Beverley, Elsie, and Margot arrive at the Farrer residence. Beverley stresses that she wants Sharon to hear their conclusion before the police become involved. After a hesitant pause, Margot knocks.

Sharon answers looking exhausted and ushers the women in for coffee, filling the silence with small talk until Beverley asks her to sit. Beverley informs Sharon that the visit concerns Peter. When Sharon moves to fetch her son, Beverley stops her.

Beverley lays out the evidence: Peter could have planted Cheryl’s bracelet in Hank’s car at the garage, since Peter also works there; the killings each mirror a scene from a specific film, matching Peter’s obsession with film; and the Polaroid places his camera near the most recent murder scene. She asks Sharon to confirm the camera is Peter’s.

Sharon recognizes it, but reveals that the police already took it. A few weeks earlier, an officer arrived, collected fingerprints from her and Hank, and removed the camera from Peter’s room, promising to return it. She describes the man as silver-haired, blue-eyed, and familiar to Hank from the garage.

Elsie asks if it was Detective Roger Greaves. Sharon confirms it. Margot asks when the McKenzie killing occurred; Elsie answers: eight days ago. Roger seized the camera before that murder, meaning he must have planted it at the scene himself.

Elsie immediately apologizes to a baffled Sharon and backs toward the door. Margot follows. Beverley cannot stand. The realization that Roger is the killer stuns her in a way that mirrors the moment she first learned of Henry’s crimes.

The women are outside Roger’s house. Margot has brought a baseball bat and her Great Dane, Duke. Beverley works through what she now understands: Roger, stalled in his career and determined to surpass his Chief Cornwell, staged the murders and chose to frame Peter Farrer as his intended scapegoat. She feels profound regret for dismissing the existence of Roger’s wife, Enid, and vows to find her.

The women knock and receive no answer. Through a window, Beverley can see signs of neglect inside. At the back of the house, Elsie takes the bat and shatters a small window. The women boost Beverley through. She falls hard onto the frame and gets a deep gash just above her hip. Inside a laundry room, she discovers her dress is soaked with blood. She presses a cloth to the wound, tucks it out of sight, and lets the others in through the front door.

With Duke sniffing ahead of them, the women move through the rooms. Following looping, mournful music down a hallway lined with photographs, Beverley pauses. The images show Enid as vivid, laughing, and full of life, which causes Beverley to feel shame again. Margot spots the spreading bloodstain on Beverley’s dress. Beverley dismisses her concern. She opens a door and the music blares out.

Margot silences the eight-track player that has been left playing music. The room is a killer’s planning space: newspaper clippings line one wall; detailed diagrams of each murder cover the other. Elsie identifies them as pre-kill blueprints. A weakened Beverley touches one and leaves a smear of blood on it. She also concludes that Roger left the pig’s head left at her home to distract her from suspecting that he had anything to do with the murders.

Feeling increasingly faint, Beverley explains Roger’s logic to the others. He did not target the victims out of obsession; he chose them because they fit the profile of women a person like Peter would plausibly pursue, making the framing more convincing. He then designed elaborate, visually striking crimes that would generate press attention and guarantee glory for the detective who solved them. Meeting Peter at Hank’s garage gave Roger both the idea and a convenient opportunity to plant Cheryl Herrera’s bracelet in Hank’s truck. He did all of this out of bitter frustration at being passed over for promotion.

Duke begins barking from somewhere else in the house.

The women find Duke scratching at a locked kitchen door. Beverley identifies it as a basement entrance. They pound on it and call out for Enid. After failed attempts to kick it in, the three charge together and force it open. The impact drops Beverley to her knees.

Elsie suggests calling for an ambulance, but Beverley refuses to stop. All three descend into darkness and a heavy, rancid smell. Strange sounds stir from the space below. When Beverley finds and pulls a light cord, the room is revealed: tied by the wrists to a central pipe, gagged and barely able to move, is Enid.

Beverley and Elsie rush forward. Elsie sends Margot upstairs for water and tells Beverley to find a cutting tool. Searching the cluttered room, Beverley registers evidence of Enid’s long imprisonment: waste buckets, a water pail, a chair positioned directly facing the pipe. She realizes that she left her knife in the car. She spots garden shears, however, grabs them, and staggers back, dropping them as her legs give way. A car engine sounds in the driveway. Margot shouts down: Roger has arrived.

Elsie grabs the shears and cuts Enid free; the cable ties have left her wrists raw and bleeding. Elsie shouts for Margot to flee through the back door and leave it open. Margot escapes. Beverley and Elsie take Enid’s weight between them and start up the stairs. Enid manages to say in a hoarse voice that she can walk on her own.

Halfway up, Beverley’s strength fails completely. She slumps on the steps and cannot move. Elsie guides Enid to the top and directs her toward the back of the house, then turns and screams at Beverley to move. Roger appears at the top of the stairs, strikes Elsie across the head, and she collapses out of sight. He descends toward Beverley. Without a word, he seizes her arm and hurls her back down to the basement floor.

Beverley regains consciousness to find Roger dragging her across the floor by her feet. She cannot move or make a sound and is certain she is about to die. Her children and family flash through her thoughts; she reflects with a dim sense of irony that Roger is about to kill her.

Roger props her upright, mutters about the women ruining everything, and picks up the garden shears. He tells her that no one understands criminal thinking better than a police officer, then opens the blades toward her throat.

Two gunshots crack through the basement. A wound opens in Roger’s chest and he turns. Enid stands at the foot of the stairs holding his gun, having retrieved it from its hiding place. As Roger falls, Enid tells him that detectives’ wives understand cops as well.

Beverley wakes in a hospital bed, having lost two liters of blood. Elsie, who is bandaged but not seriously injured, and Margot are with her. Elsie confirms that Margot came back for her, Enid is safe, and Roger is alive under police custody. Beverley weeps, blaming herself for not identifying Roger sooner. Margot cuts her off: they caught him, and it is over.

A nurse announces a reporter is asking for them. Elsie lets her in. It is Patti, who invites them to tell their story.

Five days after her rescue, Enid narrates that she had known about Roger’s affair and was already planning to leave him. She holds no anger toward his mistress, crediting that woman with saving her life.

Her confrontation with Roger was sparked by the disappearance of her Burberry coat; she now knows he used it to dress one of his victims’ bodies. The police have told her that he confessed to five murders. Enid refuses to apply labels like “evil” or “monster” to him, arguing that doing so would hand him a kind of significance he has not earned. She fell out of love with him long before the killings began. She intends to put him entirely behind her and hopes that for the victims’ families, Roger will eventually become an insignificant memory, allowing their daughters’ lives to be what is remembered.

Six months on, Beverley arrives home and notes that the house no longer feels like a place to be barricaded against the world.

Roger’s trial is behind them. He appeared diminished in the dock, having been stripped of his uniform and placed in handcuffs. He accepted a plea deal and confessed to everything, which Beverley views as a final act of image management rather than remorse. Evidence at the trial showed he chose to frame Peter over Hank because a young killer would generate far more press coverage, and the detective who caught such a killer would rise further. Beverley testified about her affair and Roger’s obsessive need to outshine Chief Cornwell. When the sentence was read, she felt only grief for five young women who never got to live their lives fully.

Enid attended the trial as well. She had previously sent Beverley a bunch of gladioli with a card bearing just the word “strength.” On the stand, Enid recounted that her confrontation with Roger began when she noticed her Burberry coat had vanished and demanded an explanation; his violent reaction led directly to her imprisonment.

Elsie’s reporting on the victims is being turned into a book, and she now works as a crime journalist under Patti. Margot is in therapy and has begun dating her therapist.

In the backyard, Beverley joins Elsie and Margot. Christopher Appleton arrives at Beverley’s with a lopsided, slightly scorched cake and is pressed into a chair and handed a margarita. At Elsie’s prompting, Beverley retrieves the scrapbook and drops it into the fire burning in a clay pot on the patio. She watches years of fear and guilt reduce to smoke. Her children’s laughter carries across the yard. She takes a breath and smiles.