Page 99 of Serial Killer Games

She’s hovering in the hallway, waiting for me. She follows me back downstairs, and we swig directly from the half-full bottle of wine together while I unpack the Halloween decorations.

“What are you doing?” Dodi asks peevishly, but I ignore her.

I spread fake cobwebs all over the tree and hang her ghost over the mantel.

“That looks stupid,” she says self-consciously when I put the skeleton in an armchair by the fire, and “You’re an idiot,” when I place Verity’s head on the mantelpiece.

But when I finish and return to her where she sits on the rug in front of the crackling fire, the ratty rolls of Christmas paper and her unwrapped gifts piled up beside her, the wine bottle cradled in her lap, she looks at me with an expression in her eyes that makes me feel warm to my very fingertips.

“I just know you have tape somewhere,” she says.

I do.

We’ve done this before, but it goes a little faster when you’re wrapping boxes instead of limbs. She’s still trash at wrapping presents, so I let her do the taping. The firelight rims her cheeks and glints in her hair while we work, and no one else will ever see her as she looks right now, privately, secretly beautiful for an audience of one, in the middle of the night, while the house sleeps and the snow drifts up against the mullioned windows.

“What’s the list about?” she asks quietly without looking up.

“What are you doing at work on your laptop?”

A small, bitter smile twists her lips, and she hesitates. “I’m afraid to tell you what I’ve been doing,” she says at last.

“Why?”

“Because it’s probably a lot less interesting than you think.” She raises her eyes to mine, dark and deep like twin wells. “You always look at me like I’m…I don’t know. Mysterious. Fascinating. Not just a tired single mom with no life. You’re going to be so disappointed to know the truth.” She presses a piece of tape over the edge of paper I hold in place for her.

“After—everything—I didn’t work for a while. I couldn’t. I had Cat and…” She stares into the fire. “Well, what do you think came up anytime a prospective employer googled my name? It was a hard time. And finally, when Cat was ready to start school, an old friend reached out and told me they’d help me get a job. I moved here to start fresh. My friend was in HR, and I managed to get in without anyone doing that Google search. But then”—she purses her lips and shrugs—“one week in, the layoffs started. My department was gutted. My supervisor got axed.Hersupervisor got axed. My friend in HR was let go. I think I wasn’t laid off because I was still being addedto the system—I don’t know. She told me to lie low and see if I could get another paycheck or two, and to line up my exit plan. I had no job prospects, and I had so much debt already. All I could come up with was to go back to school and live off student loans. So I got my application in. I was accepted. The loans came through. Except…the termination never came. Then the pandemic happened and we all started working from home.

“Another paycheck came in, and another, and another. An entire year went by. I kept getting cc’d to meeting invitations, so I kept making appearances on Zoom. I kept my camera off. I was never given any work to do, so I worked on my school assignments. And then one day I got an email telling me work from home was over and that I had to report to Doug. I walked into his office, and he said something about how nice it was to be back at work where the pretty girls are, and I just…I couldn’t. I turned around and walked right back out again.”

I can picture Doug sitting at his desk, damp, pink-faced, realizing he’d just created another HR mess for himself, panicking.

“And…he just gave me a wide berth after that. I got myself a cubicle, but then I stumbled upon my old annex. They were still on the hook for the lease, even though they didn’t have the bodies to fill it. I stole an office, and continued with my online studies, and now I’ve almost finished my MBA.” She straightens a little, reaching the part of the story she’s proud of.

“I won’t have to worry about finding an understanding employer anymore because I’m going to start my own consulting business. Isn’t that what everyone wants? To be their own boss, picking and choosing their own clients, working their own hours? I would have more time for Cat.”

Nothing about this confession is surprising. Dodi is resourceful and self-protective and used to figuring things out on her own. I can picture her, a one-woman show, swirling in and out of boardrooms in all black, aloof, sharp, sexy—and all those qualities only making clients want her more. She’s a natural-born shark. Hardworking, driven. Any enterprise she put her mind to would go fuckbusters.

“What will you consult on?”

She scowls like I’m an idiot. But I’m learning to speak Dodi, and I realize I’ve embarrassed her. She wanted to impress me, but instead I poked a finger right into the gaping hole in her plan: she hasn’t had time to figure out her angle yet.

She licks her lips. “Transformational change within a holistic framework, obviously.”

“Or maybe they can hire you to sniff out plainclothes serial killers on payroll.”

Her dark eyes flick up to mine, strange, mysterious. She doesn’t smile at my joke.

“And the Las Vegas winnings are seed money?”

“No. My problem all along has been how to leave my job at Spencer & Sterns without making them aware of my existence. Once they realize I’ve been taking a paycheck all this time…but I have the money now. I can pay them back.”

“But the promotion—”

She shakes her head. “I can’t stay there. I need a fresh start.” She clears her throat primly. “I’ve revealed my boring secret to you. Your ‘Terminate’ list better be equally boring. Is it a list of people who stole your lunch from the break room fridge?”

It’s even more boring.

Long before I started playing serial killer games with Dodi, I’d invented an elaborate spy game of my own. Something tomake me feel like my life was more exciting than it was. Something to distract me, a mental exercise to get through the boredom and loneliness. The alternative was to stick a Bic pen up my nose and swirl.

---