Pretty Girls: A Novel Page 11

  Claire went up the stairs before she could stop herself. She keyed in the code to open the door to Paul’s office. Agent Nolan had made a comment about all the codes needed for the house, but Paul had made it easy for Claire by making all the door codes a variation on their birthdays.

  The office looked the same as it had been the day before. Claire sat down at the desk. She hesitated as she reached out to tap the keyboard. This was a red pill/blue pill moment. Did she really want to know if there were more files? Paul was dead now. What was the point?

  She tapped the keyboard. The point was that she had to know.

  Claire’s hand was surprisingly steady as she moved the mouse to the dock and clicked on the Work folder.

  The rainbow wheel spun, but instead of a list of files, a white box popped up.

  CONNECT TO GLADIATOR?

  There was a YES and NO button underneath. Claire wondered why she hadn’t been prompted to log in the day before. She had a vague recollection of clicking CLOSE on several messages yesterday when Agent Nolan was creeping his way up the stairs. Apparently, one of the things she’d closed was the connection to whatever this Gladiator was.

  She leaned her elbows on the desk and stared at the words. Was this a sign that she should stop? Paul had trusted her completely—too completely, going by her affairs, because of course Adam Quinn wasn’t the first. Or the last, since she was being brutally honest; there was a reason Tim the bartender was estranged from his wife.

  She tried to summon yesterday’s crushing guilt, but the remorse had been sanded down by the rough images she’d found on her husband’s computer.

  “Gladiator,” Claire said. She didn’t know why the word sounded familiar.

  She rolled the mouse over and clicked on the YES button.

  The screen changed. A new message popped up: PASSWORD?

  “Fuck.” How much harder was this going to get? She tapped her finger on the mouse as she stared at the prompt.

  All of the system passwords were a combination of mnemonics and dates. She typed in YALAPC111176, which stood for “You Are Looking At Paul’s Computer,” followed by his birthday.

  A black triangle with an exclamation point in the center told her that the password was incorrect.

  Claire tried a few more variations, using her birthday, their wedding anniversary, the date they first met in the computer lab, the date they first went out, which was also the same day they’d first had sex because Claire never played hard to get when she’d made up her mind.

  Nothing worked.

  She looked around Paul’s office, wondering if she was missing something.

  “You Are Looking At The Chair Where Paul Reads,” she tried. “You Are Looking At The Couch Where Paul Naps.” Nothing. “You Are Looking At The Computer Where Paul Jerks Off.”

  Claire slumped back in the chair. Directly across from Paul’s desk was the painting she had given him for their third wedding anniversary. Claire had painted it herself from a photograph of his childhood home. Paul’s mother had taken the picture standing in their back yard. The picnic table was set with birthday decorations. Claire wasn’t good with faces, so a tiny blob represented a young Paul sitting at the table.

  He’d told her that the farmer who’d bought the Scott land had torn down the house and all the surrounding structures. Claire couldn’t blame the man. The house had a home-built look to it, the wooden paneling ran up and down instead of left to right. The barn in the back yard loomed like the Amityville Horror house. It cast such a dark shadow over the picnic table and old well house that Claire had been forced to guess the colors. Paul had told her she’d gotten them exactly right, though she was fairly certain the little structure over the well should’ve been green instead of black.

  Claire typed some more guesses into the computer, speaking aloud so she could get the first letters of each word in the correct order. “You Are Looking At Claire’s Painting.” “You Are Looking At The House Where Paul Grew Up.” “You Are Looking At An Old Well House That Should Be Green.”

  Claire slammed the keyboard tray back into the desk. She was angrier than she’d thought. And realizing she was angry made her realize where she’d seen the word Gladiator.

  “Idiot,” she whispered. Paul’s workbench had a giant metal logo on the side that said GLADIATOR, the company that had custom-made the piece. “You Are Looking At Paul’s Workbench.”

  Claire added Paul’s birth date, then pressed enter.

  The drive connected. The Work files came up.

  Claire’s hand stayed still on the mouse.

  Helen had told her a long time ago that knowing the truth wasn’t always a good thing. She had been talking about Julia, because that was all her mother was capable of talking about back then. She would stay in bed for weeks, sometimes months, mourning the unexplained disappearance of her oldest child. Lydia had taken over the parenting for a while, and when Lydia had checked out, Grandma Ginny had moved in and terrorized them all into shape.

  Would Helen want to know where Julia was now? If Claire handed her mother an envelope and inside was the story of exactly what had happened to Julia, would she open it?

  Claire sure as hell would.

  She clicked on the second file in the Work folder, which, according to the date, Paul had watched the same night as the first. The same woman from the first movie was chained in the same way to the same wall. Claire took in the details of the room. She was definitely looking at an older basement. It was nothing like the pristine, smoothly formed walls in Paul’s dream basement. The cinderblock wall behind the woman looked dank and wet. There was a stained mattress on the concrete floor. The trash came from fast-food restaurants. Old wires and galvanized pipe hung from the ceiling joists.

  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 set-up. 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 FAQs. 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 beating 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! DISK “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 back-up tucked inside the desk. She knew the large black box was the battery back-up because Paul had labeled it: BATTERY BACK-UP.

  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 back-up 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 though 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 set-up 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 spreadeagled 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 airbag had turned off because the sensors assumed a toddler was in the seat.

  Claire looked up at the police station, which resembled a 1950s office supply store. Fred Nolan was prob
ably the person she should be giving this to, but yesterday, Nolan had been an asshole to Claire, and Mayhew had basically told him to shut the fuck up, so she was going to give it to Captain Mayhew.

  Did she trust him to take this seriously? Unlike Fred Nolan, Claire had not gotten a clear vibe off Captain Mayhew, other than to think that he looked like a cop out of central casting. His mustache had thrown her off because Sheriff Carl Huckabee, the original Huckleberry, had sported an impotent-looking mustache that he kept trimmed in a straight line rather than grooming it to follow the natural curve of his upper lip. Claire had been thirteen the first time she’d met the man. She could still recall looking up at the strange pushbroom over his lip and wondering if it was fake.

  Which mattered not one bit in her current situation, because facial hair was not a universal indicator of incompetency.

  She looked down at the hard drive in the seat beside her.

  Red pill/blue pill.

  Mayhew wasn’t the concern here. It was Claire. It was Paul’s reputation. There was no such thing as anonymity anymore. This would get out. People would know what her husband was into. Maybe people already did.

  And maybe the movies were real, which meant that the second girl might still be alive.

  Claire forced herself to get out of the car. The hard drive felt heavier than before. Night was falling fast. Thunder rumbled in the distance. The overhead lights came on as Claire walked across the parking lot. Her funeral dress had dried, but it was stiff and chafing. Her jaw hurt from grinding her teeth. The last time she was at the Dunwoody police station, she was in a tennis dress and being escorted in through the back doors.

  This time she found herself in an extremely narrow front lobby with a large piece of bulletproof glass separating visitors from the office area. The receptionist was a burly man in uniform who didn’t look up when Claire entered.

  She put the hard drive down on an empty chair. She stood in front of the window.

  The burly officer reluctantly looked up from his computer. “Who’re you here to see?”