Chapter One

Karin knew she had already sounded and reacted suspiciously just by the mere act of providing her name to the investigator.

“Karin Hoffman…actually, Rasmussen, although I went back to using my maiden name, Hoffman, after the divorce. But I never formally changed my name so, legally, I guess I’m still Rasmussen. Even though I hate using that name…”

Shut up, shut the fuck up, she told herself.

She didn’t know how long she had sat there, alone. It seemed as though hours had passed since the investigator left the room, saying that another one of his colleagues would be in to ask her more questions. She looked around the dingy, grey room and knew that, likely in the corner of the ceiling tiles, a camera watched her every move. She had seen this sort of room hundreds, maybe even thousands of times on TV, on all the true crime and forensics documentaries she religiously watched every morning before breakfast, before her first shower of the day. She was surprised, though, that her chair and the chair sitting on the other side of the table, as well as the table itself, weren’t screwed to the floor.

That can’t be smart, she said to herself. Any irate suspect could grab something and crack it over the head of one of these cops, bust out of here in a blaze of glory. But who would be dumb enough to do that? she wondered. Talk about looking suspicious…

She heard a creak at the door and became paralyzed, waiting for the door handle to turn, and then realized that her knee had not stopped bouncing since the investigator left. Had she been involuntarily twitching the entire time? When the handle remained still, she took a deep breath in, leaned against the back of her chair, interlaced her fingers on her lap, closed her eyes, and did what she normally did when she went for her daily marathon runs on her treadmill: count her breathing. One inhale, two exhale, three inhale, four exhale…

She didn’t know how many times she had reached 100, but she would start over again at one, and kept herself in a meditative stance, until her mind wandered.

She wondered how three friends, so-called “normal” and “average” women—“housewives” she cringed, imagining how the newspapers and media would describe them—could commit an act of, what? Barbarity? Honour? What would they call it, she wondered.

And then, like all those documentaries about serial killers, wife killers, and thrill killers, she went back to her childhood to imagine what the TV shows would depict from her past, and in her friends’ pasts, to explain what had happened. Snapshots of class photos, images of the town they grew up in all those decades ago, as it appeared back then, and even of her own family in one of the many stilted family portraits taken during Christmas or someone’s birthday flooded her brain and flashed on the TV screen in her mind’s eye.

Trisha and Alaina, she thought. We were just kids once…little girls. She sighed. Little girls who probably knew better then than we do now.