Pretty Girls: A Novel Page 7

  Mayhew looked up from his notebook. “It’s just a routine question. We’ll need to talk to anybody who had access to the house.”

  Claire felt a tickling sensation at the base of her throat. She was starting to feel overwhelmed again. This was the sort of thing Paul would know. She tried, “The housecleaners, our handyman, Paul’s assistant, his partner, my mother. I can look for names and numbers.”

  “Your mom,” Nolan said. “She’s quite the pistol.”

  Claire pressed the code into the keypad beside the four-bay garage. The heavy wooden door slid silently up its tracks. She watched the men’s eyes take in the diamond-plate wainscoting and matching storage cabinets. The floor was a racetrack-white and black rubber tile. There was a bracket for everything—hand tools, extension cords, tennis rackets, golf clubs, basketballs, sunglasses, shoes. Paul’s custom workbench took up one side of the room. He had a charging station, a mini fridge, a flat-panel TV, and an air conditioner for hot summer days.

  Then, of course, there was Claire’s BMW and Paul’s Porsche Carrera and Tesla Model S.

  “Holy shit.” Nolan’s tone was reverential. Claire had seen men get harder over Paul’s garage than they ever got over a woman.

  “It’s through here.” Claire entered the four-digit code into another keypad and led them downstairs to the basement. She had loved that Paul loved his garage. He spent hours in here working on his models. Claire had teased him that the only reason he constructed them at home instead of at work was because here, he got to clean up after himself.

  “Kind of a neat freak,” Nolan said, as if reading her mind.

  “I got lucky,” Claire told him. Paul’s mild obsessive–compulsive disorder had never stopped their lives or made him do odd things like touch a doorknob twelve times. Actually, his compulsions manifested themselves in acts that any wife could appreciate: putting down the toilet seat, folding all the clothes, cleaning up the kitchen every night.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Claire entered another four-digit code into the keypad on the door. The lock clicked open.

  Mayhew said, “Never seen a basement under a garage like this.”

  Nolan said, “Kind of Silence of the Lambs-y.”

  Claire flipped on the lights and the small, concrete room came into stark relief. Paul had designed the space to double as a tornado shelter. Metal shelves held food and supplies. There was a small TV, a weather radio, a couple of camping cots, and plenty of junk food, because Claire had told Paul that in the event of the apocalypse, she was going to need lots of chocolate and Cheetos.

  She was glad she still had on her coat. The temperature was kept low because of all the computers. Everything was controlled from inside this room, not just the security cameras but all the audio-visual systems, the automation for the blinds and fixtures, and whatever else made the house run like magic. There were banks of components with flashing lights and a small desk with four flat-screen monitors mounted on articulating stands.

  Nolan asked, “Does your husband secretly work for the NSA?”

  “Yes.” Claire was tired of his questions, which were made even more grating by his flat, Midwestern accent. The most expedient thing would be to just give them what they wanted so they would go away.

  She opened a desk drawer and found the laminated checklist that explained how to work the security cameras. Paul had tried to walk her through the steps but Claire’s eyes had glazed over and she’d worried she was going to have a seizure.

  She tapped the computer keyboard and entered the access code to the system.

  “Lots of passwords to remember.” Nolan was standing too close again.

  Claire slid away from Nolan. She handed Mayhew the directions. “You’ll have to take it from here.”

  Nolan asked, “Are all of your houses like this?”

  “We only have one house.”

  “‘Only.’” Nolan laughed.

  Claire had reached her limit. “My husband is dead and now my house has been broken into. Is there something you find funny about this situation?”

  “Whoa.” Nolan held up his hands like she’d tried to scratch out his eyes. “No offense, lady.”

  Mayhew’s mustache twitched again. “Hard to offend someone if you keep your fucking mouth shut.”

  Claire gave Nolan a look before turning away from him. She knew how to shut down a man. He didn’t leave, but he took a few steps back to let her know the message had been received.

  She watched the monitors as Mayhew followed Paul’s checklist. The views were split so that each screen showed four different aspects from sixteen different cameras. Every entrance, every bank of windows, the pool area, and several sections of the driveway were monitored. Claire could see that the caterers were in the motorcourt turning around their truck. Helen’s silver Ford was parked on the other side of the garage. She was talking to one of the detectives outside the mudroom door. Her hands were on her hips. Claire was glad there was no sound.

  Mayhew flipped through the pages of his notebook. “Okay. We’ve got a basic time frame for the break-in based on when the caterers called 911.” He pecked at some keys and Helen disappeared from the monitor. The catering van went from making a sharp turn to pulling into the motorcourt. Mayhew skipped back the footage until he found what he wanted. Three individuals at the bottom of the driveway. They were far enough away to be indistinct, just dark, menacing blurs making their way toward the house.

  Claire felt every hair on the back of her neck rise up. This was actually something that had taken place at her home.

  She noted the time on the video. While the burglars were passing the parking pad in front of the house, Claire had been standing by the small, non-denominational chapel in the cemetery wondering why she hadn’t died in that alley with her husband.

  “Here we go,” Mayhew said.

  Claire felt a sharp pain in her chest as the blurs turned into men. Seeing it made it real, something she had to deal with. It was just as she had been told: three African American males in ski masks and gloves jogged up the driveway. They were all dressed in black. Their heads scanned left and right in a coordinated pattern. One of them held a crowbar in his hand. Another had a gun.

  Nolan said, “Looks pretty professional to me.”

  Mayhew agreed. “This ain’t their first rodeo.”

  Claire studied the men walking so confidently toward her mudroom door. Paul had ordered all the doors and windows from Belgium. They were solid mahogany with four-point locks that were easily bypassed when a crowbar smashed the leaded glass and one of the burglars stuck his arm through the window and turned the thumb latch.

  Her mouth went dry. She felt tears come into her eyes. This was her mudroom. This was her door, the same door she used countless times every day. The same door Paul came through when he got home from work.

  Used to come through.

  She said, “I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”

  Claire walked up the stairs. She wiped her eyes. Her mouth opened. She forced herself to draw in breath, to let it go, to fight the hysteria living in the pit of her stomach.

  Paul’s stairs. Paul’s workbench. Paul’s cars.

  She went through the garage. She kept going to the stairs in the back and climbed them as quickly as her heels would allow. She didn’t realize where she was going until she found herself standing in the middle of Paul’s office.

  There was the couch he napped on. There was the chair he sat in to read or watch TV. There was the painting she’d given him for their third wedding anniversary. There was his drafting table. There was his desk, which he’d designed so that no cords were hanging down. The blotter was pristine. The outbox held neatly stacked papers with Paul’s angular handwriting. There was his computer. There was his pencil set. There was a framed photograph of Claire from more years ago than she could count. Paul had taken it with a Nikon that had belonged to his mother.

  Claire picked up the picture. They were at a football game. Paul’s jacke
t was wrapped around her shoulders. She could recall thinking how warm it felt, how reassuring. The camera had captured her laughing, mouth open, head tilted back. Ecstatically, irrevocably happy.

  They’d both gone to Auburn University in Alabama, Paul because it had one of the top architectural programs in the country, Claire because it was far enough away from home to be meaningful. That she ended up with a boy who had grown up less than twenty miles from her childhood home was just further proof that no matter how far you ran, you always ended up back where you started.

  Paul had been a breath of fresh air compared to the other boys Claire dated in college. He was so sure of himself, so sure of what he wanted to do and where he was going. His undergrad had been paid by a full ride scholarship and graduate school was taken care of by the money he inherited when his parents died. Between a small life insurance policy, proceeds from the sale of the farm, and the out-of-court settlement from the trucking company that had owned the eighteen-wheeler that killed the Scotts, there was more than enough money for tuition and living expenses.

  Still, Paul had worked the entire time he was in school. He had grown up on a working farm, where he was expected to do chores at the crack of dawn. In ninth grade, he’d won a scholarship to a military boarding school in southeast Alabama. Between the two home lives, routine had been drilled into his system. He was incapable of being idle. One of his jobs during college was at Tiger Rags, a university bookstore. The other was as a tutor in the math lab.

  Claire was an art history major. She had never been good at math. Or at least she’d never tried to be, which was the same thing. She could vividly remember the first time she’d sat down with Paul and gone over one of her assignments.

  “Everyone knows you’re beautiful,” he’d told her, “but no one knows that you’re clever.”

  Clever.

  Anybody could be smart. It took a special somebody to be clever.

  Claire returned the photograph to its spot. She sat down at Paul’s desk. She rested her arms where his arms used to rest. She closed her eyes and tried to find a trace of his scent. She took a deep breath until her lungs ached, then slowly sighed it out. She was almost forty years old. She didn’t have any children. Her husband was dead. Her best friends were probably drinking margaritas at the bar down the street and gossiping about how washed out she had looked at the funeral.

  Claire shook her head. She had the rest of her life to think about how lonely she was. What she needed to do right now was get through today. Or at least the next hour.

  She picked up the telephone and dialed Adam Quinn’s cell phone number. Paul had known Adam longer than he’d known Claire. They’d been dorm-mates their first year at Auburn. They’d gotten their architectural degrees together. Adam had been best man at their wedding. More importantly, Adam and Paul tended to use the same people to manage their lives.

  He picked up on the first ring. “Claire? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she told him, but only now that she had something concrete to do did she feel that way. “Listen, I’m sorry to bother you, but do you know who our insurance agent is?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Okay.” He sounded confused, probably because this was the last question he expected from Claire on the day of her husband’s funeral. “Her name is Pia Lorite.” He spelled the last name. “I can text you her info.”

  “I don’t have a cell phone,” Claire realized. “The Snake Man took it. I mean, the guy who—”

  “I’ll email it to you.”

  Claire was about to tell him she couldn’t access her email, either, but then she remembered her iPad. It was an older model. Paul kept threatening to replace it with a laptop and she kept saying it was fine and now she would probably pack it up to take with her in thirty-odd years when she went into a nursing home.

  “Claire?” Adam’s voice was muffled. She gathered he was walking into another room. How many phone calls had there been between them where Adam had gone into another room? Half a dozen, maybe.

  So meaningless. So stupid.

  He said, “Listen, I’m really sorry about this.”

  “Thank you.” She felt tearful again, and she hated herself for it because Adam was the last person she should be tearful with.

  “I want you to know if you need anything …” His voice trailed off. She heard a scratching sound and guessed he was rubbing his fingers along his face. Adam was one of those men who had a perpetual five o’clock shadow, even right after he’d shaved. Claire had never found hairy men particularly attractive, but she’d still managed to sleep with Adam anyway.

  She couldn’t even console herself by saying it had happened a long time ago.

  “Claire?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I’m sorry to bring this up, but Paul should have a file on his computer for work in progress. Can you email it to me? I hate to ask, but we’ve got a really important presentation first thing Monday morning and it would take hours to duplicate Paul’s work.”

  “It’s fine. I understand.” She reached under Paul’s desk and pulled out the keyboard. “I’ll send it from his email.”

  “You’ve got his password?”

  “Yes. He trusted me.” Claire was conscious that she and Adam both knew he shouldn’t have.

  What a stupid, pointless mistake.

  She said, “You’ll have it in a few minutes.”

  Claire hung up the phone. She thought about the hours she had spent with Adam Quinn. Hours she should’ve spent with her husband. Hours she would kill to have back now.

  There was no going back. She had to keep moving forward.

  Paul’s iMac desktop was a blank field of blue with the dock at the bottom. Beside the icons listing Paul’s applications were three folders: Work, Personal, House. She clicked House and quickly found the January to-do list. She also saw a file titled “insurance” that contained not just the name of their insurance agent, but a PDF with descriptions, photographs, and serial numbers of everything in the house. Claire sent all 508 pages to the printer.

  Next, she opened the Work folder. This was far more complicated and confusing. There was no “work in progress” folder, just a long list of files with numbers instead of names. Claire assumed these were project numbers, but she couldn’t be certain. She clicked on the date field to list them chronologically. There were fifteen recent files he’d been working on in the last two weeks. The last one had been opened the night before Paul died.

  Claire clicked on the file. She expected to find a schematic or scope of work, but all that happened was the little iMovie icon on the dock started bouncing.

  “Oh,” she said, because at first she didn’t understand what she was seeing. And then she smiled for the first time since the Snake Man had told them not to move.

  Paul had been looking at porn on his computer.

  Not just any porn.

  Kinky porn.

  A young woman in a leather bustier was chained to a concrete-block wall. She wore a studded dog collar. Her arms and legs were spreadeagled, giving her crotchless leather panties a workout. She was making squeaky, fearful noises that sounded more 1970s horny than present-day scared.

  Claire shot a guilty glance at the open doorway to Paul’s office. She muted the sound, but let the movie play.

  The woman was in a filthy room, which made it all the more shocking that Paul was interested. She was obviously young, but not alarmingly so. Her brunette hair was cut in a chic pixie. Heavy mascara ringed her eyes. Bright red lipstick made her lips seem bigger than they were. Her breasts were small, but she had fantastic legs. Paul had always liked Claire’s legs, even when she had on the ankle monitor.

  Actually, he’d especially loved the ankle monitor, which was the kinkiest thing she’d ever gotten out of him until he’d turned inexplicably rough with her in the alley.

  And now, of course, because this movie was pretty out there.

  Suddenly, a man’s head filled the screen. He was wearing a leather ski
mask with open zippers at the mouth and eyes. He smiled into the camera. There was something disturbing about the way his red lips showed against the metal teeth of the zipper, though Claire doubted Paul had been looking at the man.

  The focus blurred, then sharpened. The smile disappeared. And then the man started walking toward the girl. Claire saw his erect penis jutting out from his tight leather briefs. There was a machete in his hand. The long blade glinted in the overhead light. The man stopped a few feet away from the girl.

  The machete arced into the air.

  Claire gasped.

  The machete came down on the woman’s neck.

  Claire gasped again.

  The man wrenched out the blade. Blood sprayed everywhere—onto the walls, onto the man, onto the camera.

  Claire leaned forward, unable to look away.

  Was this real?

  The woman’s body convulsed, arms and legs pulling at the chains, head jerking. Blood poured down her chest, pooled at her feet.

  The man started fucking her.

  “Mrs. Scott?”

  Claire jumped back so hard that the chair slammed into the wall.

  “Are you up there?” Fred Nolan was walking up the stairs.

  Claire banged on the keyboard, blindly searching for a way to stop the movie.

  “Hello?” Nolan’s footsteps were getting closer. “Mrs. Scott?”

  She held down the control button and furiously tapped on the Q to quit the program. Error messages started popping up. Claire grabbed the mouse and clicked each one closed. The rainbow wheel started to spin. “Shit!” she hissed.

  “Mrs. Scott?” Fred Nolan was standing in the open doorway. “Something wrong?”

  Claire looked back at the computer. Sweet Jesus. The desktop was blank again. She willed her voice not to shake. “What is it?”

  “Just wanted to say that I’m sorry about before.”

  Claire nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

  Nolan let his gaze travel around the room. “Nice office.”

  She tried not to blink because every time her eyes closed, she saw the woman. The man. The blood.