet, every screw, every piece of hardware anywhere in our master bedroom and bathroom. Over Chinese food, he and Brady had ordered an RF scanner with overnight shipping, but tonight we were on our own.

I’d eaten enough lo mein and scallion beef for eight people, and I felt great. Strong, powerful. The blackout curtains made it impossible to see or be seen, I told myself. The cameras were some leftover artifact from the past, nothing to do with us.

When I fell asleep, I dreamed I was in the darkened museum after hours. Only the security lights were on, and the corridor I followed took me in a loop past the same three rooms over and over.

In the distance, I could hear the footsteps of a security guard and the jingling of the keys of his belt. Then I remembered I’d been fired, I wasn’t supposed to be there, so I hurried around a corner, only to find myself just ahead of him, but in the same hallway with the same three galleries.

One was completely dark and seemingly empty; another had a found-art installation, long paper spirals formed from recyclables hanging from the ceiling, spinning slowly with the air conditioning. And the final one had a statue in a spotlight, a riff on Winged Victory, a woman without a head, formed from stiff paper instead of carved stone. The folds of her chiton gathered around her smooth, taut belly, and I heard Aimee’s voice behind me: “If you can’t imagine a world without me, maybe you need a belly as big as the world?”

I woke again before dawn, and as I sat on the sofa facing down the red light of the motion sensor, my fingers folding paper stars, everything seemed so clear. How had I not thought of it before?

I must be pregnant.

C2C TRANSCRIPT

6

Helen: Of course, we’re not talking about a single killer. I think that could have skewed the victim profile too, since there were two perpetrators.

Julia: Well, what other serial killer “teams” do we know about?

Helen: The most famous in the Houston area would have to be Dean Corll, known as the Candyman or the Pied Piper. His two partners—Brooks and Henley—were both teenagers, and together they lured over twenty-eight young men to their death. A fracture in their relationship led to Corll’s death and the revelation of his crimes.