I never did send a revenge postcard to Aimee, not even after another one arrived from her. This time Aimee had chosen a black-and-white print of a seamstress’s dummy in front of a window overlooking Brooklyn in the thirties. In black permanent marker next to my address, she’d written, Is this what you wanted to be when you grew up? Soz ~A

Before I realized what was happening, laughter bubbled up inside me. Aimee had no idea. She didn’t know I was pregnant; she didn’t know I had friends; she didn’t know I was chasing happiness and it was right within my grasp. Lena twitched the postcard out of my fingers and flipped it over to read it. “That fucking bitch.”

“It’s okay.” The sun was warm, without the slightest edge of winter. Aimee would be wearing sweaters, or she’d be shivering in too-thin blouses.

“It’s not okay. Bad enough that this psycho loony framed you and got you fired; now she’s stalking you? Someone needs to teach this bitch a lesson.”

“It really doesn’t matter, Lena. I’m over it.”

Lena folded the postcard and shoved it into the pocket of her jeans. “You are too damn good for this world.”

“No.” I tilted my face up and closed my eyes, letting the sunlight turn my vision gold. “I just figured out the difference between people who matter and people who don’t. Good friends are the only ones worth keeping.”

C2C TRANSCRIPT

7

Helen: So now we’ve got a baby in the mix.

Julia: I’m sorry, I need a minute to freak out. Because the baby shower? Thrown by a killer. Seriously, how creepy is that?

Helen: After the baby was born, she even babysat. They left their three-month-old infant with a couple that had killed over a dozen people, picking off the homeless, the elderly, the undocumented. There’s a huge homeless population in Houston, but there’s also a robust safety net of shelters and social workers. Even commuters pass the same faces every day. If a cluster of people went missing, someone might notice. But our killers plucked one from Harris County, one from Spring, one from Galveston, always staying below the radar.

Julia: And I know what our listeners are thinking. Maybe the authorities hadn’t noticed a serial killer was in the area, but how could their neighbors, their best friends, have no idea?

Helen: We’ve talked about this. Serial killers can be incredibly good at compartmentalizing. They can be charming; they may have spouses, friends, even kids of their own. Ann Rule wrote a book about working the phones at a help line with Ted Bundy. This couple is so good, so very approachable, that they are literally taking people off the side of the road without a fight. They just don’t look scary.