Claire turned the sound back on, but low. The woman was whimpering. A man entered the frame. Claire recognized him as the same man from the other movie. Same mask. Same tight leather briefs. He wasn’t hard yet. Instead of a machete, he had an electric cattle prod in his hand. Claire waited until he was about to use it, then she paused the movie.
She sat back in the chair. The man was frozen. His arm was out. The woman was shrinking away. She knew what was coming.
Claire closed the movie. She went back to the files and opened the third one from the top. Same woman. Same setup. Same man. Claire studied his naked back. She didn’t tell herself why until she confirmed there was no constellation of moles under his left shoulder blade, which meant that the man could not be Paul.
The relief was so overwhelming that she had to close her eyes and just breathe for a few minutes.
Claire opened her eyes. She closed the movie. The file names were in sequences, so she gathered there were ten more files of the woman in various scenes of torture before the death shot. According to their dates, Paul had watched them all the night before he’d died. They were each around five minutes, which meant he’d spent almost an hour watching the vile images.
“No way,” Claire mumbled. She was lucky if Paul lasted more than ten minutes. Was he watching these movies for something other than sexual pleasure?
She scrolled down to the next sequence of files. There were only five in this series. Paul had watched the first one ten days ago, the next was nine days ago, and so on until the night before Paul had died. She clicked open the most recent movie. Another girl. This one even younger. Her long, dark hair covered her face. Claire leaned in closer. The girl was pulling at the restraints. She turned her head to the side. Her hair fell away. Her eyes went wide with fear.
Claire paused the movie. She didn’t want to see the man again.
There was another question she should’ve put on the list: Is this legal?
Obviously, that all depended on whether or not it was real. If the police could arrest you for watching fake gore, every cinema in America would be part of a sting operation.
But what if Paul’s movies were real?
Agents from the FBI didn’t just show up at burglaries for no reason. When Julia first went missing, Helen and Sam had raised hell trying to get the FBI involved, but it was explained to them that by law, a state agency had to request federal help before the feds could review the case. Given that the sheriff thought Julia had run off in a fit of rebellion, there had been no request sent up the chain.
Claire opened the Web browser and pulled up the FBI’s home page. She went to the FAQ. She scrolled through questions about all the various crimes the agency investigated until she found what she was looking for.
Computer-related crime: In the national security area, the FBI investigates criminal matters involving the nation’s computerized banking and financial systems. Examples of criminal acts would be using a computer to commit fraud or using the Internet to transmit obscene material.
Claire had no doubt these movies were obscene. Maybe she’d been right about Agent Fred Nolan yesterday. The FBI had tracked the downloaded files to Paul’s computer. Claire had seen a 60 Minutes story where a government whistleblower had said connecting your computer to the Internet was tantamount to jacking yourself directly into the NSA. They probably knew that Paul had looked at the movies.
Which meant that they knew that Claire was looking at them, too.
“Jesus!” The Mac was hardwired to the Internet. She grabbed at the cords plugged into the back of the computer. She yanked on the cables so hard that the monitor twisted around. Thin wires stripped away from the plastic plug, severing the Internet connection. Claire nearly passed out with relief. Her heart was pounding so hard that she could feel it in her neck.
Her parole officer had made it clear that he would send her to jail for even the smallest violation. Was it illegal to look at these movies? Had Claire broken the law without even realizing?
Or had she overreacted like an idiot?
She turned the monitor back around. All of the Web pages said she was not connected to the Internet. The movies were still frozen on screen. Another error message had popped up.
WARNING! DISC “GLADIATOR” NOT PROPERLY EJECTED. SOME FILES MAY HAVE BEEN LOST.
Claire looked at all the cables she had unplugged. She wasn’t completely ignorant about computers. She knew that movie files were large and required a lot of storage. She knew that the lightning symbol on the back of the computer was for a Thunderbolt connection, which transferred data twice as fast as USB.
She also knew her husband.
Claire knelt down on the floor. Paul had designed his desk so that all the cables were concealed inside. Everything electrical, from the computer to the desk lamp, connected into a battery backup tucked inside the desk. She knew the large black box was the battery backup because Paul had labeled it: BATTERY BACKUP.
She pulled out the drawers and checked inside and behind them. There didn’t appear to be an external hard drive inside the desk. The power cord for the backup was concealed inside the front right desk leg. The plug came out at the bottom and connected to a floor outlet.
Nothing was labeled GLADIATOR.
Claire pushed on the desk. Instead of the whole thing rolling straight back, it went lopsided, like an excited dog wagging its entire butt. There was another cable threaded through another leg. It was white and thin, the same as the Thunderbolt cable that she’d yanked out of the back of the computer. That end was still on top of the desk. The other end disappeared into a hole drilled into the hardwood floor.
She went downstairs into the garage. Paul’s Gladiator workbench took up an entire wall. Smaller rolling cabinets with drawers were on either side with an open span of about ten feet in between. Claire pulled out all of the cabinets. No stray cables trailed from the back of the drawers. She looked underneath the bench. Claire had driven into the garage thousands of times, but she’d never noticed that the diamond-plate paneling behind the bench wasn’t the same paneling that was on the wall. She pressed against the metal, and the sheet flexed under her hand.
Claire stood up. Thanks to her tennis racket, Paul’s 3-D printer and CAD laser cutter were in pieces strewn across the bamboo worktop. She swept them onto the floor with her arm. She turned off the lights. She leaned over the workbench and looked down through the narrow crack between the bench and the wall. She started at the far left end. At what she knew was the exact center, she saw a flashing green light behind the workbench.
She turned the lights back on. She found a flashlight in one of the rolling cabinets. The workbench was too heavy to move, and even without that, it was bolted to the floor. She leaned back over the bench and saw that the green flashing light was on a large external hard drive.
None of this was an accident. Claire couldn’t come up with any good excuses. This setup had been designed into the house when it was built eight years ago. Paul hadn’t just watched those movies. He had collected them. And he had gone to great lengths to make sure that no one found them.
Tears filled her eyes. Were the movies real? Could she possibly have evidence of the torture and killing of perhaps dozens of women?
Yesterday Fred Nolan had asked Claire about Paul’s demeanor before he died. For the first time since it happened, Claire let herself consider what her own demeanor had been. She was shocked when Paul pulled her into that alley. Excited when he made it clear what he wanted to do. Thrilled when he’d been so forceful, because it was sexy and completely unexpected.
And then what?
Claire knew she’d been terrified when she realized they were being robbed. Had she been scared before that? When Paul spun her around and crushed her against the wall, hadn’t
she been a little afraid? Or was she revising her memory because the way he’d kicked her legs apart and pinned her wrists to the wall was oddly reminiscent of the spread-eagled young girls in the movies?
Those poor creatures. If the movies were real, then Claire owed it to their families to do everything she could to make sure they knew what had happened to them. Or what might happen, because there was the slim possibility that the young girl in the second movie was still alive.
Claire moved quickly, because she knew that if she stopped to think about it, she would do the wrong thing.
Paul always bought two of everything for the computers. There was an extra twenty-terabyte hard drive in the garage basement. Claire leveraged the heavy box off the shelf and lugged it up to the office. She followed the directions to set up the drive using the computer, then she plugged in the Gladiator cable. She highlighted all of the files and dragged them to the new drive.
DO YOU WANT TO COPY GLADIATOR ONTO LACIE 5BIG?
Claire clicked YES.
The rainbow wheel started spinning as the computer calculated the amount of time it would take to transfer all of the files. Fifty-four minutes. She sat down at Paul’s desk and watched the progress bar inching across the screen.
Claire looked at the anniversary painting again. She thought about Paul as a child. She’d seen pictures—his winsome, toothy grin; the way his ears poked out from his giant head when he was six and seven; the way everything started to catch up when puberty hit. He wasn’t dashing or flashy, but he was handsome, once she’d talked him into wearing contacts and buying nice suits. And he was funny. And he was charming. And he was so damn smart that she just assumed he knew the answer to everything.
If only he were here now to answer her questions about this.
Claire’s eyes blurred. She was crying again. She continued crying until the message came up that all the files had been successfully copied.
A toppled cabinet was blocking her BMW. She drove Paul’s Tesla because it was getting dark and the Porsche’s headlights were shattered. Claire did not question herself about what she was doing until she pulled into the parking lot in front of the Dunwoody police station. The hard drive was belted into the seat beside her. The white aluminum box weighed at least twenty pounds. The passenger air bag had turned off because the sensors assumed a toddler was in the seat.