Blanca would find the women: stable, independent, often divorced or alone, at galas and charity events and fundraisers, the kind of places a warm, cultured older woman draws no suspicion at all.

She would befriend them first.

Then she would introduce her son.

I made Javier tell me, later, what the investigators had learned about the two women whose folders bracketed mine.

I wanted them to be more than a pattern to me, because to Dario and Blanca they had been nothing else.

Alyssa had run a small foundation that funded art programs in county schools; the people who worked for her still spoke of her as the reason their kids had a music room.

Ines had been a widow who volunteered at the same hospital foundation where Blanca went hunting, a gentle woman rebuilding a life after her first husband’s long illness.