At Beverley’s house in the present day, Margot arrives with urgent news: a young model, Diane Howard Murray, has gone missing from Golden Point. She is a potential third victim after Cheryl Herrera and Emily Roswell. Consulting Beverley’s annotated map, the women note that Diane’s work area in Calabasas forms a triangle around their town of Berryview, with all three points connected via the interstate.

That evening, Chief Cornwell holds a televised press conference directing investigators toward the Kings and the local Mexican community. The women are disgusted. Elsie argues they must conduct their own investigation, and Margot agrees, asserting that their direct experience with killers gives them insight no officer has.

Elsie advances a theory: Each of their husbands was under severe external stress when his crimes began. Stephen Green had lost an election, Albert Moss had been dismissed from teaching, and Henry Lightfoot was confronting the death of his abusive father. Such pressure, Elsie argues, triggers those already capable of violence. They divide tasks: Elsie investigates a logo she saw at the vigil and decides to look for Cheryl Herrera’s missing bracelet, Margot looks into Diane, and Beverley analyzes letters she has received from other killers’ wives.

In a first-person account, an unnamed female narrator recalls the moment of her abduction: She sensed an intruder’s presence just before being struck unconscious. Two days have now passed since she was taken.

Beverley secretly arranges a visit to San Quentin to see her incarcerated husband, Henry, for the first time in five years, concealing it from Elsie and Margot, who would see it as a betrayal of their pact. A flashback reveals a traumatic incident from Beverley’s youth involving her mother’s abusive boyfriend, whom her mother ultimately blamed Beverley for attracting.

Henry has grown physically more powerful in prison and quickly reveals he is engaged to a woman who has been writing to him. Beverley absorbs this without reacting and presses ahead: She describes the ritualistic nature of the recent murders and asks for his insight. Henry explains that he chose victims based on ease of access and suggests the new killer may be escalating from earlier crimes, using stolen vehicles, and targeting successful women out of a sense of emasculation. He adds, chillingly, that he chose his weapons based on whatever suited his mood.

Beverley leaves with a lead: Find men who pay for sex near the crime locations. Once safely in her car, she experiences a mental health crisis.

Diane Howard Murray’s body is found in a Calabasas alleyway in late July, but her murder receives only a brief paragraph in the press. Margot drives to Diane’s home community of Golden Point, a low-income trailer park, to investigate.

She first visits Ray Roberts, a local criminal, who confirms Diane may have done sex work on the side but was seriously pursuing modeling, then directs Margot to Pearl Howard Murray, Diane’s grandmother. Pearl is initially hostile but warms when Margot discloses that she too has had her life upended by a dangerous man. Pearl reveals details suppressed by police and press: Diane was strangled, and the killer had dressed the body in a designer coat and black suspenders, staging it deliberately for display. Margot immediately recognizes this detail as being consistent with the other murders. Pearl produces photographs, including one of Diane in a cleaning company apron bearing a logo on the chest. Margot borrows the photos, promising to return them.

Five days into captivity, the unidentified narrator reflects on the routine fears women manage daily: unwanted attention, poorly lit streets, the constant calculation of personal safety. She is bound, injured, and held in darkness, but resists self-blame and resolves to find a way out.

During a restless night, Beverley has nightmares about Henry and his victims. She admits privately that she was drawn to his domineering nature and that his arrest left her uncertain of her own identity.

A sound draws Beverley into the hallway, where she finds her young son Benjamin sleepwalking and steers him back to bed. Passing the landing window, she spots something large and dark on the front lawn: a pig carcass, its throat slit, surrounded by blood. Finding no one in the yard or street, she connects the pig to slang for police and concludes it is a warning tied to her secret relationship with Roger.

At the department store where she works, Margot is unbothered by the arrival of the store’s wealthy owner, Broderick Arnold, for his seasonal inspection. That morning, Margot woke from a recurring nightmare about her husband Stephen, recalling the trauma she endured after his arrest and death. She deliberately holds Arnold’s gaze as he makes his rounds, and shortly afterward they have sex in his office, a transaction Margot values for the leverage it gives her over a powerful man.

She uses the opportunity to ask Arnold for an introduction to movie director Mason Clarke. Arnold agrees but warns her that Clarke has a poor reputation. Margot assures him she can handle herself.

Ten days into her captivity, the unidentified narrator marks time by the sounds of ordinary life continuing just above her: a paperboy’s bell, birdsong, a neighbor’s dog. She identifies helplessness as her deepest fear, reaffirms her resolve to survive, and vows to remember her own strength when she is free.

Arriving late to the Monument Hotel, Beverley joins Elsie and Margot feeling she has nothing to contribute, concealing her visit to Henry, the pig carcass, and her relationship with Roger.

Margot reports what Pearl disclosed: Diane was strangled, then dressed and staged for display. Elsie reports her editor agreed to run an item on Cheryl Herrera’s missing bracelet. Working to profile the killer, they settle on a likely white man in his mid-thirties with access to a vehicle. Margot reveals that Stephen once told her he killed out of boredom; Elsie argues the elaborate staging points to something more purposeful.

Beverley describes Henry’s pattern of violent behavior. She recounts a night when she chose to go out and Henry retaliated by driving car onto the sidewalk, breaking her friend Sandie’s leg. He then returned home freshly showered, projecting sudden calm. Earlier that night, he had murdered a woman named Carol Waterford. Elsie adds that Albert developed a vacant expression before his crimes and hid violent pornography at home.

Finally, Margot lays out Diane’s photographs, and Elsie immediately recognizes the logo on Diane’s cleaning company apron as the same one she sketched from the van at Cheryl Herrera’s vigil.

At the Signal office, Patti confirms the logo on Diane’s apron matches Elsie’s sketch from the vigil. She cautions Elsie not to jump to conclusions and proposes they visit the detectives assigned to the homicides, then reveals she already knows Elsie’s history and the details of Albert’s crimes.

The narrative flashes back to Elsie’s discovery of her husband’s crimes. After Albert lost his teaching post, Elsie devoted herself to managing his moods, enduring his violence and sexual frustration. A worsening smell in the house eventually led her to crawl beneath the floorboards against his explicit instructions. She found a young woman’s decomposing body.

Back in the present, Patti tells Elsie her secret is safe and invites her to work alongside her to find the killer. Elsie agrees.

On a Thursday in August, Bob Taggit, a plumber from Ventura, returns to his truck after shopping and finds a note wedged beneath a windshield wiper. The note is written on the back side of a piece of cereal box packaging.

The note is addressed to the police and newspapers. The writer taunts law enforcement for being slow: “Why can’t you see the big picture?” (150). He demands media coverage and threatens to kill again within a week if no article appears. He names all three of the murder victims and warns that if ignored, he will take another girl, making the police responsible for her death.