Pretty Girls

by Karin Slaughter

  Claire closed the file. She clicked open all of the other spreadsheets and scrolled through each name because she had paid the price that came with not looking at everything once before.

  Fifty names on each spreadsheet, sixteen spreadsheets in all. There were eight hundred men scattered all over the world who were paying for the privilege of watching Paul commit brutal, cold-­blooded murder.

  If only Claire had clicked open all of the files on the USB drive back in the garage. Then again, there was no way she would’ve guessed the same password, because back in the garage, she’d thought her husband was a passive viewer rather than an active participant.

  Claire held the mouse over the last file, which wasn’t really a file. It was another folder, this one titled JJ.

  If the FNF folder contained things that Fred Nolan wanted to get his hands on, she knew that the JJ folder would contain information valuable to Congressman Johnny Jackson.

  Claire opened the folder. She found a list of files with no extensions. She scrolled over to the column on the far right.

  Kind: JPEG image.

  Claire clicked open the first file. What she saw made her gag.

  The photo was in black and white. Johnny Jackson was standing inside what could only be the Amityville barn. He was posing with a body that was suspended upside down from the rafters. The girl was trussed up like a deer. Her ankles were tied together with barbed wire that sliced into the bone. She was hanging from a large metal hook that looked like something from a butcher’s shop. Her arms dragged the floor. She had been cut open stem to stern. Johnny Jackson held a sharp-­looking hunting knife in one hand, a cigarette in the other. He was naked. Black blood covered the front of his body and engulfed his rigid penis.

  Claire clicked open the next file. Another man in black and white. Another dead girl. Another bloody scene of carnage. She didn’t recognize the face. She kept clicking. And clicking. And then she found what she should’ve guessed would be there all along.

  Sheriff Carl Huckabee.

  The photograph was in Kodachrome color. Huckleberry had what could only be called a shit-­eating grin under his neatly combed mustache. He was naked but for his cowboy hat and boots. There was a splash of blood on his bare chest. His thick thatch of pubic hair was caked with dried blood. The girl hanging beside him was trussed up like all the others, except this girl wasn’t just any girl. Claire immediately recognized the silver and black bangles that hung from her limp wrist.

  It was Julia.

  Her sister’s beautiful blonde hair dragged the dirt floor. Long cuts exposed the white of her high cheekbones. Her breasts had been cut off. Her stomach was sliced open. Her intestines hung down to her face and wrapped around her neck like a scarf.

  The machete was still inside of her.

  Paul, aged fifteen, was standing on the other side of Huckabee. He was dressed in acid-­washed jeans and a bulky red polo shirt. His hair was feathered. He wore thick glasses.

  He was giving the man behind the camera two thumbs-­up.

  Claire closed the photograph. She looked out the window. The sky had opened up, sending a deluge of water into the park. The clouds had darkened to an almost black. She listened to the insistent tapping of rain against glass.

  She had lulled herself into hoping that Paul would not irreparably harm Lydia because he still wanted to please Claire. The justifications followed a simple pattern: He had obviously terrified Lydia. He had clearly hurt her. But there was no way he would truly damage her. He’d had his chance eighteen years ago. He had paid men to follow her for years. He could’ve taken her at any point and he had chosen not to because he loved Claire.

  Because she was pretty? Because she was smart? Because she was clever?

  Because she was a fool.

  Lydia was right. She was already dead.

  CHAPTER 20

  Paul was pacing the room as he talked on the phone. Words were coming out of his mouth, but none of them made sense. Actually, nothing made sense to Lydia.

  She knew she was in pain, but she didn’t care. She was afraid, but it didn’t matter. She pictured her terror as a festering wound below a fresh scab. She knew it was still there, she knew that even the slightest touch could make it open, and yet she could not bring herself to worry.

  Nothing could occupy her thoughts for very long except for one exquisite truth: She had forgotten how fucking fantastic it was to be high. The stench of piss had gone away. She could breathe again. The colors in the room were so goddamn gorgeous. The Apple Macintosh, dot-­matrix printer, five-­inch floppy discs, duping machine, disc burner. They glowed every time she looked at them.

  Paul said, “No, you listen to me, Johnny. I’m the one in control.”

  Johnny. Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Jack Corn and I don’t care.

  No, that was Jimmy.

  Jimmy Jack Corn and I don’t care.

  No, it was Jimmy Crack Corn.

  But did she care?

  Lydia vaguely recalled Dee singing the song along with the puppets on Sesame Street. But that couldn’t be right. Dee was terrified of Big Bird. Probably Claire had sung the song. She’d had a Geraldine doll that said “the devil made me do it” every time you pulled the string. Claire had broken the string. Julia was furious, because the doll had belonged to her. She had gone to Sambo’s with her friend Tammy.

  Was that right? Sambo’s?

  Lydia had been there, too. The restaurant’s menu had a black-­faced child running around a tree. The tigers chasing him were turning into butter.

  Pancakes.

  She could almost smell her father making pancakes. Christmas morning; it was the only time Helen let him in the kitchen. Her father delighted in taunting them. He made them eat all of their breakfast before they were allowed to open any gifts.

  “Lydia?”

  Lydia let her head roll to the side. Her eyelids had stars on the inside. Her tongue tasted like candy.

  “Oh, Lydia?”

  Paul’s voice was singsong-­y. He was off the phone. He was standing in front of Lydia with the pry bar in his hands. Claire had dropped it on the kitchen table yesterday. The day before? Last week?

  He tested the weight of the bar in his hands. He looked at the hammer head, the giant claw on the other end. “This is something that I could find very useful, don’t you think?”

  Lydia said, Motherfucker, but only in her head.

  “Watch this.” He held the pry bar like a bat on his shoulder. He swung the claw at her head.

  He missed.

  On purpose?

  She had felt the breeze as the metal chopped through the air. She could smell a metallic kind of sweat. Claire’s sweat? Paul’s sweat? He wasn’t sweating now. She only saw him sweat when he was standing over her with that sick grin on his face.

  Lydia blinked.

  Paul was gone. No, he was sitting at the computer. The monitor was massive. Lydia knew he was looking at a map. She wasn’t close enough to make out any landmarks. He was glued to the screen, tracking Claire’s progress as she went to the bank, because Paul had told her Claire was hiding the USB drive in the bank. In a safety-­deposit box. Lydia had been tempted to tell him otherwise, but her lips felt too full, like giant balloons were glued to the skin. Every time she tried to pry her mouth open, the balloons got heavier.

  But she couldn’t tell him. She knew that. Claire was doing something. She was tricking him. She was trying to help Lydia. She said on the phone that she was going to take care of this, right? That Lydia needed to hold on. That she wouldn’t abandon her again. But the USB drive was with Adam Quinn, so what the hell was she doing at the bank?

  Adam Quinn has the USB drive, Lydia told Paul, but the words were only in her head because her mouth was taped shut because she had finally managed to say some things to Paul that he did not want to hear.

 
Claire hates you now. She believes me. She will never, ever take you back.

  We are never ever ever getting back together.

  Taylor Swift. How many times had Dee played that song after she caught Heath Carmichael cheating?

  This time I’m telling you. . .

  “Lydia?” Paul was standing beside her. She looked back at his computer monitor. When had he moved? He had been looking at the computer. He was saying something about Claire leaving the bank. How was he standing beside her now when he was at the computer?

  She turned her head to ask Paul. Her vision staggered through each frame. She heard the bionic sound like Steve Austin made in the Six Million Dollar Man.

  Ch-­ch-­ch-­ch. . .

  Paul wasn’t there.

  He was standing in front of the rolling cart. He was replacing the old items with new ones. His movements were slow and precise. Ch-­ch-­ch-­ch came the bionic sound as he moved in stop-­motion like in Rudolph the Red-­Nosed Reindeer.

  Claire. She hated the Christmas special with the freakishly happy creatures whose movements stuttered one millisecond at a time. Julia made them watch it every year, and Claire would curl into Lydia like a tiny, frightened doll, and Lydia would laugh along with Julia because Claire was such a baby but secretly, the creatures scared her, too.

  Paul said, “You’re going to want to prepare yourself for this.”

  This sounded important. Lydia felt the scab start to itch. She shook her head. She wouldn’t pick at it. She needed that scab to stay on. Instead, she tried to concentrate on his hands, the stilted moves of his fingers as he straightened everything once, then twice, then a third time, then a fourth.

  Lydia heard a new mantra come into her head—­

  Barbed wire. Pry bar. A length of chain. A large hook. A sharp hunting knife.

  A moment of clarity broke through the clouds in her mind.

  They were close to the end.

  CHAPTER 21

  Claire sat with her back to the wall inside the Office Shop across from Phipps Plaza. She had angled herself between the front and back doors so that she would know if anyone came in. She was the only customer in the small storefront. The clerk was working silently at one of the rental computers. Claire held the burner phone in her hand. Helen had been on I-­75 for ten minutes.

  Paul still hadn’t called.

  Her head was filling with wild reasons for why the phone had not yet rung. Paul was on his way here. He had already murdered Lydia. He was going to murder Claire. He was going to track down Helen and go to Grandma Ginny’s home and then he was going to search for Dee.

  Maybe that had been his plan all along, to wipe out her entire family. Claire was nothing more than a calculated first step. Dating her. Wooing her. Marrying her. Pretending to make her happy. Pretending to be happy.

  Lies on top of lies on top of more, endless lies.

  They were like grenades. Paul lobbed them over the wall and Claire waited an interminable amount of time before the truth finally exploded in her face.

  The photographs were a thousand grenades. They were the nuclear explosion that sent her reeling into the darkest place she had ever known.

  Paul, fifteen years old, flashing a maniacal grin as he posed for the camera beside the trussed-­up body of her sister. He had his thumbs up, the same way he had given Fred Nolan a thumbs-­up when he’d given the FBI agent the slip.

  Claire stared at the burner phone. The blank screen stared back. She forced herself to come up with less alarming reasons for why the phone was not ringing. The call forwarding wasn’t working properly. Mayhew had talked to someone at the phone company who put Paul on to the burner phone. Adam was secretly in on it and he’d alerted Paul so that his men could follow Claire.

  None of those things was any less terrifying, because they all led back to Paul.

  Claire patted her hand to her purse until she felt the hard outline of Lydia’s revolver. At least she’d done one thing right. Buying bullets for the gun had been easy. There was a gun store down the street that had sold her a box of hollow-­point ammunition, no questions asked.

  The Office Shop offered printing ser­vices as well as hourly computer rental. She had been too wrapped up in her own fear to flirt with the geeky boy behind the counter, so she’d bribed him with $250 of Helen’s cash instead. She had explained her problem in loose terms—­she wanted to put something on YouTube, but it was photographs, not movies, and there were a lot of them, along with some spreadsheets, and she needed all of it to work properly because someone was going to try to take them down.

  The boy had stopped her there. She didn’t want YouTube, she wanted something like Dropbox, and then Claire had shifted her purse on her shoulder and he had seen the box of ammo and the gun and told her that it was going to be an extra hundred dollars and she wanted something called Tor.

  Tor. Claire had a vague recollection of reading about the illegal file-­sharing site in Time magazine. It had something to do with the dark Web, which meant it was uncatalogued and untraceable. Maybe Paul was using Tor to distribute his movies. Instead of emailing large files, he could send out a complicated Web site link that no one else could find unless they put in the exact combination of letters and numbers.

  She had their email addresses. Should she send Paul’s customers his spreadsheets and photographs?

  “It’s ready.” The geeky boy stood in front of Claire with his hands clasped in front of his pleated slacks. “Just jack in the thumb drive and drag everything you want onto the page and it’ll be uploaded.”

  Claire read his name tag. “Thank you, Keith.”

  He smiled at her before trouncing back to the counter.

  Claire pushed herself up. She sat in the chair in front of the computer, occasionally glancing at the entrance and the exit as she followed the boy’s instructions. The store was cold inside, but she was sweating. Her hands weren’t shaking, but she felt a vibration in her body, like a tuning fork had touched her bones. She checked the doors again as Paul’s files started to upload. She had put the JPEGs at the top so that the first click would open the image of Johnny Jackson. The trick would be making someone want to click.

  Claire went to the mail program that Keith had set up for her. She had a new email address that came with the ability to schedule the exact time and date that emails were sent out.

  She started to type.

  My name is Claire Carroll Scott. Julia Carroll and Lydia Delgado were my sisters.

  Claire felt sick from the betrayal. Lydia was alive. She had to be alive.

  She hit the backspace key until the last sentence was deleted.

  I have posted proof that Congressman Johnny Jackson has participated in pornographic films.

  Claire stared at the words. This wasn’t entirely true because it was more than porn. It was abduction, rape, and murder, but she was worried that listing all of that out would dissuade ­people from clicking on the link. She was sending this to every media outlet and government agency who listed a contact address on their Web site. Most likely, the accounts were monitored by young interns who hadn’t any idea who Johnny Jackson was or who had grown up around email and therefore knew not to click anonymous links, especially ones that connected to Tor.

  Claire opened a new browser window. She found Penelope Ward’s email on the Westerly Academy PTO page. Lydia’s nemesis looked just as candy-­apple fake as Claire would’ve guessed. The Branch Ward for Congress Exploratory Committee listed the address intern@WeWantWard.com. The site indicated the group was a PAC, which meant they would be looking for any dirt on their opponent that they could find.

  The burner phone rang.

  Claire headed into the stockroom and opened the back door. Rain was still pouring down. The wind had picked up, sending a cold jet of air into the small space. She hoped the background noise was enough to convince Paul that she w
as driving the Tesla up I-­75.

  She flipped open the phone. “Paul?”

  “Do you have the key tag?”

  “Yes. Let me talk to Lydia.”

  He was silent. She could feel his relief. “Did you look at what’s on it?”

  “Sure, I used the computer at the bank.” Claire funneled all of her anger into the sarcastic response. “Let me speak to Lydia. Now.”

  He went through the usual steps. She heard the speakerphone turn on.

  Claire said, “Lydia?” She waited. “Lydia?”

  She heard a loud, desperate moan.

  Paul said, “I don’t think she feels like talking.”

  Claire leaned her head back against the wall. She looked up at the ceiling as she tried to keep her tears from falling. He had really hurt Lydia. Claire had held on to a shred of hope that he hadn’t, the same way she’d held on to a shred of hope about Julia for so many years. Her face burned with shame.

  “Claire?”

  “I want to meet at the mall. Phipps Plaza. How long do you need?”

  “I don’t think so,” Paul said. “Why don’t we meet at Lydia’s house?”

  Claire stopped fighting her tears. “Did you take Dee?”

  “I haven’t taken her yet, but I know you went to Lydia’s house to warn her redneck boyfriend. He took Dee to a fishing shack off Lake Burton. Haven’t you figured out by now that I know everything?”

  He didn’t know about the gun. He didn’t know about the Office Shop.

  He said, “Drive back to Watkinsville. I’ll meet you at my parents’ house.”

  Claire felt her stomach drop. She had seen what Paul did to prisoners inside the Fuller house.

  “Still there?”

  Claire forced herself to speak. “There’s a lot of traffic. It’ll probably take me a ­couple of hours.”

  “It shouldn’t take more than ninety minutes.”

  “I know you’ve been tracking me with my phone. Watch the blue dot. It’ll take however long it takes.”