He said, “I wasn’t just pissed off about the money. It was one more thing on top of the mood swings and the temper tantrums and his need to control everything and—I never meant for it to escalate. When that asshole from the FBI handcuffed him and walked him out of the office, I knew that was it. The look on Paul’s face. I’ve never seen him angry like that. He just kind of turned into this guy I had never seen before.”
Claire had seen what that guy was capable of. Adam was lucky Paul had been in handcuffs. “You dropped the charges. Was that because Paul paid the money back?”
“No.” He looked away from Claire. “I paid it back.”
Claire was sure she’d heard wrong. She had to repeat his words to make sure. “You paid back the money.”
“He knew about us. The three times.”
The three times.
Claire had been with Adam Quinn three times: at the Christmas party, during the golf tournament, and in the bathroom down the hallway while Paul was downstairs waiting for them to join him for lunch.
Fred Nolan had the answer to his first curious thing. Paul had stolen one million dollars for each time Adam had fucked her.
“I’m sorry,” Adam said.
Claire felt foolish, but only because she hadn’t figured it out on her own. Paul and Adam had always been driven by money. “He took enough money to get your attention, but not enough to make you call the police. Except that you did. You called in the FBI.”
Adam nodded sheepishly. “Sheila pushed me into doing it. I was pissed off—I mean, why? And then it snowballed into them arresting Paul and searching his office and …” His voice trailed off. “I actually ended up begging him for his forgiveness. I mean, yeah, what I did was wrong, but we’re partners and we had to find a way to be able to work together again, so …”
“You paid him a three-million-dollar penalty.” Claire didn’t have the luxury of processing her feelings. “I guess if I’m going to be a whore, at least I’m not a cheap one.”
“Hey—”
“I need the USB drive back, the one I left for you in the mailbox.”
“Of course.” Adam walked over to the projector. His briefcase was open beside it. She supposed this was the last bit of proof she needed that Paul had hidden his sick venture from his best friend. Or former best friend, as seemed to be the case.
Adam held up the keytag. “I already downloaded the files I needed. Can I help you with—”
Claire took the drive out of his hand. “I need to use the computer in Paul’s office.”
“Sure. I can have—”
“I know where it is.”
Claire walked down the hallway with the keytag clenched in her hand. She had Paul’s customer list. Claire was sure of it. But she couldn’t get Fred Nolan’s words out of her head: Trust but verify.
The lights were off in Paul’s office. His chair was tucked under his desk. The blotter was clear. There were no stray papers. The stapler was aligned to the pencil cup was aligned to the lamp. Anyone would assume that his office had been cleaned out, but Claire knew differently.
She sat in Paul’s chair. The computer was still on. She stuck the USB connector into the back of the iMac. Paul hadn’t logged out of the system. She could picture him sitting behind his desk when Fred Nolan came to tell him that it was time to fake his death. Paul wouldn’t have been able to do anything but stand up and leave.
So of course he had taken the time to slide his chair back under his desk at a precise angle to the legs.
Claire double-clicked on the USB drive. There were two folders, one for Adam’s work-in-progress files and the other for the software that ran the USB drive. She clicked open the software folder. She scanned the files, which all had technical-looking names and .exe extensions. She checked the dates. Paul had saved the files onto the drive two days before his staged murder.
Claire scrolled to the bottom of the list. The last file Paul had saved was a folder titled FFN.exe. In the garage two nights ago, Claire had checked the USB drive for movies, but that had been before she discovered the true depth of her husband’s depravities. She knew better than to take things at face value now. She also knew that folders didn’t require extensions.
FFN. Fred F. Nolan. Claire had seen the man’s initials on his handkerchief.
She clicked open the folder.
A prompt came up asking for a password.
Claire stared at the screen until the prompt blurred. She had guessed the other passwords with the notion that she knew her husband. This password had been set by the Paul Scott she had never met—the one who donned a mask to film himself raping and murdering young women. The one who charged his best friend a million bucks a pop to fuck his wife. The one who had found his father’s stash of movies and decided to scale up the business.
Paul must have watched the tapes on the same VCR that Lydia and Claire had seen in the Fuller house. Claire imagined her young, awkward husband sitting in front of the television watching his dead father’s movies for the first time. Was Paul surprised by what he saw? Was he disgusted? She wanted to think that he’d been outraged, and repulsed, and that habituation and necessity had compelled him not only to sell the tapes, but to try out his father’s deviations for himself.
But then less than six years later, Paul was meeting Claire in the math lab. Surely he knew exactly who Claire was, exactly who her sister was. Surely he had watched Julia’s movie dozens, maybe hundreds of times by then.
Claire’s hands were surprisingly steady on the keyboard as she typed in the password: 03041991.
No mnemonics. No acronyms. March 4, 1991, the day that her sister had gone missing. The day that had started it all.
She pressed enter. The rainbow wheel started to spin.
The folder opened. She saw a list of files.
.xls—Excel spreadsheet.
There were sixteen spreadsheets in all.
She opened the first spreadsheet. There were five columns: Name, email, address, bank routing info, member since.
Member since.
Claire scrolled down the list. Fifty names in total. Some of the memberships went back thirty years. They were anywhere from Germany to Switzerland to New Zealand. Several addresses were in Dubai.
She had been right. Paul needed his customer list. Was Mayhew looking for it, too? Did he want to take over Paul’s business? Or was Johnny Jackson sending the police to clean up his nephew’s mess?
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 800 men scattered all over the world who were paying for the privilege of watching Paul commit brutal, coldblooded 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.
TWENTY
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 disks, duping machine, disk 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 sing-songy. 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.
TWENTY-ONE
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.
Pretty Girls: A Novel Page 39
