“I had no idea it was there. All of this . . .” Claire indicated the garage. “This entire building was designed to hide his secrets.” She paused, studying Lydia. “Are you really sure you want to see it?”
For the first time, Lydia felt real trepidation about the movies. Back in the house, what Claire had described sounded terrible, but Lydia had somehow convinced herself that they couldn’t be that bad. Rick and Dee loved watching horror movies. Lydia assumed the vignettes couldn’t be any worse. Now, faced with the level of Paul’s deception, she understood that Claire was probably right: The movies were far worse than anything Lydia could imagine.
Still, she said, “Yes.”
Claire opened the laptop. She turned the screen away from Lydia. She moved her finger along the trackpad until she found what she was looking for, then she gave it a click. “This is the best view of her face.”
Lydia hesitated, but then she saw the girl on the screen. She was chained to a wall. Her body was torn up. There was no better way to describe what had been done to her. Skin was rent. Burns gaped like open sores. She had been branded. There was a large X burned into her belly, slightly off center, just below her ribs.
Lydia tasted fear in her mouth. She could practically smell the burning flesh.
“It’s too much.” Claire tried to close the laptop.
Lydia stopped her hand. Every part of her body was responding to the unnatural acts on the screen. She felt ill. She was sweating. Even her eyes hurt. This was not like any horror movie she had ever seen. The signs of torture weren’t meant to scare the viewer. They were meant to arouse.
“Liddie?”
“I’m okay.” Her voice was muffled. At some point, she’d put her hand over her mouth. Lydia realized that she’d been so overwhelmed by the violence that she hadn’t even looked at the girl’s face. At first glance, she looked an awful lot like Anna Kilpatrick. Lydia stepped closer. She leaned down and almost touched her nose to the display. There was a magnifying glass by the laptop. She used it to take an even closer look.
Finally, Lydia said, “I can’t tell, either. I mean, yes, she looks like Anna, but lots of girls that age look alike.” Lydia didn’t tell Claire that all of Dee’s friends looked the same. Instead, she put down the magnifying glass. “What did the police say?”
“He said it wasn’t Anna. Not that I asked the question, because I didn’t pick up on the similarity until I was at the police station. But now that it’s in my head, I can’t get it out.”
“What do you mean, you didn’t ask the question?”
“It never occurred to me that she looked like Anna Kilpatrick, but that was practically the first thing Captain Mayhew said when I showed him the movie: It’s not Anna Kilpatrick.”
“The guy in charge of the Kilpatrick case is named Jacob Mayhew. He’s got a Huckleberry mustache. I saw him on the news tonight.”
“That’s him, Captain Jacob Mayhew.”
“Anna Kilpatrick’s all over the news. Why would the guy in charge of finding her stop everything to work on a house robbery?”
Claire chewed her lip. “Maybe he assumed I was showing him the movie because I knew he was investigating the Kilpatrick case.” She met Lydia’s gaze straight on. “He told me that she’s dead.”
Lydia had assumed as much, but having it confirmed didn’t make it any easier. Even with Julia, who had been gone so long that it wasn’t possible she was still alive, Lydia always held out a tiny sliver of hope. “Have they found her body?”
“They found blood in her car. Mayhew said the volume was too much, that she couldn’t live without it.”
“But the news didn’t say that.” Lydia knew she was grasping at straws. “Her family’s still making pleas for her safe return.”
“How many years did Mom and Dad do the same thing?”
They were both quiet, both probably thinking their own thoughts about Julia. Lydia could still remember Sheriff Huckabee telling her parents that if Julia hadn’t walked away on her own, she was most likely dead. Helen had slapped him across the face. Sam had threatened to sue the sheriff’s department into oblivion if they even thought about suspending the investigation.
Lydia felt a lump in her throat. She struggled to clear it. There was more that Claire wasn’t telling her. She was either trying to protect Lydia or trying to protect herself. “I want you to start from the beginning and tell me everything that’s happened.”
“Are you sure?”
Lydia waited.
Claire leaned against the workbench. “I guess it started when we got back from the funeral.”
Claire ran it down for her, from finding the movies on Paul’s computer, to Nolan’s intrusive questions, to her decision to hand everything over to the police. Lydia asked her to repeat herself when she described Mayhew’s less-than-casual curiosity about whether or not Claire had made copies of the movies. And then she got to the part about Adam Quinn leaving the threatening note on her car, and Lydia couldn’t keep silent anymore.
She asked, “What files is he talking about?”
“I’m not sure. Work files? Paul’s secret files? Something to do with the money Paul stole?” She shook her head. “I still can’t understand that. Nolan was right about us being flush. Why steal something you don’t need?”
Lydia held back her response—why try to rape someone when you had a beautiful, willing girlfriend back home? Instead, she asked, “Did you check Paul’s laptop for a Work in Progress folder?”
Claire’s blank expression answered the question. “I was just worried about finding more movies.” She leaned over the MacBook and started searching the drive. The Work in Progress folder came up immediately. They both scanned the file names.
Claire said, “These extensions are for an architectural software. You can tell by the dates that Paul was working on them the day that he was murdered.”
“What’s an extension?”
“It’s the letters that come after the period in a file name. They tell you what the file format is, like .JPEG is for photographs and .PDF is for printed documents.” She clicked open each of the files. There was a drawing of a staircase, some windows, elevations. “Conceptual drawings. They’re all for work.”
Lydia considered their options. “Make copies of the files for Adam Quinn. If he leaves you alone, then you know he’s not involved.”
Claire seemed astonished by the simple solution. She opened the door to the Tesla and grabbed a set of keys that had been tossed onto the dashboard. “I bought Paul this key chain when Auburn went to the BCS bowl. There’s a USB drive inside.”
Lydia wondered if her sister knew how light her voice sound
ed when she talked about her life with Paul. It was almost like Claire was two different people—the woman who loved and believed in her husband and the woman who knew he was a monster.
Lydia told her, “I don’t want you seeing Adam alone. Text him that you’ll leave it in the mailbox.”
“That’s a good idea.” Claire was trying to pry open the split metal key ring with her thumbnail. “I have a burner phone in the house.”
Lydia didn’t ask her why she had a burner phone. Instead, she went to the laptop and clicked all of the architectural files closed. She stared at the paused movie on the computer screen. The girl’s eyes were wide with fear. Her lips were parted as if she was about to start screaming. Part of Lydia was tempted to play the movie out, to see just how bad it would get.
Lydia closed the movie.
The Gladiator drive showed in the finder. She studied the file names, which were numbers, just as Claire had said. “There has to be a pattern to these.”
“I couldn’t figure it out. Fuck.” Claire had split her fingernail on the metal ring.
“Aren’t there a million tools in here?”
Claire scrounged around until she found a screwdriver. She sat cross-legged on the floor while she jammed apart the key ring with a metal file.
Lydia studied the file names again. There had to be a code that would explain the numbers. Instead of offering a solution, she said, “Agent Nolan made a point tonight about watching movies. If he meant Paul’s movies, how would he know about them?”
Claire looked up. “Maybe he’s into them, too?”
“He seems like the type,” Lydia said, though she was only guessing. “Why was he here for a house robbery?”
“That’s the big question. No one wanted him here. Mayhew clearly can’t stand him. So what was Nolan looking for?”
“If Mayhew is involved—”
“Then why put pressure on me?” Claire sounded exasperated. “I don’t know anything. Why Paul watched the movies. Who else watched them. What Mayhew knows. What Nolan knows. Or doesn’t know. I feel like I’m running around in circles.”