Pretty Girls: A Novel Read online

  Claire looked down at the counter. She wasn’t wearing makeup, but she wiped underneath her eyes in the careful way you did when you were wearing mascara. “He was watching these movies. Not just porn, but violent porn.”

  The only thing that surprised Lydia was that Claire actually cared. “I’m not taking up for him, but men watch all kinds of weird shit.”

  “It wasn’t weird, Liddie. It was violent. And graphic. A woman is murdered, and this man in a leather mask rapes her while she’s dying.”

  Lydia covered her mouth with her hand. She was speechless.

  “There are twenty short films. Vignettes, I guess, of two different women. They’re both tortured and electrocuted and burned and branded like cattle. I can’t even describe the other things that are done to them. The first girl is murdered.” She gripped her hands together. “The second girl looks like Anna Kilpatrick.”

  Lydia’s heart quivered like a harp string. “You have to call the police.”

  “I did more than that. I took all of the movies to the cops, and they said they were fake, but—” She looked up at Lydia, her face a study in devastation. “I don’t think they’re fake, Liddie. I think the first woman was really killed. And the girl … I’m not sure. I just don’t know anymore.”

  “Let me see them.”

  “No.” Claire vehemently shook her head. “You can’t watch them. They’re awful. You’ll never be able to unsee them.”

  The words reminded Lydia of her father. Toward the end of his life, he’d often said that about Julia, that there were just some things that you couldn’t unsee. Still, she had to know. Lydia insisted, “I want to see the girl who looks like Anna Kilpatrick.”

  Claire started to argue the point, but she obviously wanted a second opinion. “You can’t play the movie. You can only look at her face.”

  Lydia would play the damn movie if she wanted to. “Where is it?”

  Claire reluctantly stood from the bar. She led Lydia to the mudroom and opened the side door. There was a piece of wood where the window should’ve been.

  Claire explained, “There was a break-in on the day of the funeral. Nothing was taken. The caterers stopped them.”

  “Were they looking for the movies?”

  Claire turned around, surprised. “I never even considered it. The police said there’s a gang that trawls obituaries looking for houses to rob during funerals.”

  Lydia had a vague recollection of hearing something similar on the news, but it was still a weird coincidence.

  They walked across the large motorcourt toward the garage, which was twice the size of Lydia’s house. One of the bay doors was already open. The first thing Lydia saw was a cabinet on its side. Then a set of broken golf clubs. Hand tools. Machinery. Paint cans. Tennis rackets. The garage had been completely ransacked.

  “This is my own apeshittery,” Claire said, not elaborating. “The burglars didn’t make it into the garage.”

  “You did this?”

  “I know,” Claire said, as if they were gossiping about another person.

  Lydia stepped carefully because her shoes were back inside the house. She braced her hand against a BMW X5 as she stepped over the toppled cabinet. There was a beautiful charcoal Porsche that looked like someone had taken a hammer to it. The silver Tesla had pockmarks on the hood. She was fairly certain that even in their damaged states, any one of these cars could pay off her mortgage.

  Claire jumped right into the story. “There was a Thunderbolt cable that went upstairs. Paul drilled a hole in the floor so it could plug directly into his computer.”

  Lydia looked up at the ceiling. The Sheetrock had been broken open.

  Claire said, “I couldn’t stay up there anymore. Paul’s MacBook was in the Tesla’s front trunk. I got it out and put it here, and then got the cable out of the wall so I could plug it in.” She was almost breathless, the same way she used to get when she was little and wanted to tell Lydia something that had happened at school. “I did a search on the laptop to see if there were any more movies. I didn’t find anything, though who knows? Paul was very good with computers. Then again, he never really bothered to hide anything because he knew that I would never look.” She told Lydia, “I trusted him.”

  Lydia followed the destruction to a silver MacBook Pro that was set up on the workbench. Claire had used a hammer to punch out the Sheetrock, which Lydia knew because the hammer was still stuck in the wall. A thin white cable hung down like a piece of string. Claire had plugged it into the laptop.

  “Look back there.” Claire pointed behind the workbench. “You can see the light from the external hard drive.”

  Lydia had to push up onto her toes to see what she meant. She craned her neck. There was the flashing light. The drive was embedded in the wall. The niche was professionally built out, including a trim detail. If Lydia stared long enough, she could almost see the schematic in her head.

  “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 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 keychain when Auburn went to the BCS bowl. There’s a USB drive inside.”

  Lydia wondered if her sister knew how light her voice sounded 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 keyring 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 keyring 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.”

  Lydia felt the same way, and she’d only been doing this for a few hours.

  Claire said, “Nolan flirts with me, right? The way he looked at me tonight, like he was checking me out. You picked up on that?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s creepy, right?”

  He was beyond creepy, but Lydia just said, “I guess.”

  “Ha.” Claire stood, holding up the separated keytag in triumph. The plastic medallion was imprinted with the orange and blue logo of Auburn University. Claire pulled it apart, then shoved the USB connector into the laptop. She clicked open the drive. Lydia saw that it was empty save for the software folder.

  She breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God.”

  “No kidding.” Claire copied the Work in Progress folder onto the drive. “I hope these are the files Adam was talking about. I don’t think I can take it if they’re not.”

  Lydia noticed a striking similarity between the way she talked about Paul and the way she talked about Adam Quinn. And then she remembered something Nolan had intimated as they all stood at the front door. “You were sleeping with Adam Quinn.”

  Claire shrugged with feigned innocence. “My court-appointed therapist would say I was trying to fill a hole.”

  “Is that what you call your vagina?”

  Claire chuckled under her breath.

  “Unbelievable,” Lydia muttered, though history told her it was completely believable.

  When Rick had asked Lydia to tell him about Claire, she had left out the part about her sister being sexually liberated. Not that Claire was sloppy about it. She was remarkably adept at compartmentalizing everyone in her life. Her townie friends never met her college friends. Her cheerleading friends never mixed with her track club friends and hardly anyone knew she was on the tennis team. None of them would’ve ever guessed she was sleeping around. Especially whichever man she was dating at the time.

  “Finished.” Claire ejected the USB drive. “All right. That’s at least one thing that’s done.”

  Lydia didn’t care about Adam Quinn anymore. Some component in the back of her brain had been working the puzzle of Paul’s code, and she finally understood what he’d done. “The movie names. They’re coded dates.” She turned to Claire. “Like, if a file was named 1-2-3-4-5, the code would be 1-5-2-4-3. You tak
e the first number, then the last number, then the second number, then the second-from-last number, and work your way into the middle until they’re all accounted for.”

  Claire was already nodding. “So, November 1, 2015, is 11-01-2015, which would make the code 1-5-1-1-0-0-1-2.”

  “Exactly.”

  She pointed to the screen. “The last file on the list is the first movie with the girl who looks like Anna Kilpatrick.”

  Lydia translated the date. “It was made a day after she went missing.”

  Claire leaned heavily on the workbench. “This is how it’s been for the last two days. Every time I convince myself the movies aren’t real, something else comes along and I think maybe they are.”

  Lydia had to play devil’s advocate. “I’m not taking up for Paul, but so what if it’s real? There’s all kinds of shit on the Internet showing people being shot or beheaded or raped or whatever. It’s disgusting to watch it, and if Paul knew it was Anna Kilpatrick, he should’ve reported it to the police, but it’s not illegal to just shut up and watch it.”

  Claire seemed battered by the brutal truth behind Lydia’s words. She tucked her chin down the same way Dee did when she didn’t want to talk about something.

  “Claire?”

  She shook her head. “If it’s not illegal, then why does Nolan keep coming here? And why did Mayhew act so weird when he asked me if I made any copies?”

  “Maybe Nolan’s just a prick and he can’t stand it that Paul got away with breaking the law.” Lydia had to give Captain Mayhew’s part a bit more thought. “Mayhew could be trying to protect you. That’s what men do around you. They always have. But let’s say the movies are real. So what?” Saying those two words a second time made Lydia realize how awful she sounded, because these women were human beings with families. Still, she had to push on. “Worst-case scenario, Mayhew was trying to keep you from thinking your husband is morally bankrupt.”

  “Paul was morally bankrupt.” Claire spoke with deadly cold conviction. “I found more files. Paper files.”

  Lydia felt panic wind up inside of her chest like a watch.