24.

This one is a married couple around sixty years old. He has a serious Psycho face people would line up to see; she has a smile, a wig, shiny/new teeth. They smile, arms around each other, in all the photos. He buys a car to take her on a trip. A few days later—yet again, modus operandi—he says she has left, run off, with the car. There are witnesses who say they saw a suspicious woman with that same car, some ways away. The mysterious woman goes to an ATM, takes out money with her card, Denise’s card, her own card, it’s caught on camera, and there definitely is something strange about her. Her husband goes on the radio, begs her to come back, even if it’s just for their grandchildren. In a plaintive tone he asks her to at least take pity on the grandkids. A few days later her family gets a goodbye letter from their mother, a suicide note. She laments in the card, says she’s sorry for not having been able to be a good wife for George—the widower. A few days later someone finds the woman’s sweater and her purse on the seashore. The hypothesis gets confirmed: suicide. But her daughter doesn’t give up: she denies that the handwriting on the goodbye letter is her mother’s, there’s something there that doesn’t quite convince her. So, they take the envelope and have it analyzed, the part you seal with saliva. And the DNA they find belongs to none other than George. They get him, and he confesses: he bludgeoned her and then he took her to his place of work and incinerated her in a furnace. All the rest was fake. And—of course—the mysterious woman who was seen in her car was just George dressed up as Denise/wearing his wife’s clothing/wearing his Denise’s clothes. It’s strange that with that capacity for fiction he would have overlooked the envelope. Yet again the devouring thing, the swallowing thing, in the family. Everything kept in the family.