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 probably 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?”
“Captain Mayhew.”
The name elicited an immediate frown. “He’s busy, ma’am.”
Claire hadn’t expected this. “I need to leave this for him.” She pointed to the hard drive, wondering if it looked like a bomb. It sure as hell felt like one. “Maybe I can write a note explaining—”
“Lee, I got this.” Captain Mayhew was standing behind the glass. He waved for Claire to go to a side door. There was a buzzing sound, then the door opened. Instead of seeing just Mayhew, she found Mayhew and Adam Quinn.
“Claire.” Adam seemed tense. “I didn’t get that email.”
“I’m sorry.” Claire had no idea what he was talking about. “What email?”
“The work-in-progress file from Paul’s laptop.”
Paul’s laptop. God only knew what he had on the MacBook. “I don’t—”
“Just get it to me.” Adam walked past her and out the door.
She stared at his back long after he’d gone. She didn’t understand why he seemed so angry.
Mayhew told Claire, “Guy does not like being in a police station.”
Claire suppressed the first response that came to mind: Who the hell does?
Mayhew said, “We’re talking to everybody who has a key to your house.”
Claire had forgotten Adam was on the list. He and his wife Sheila lived five streets over. He checked on the house when Claire and Paul were out of the country.
Mayhew asked, “What can I do you for, Mrs. Scott?”
“I have something you need to see.” She started to lift the hard drive.
“I got that.” Obviously, he wasn’t expecting the box to be so heavy. He almost dropped it. “Whoa. What is this thing?”
“It’s a hard drive.” Claire felt herself getting flustered. “It was my husband’s. I mean, my husband—”
“Let’s go back to my office.”
Claire tried to pull herself together as she followed him down a long corridor with closed doors on each side. She recognized the open area for processing prisoners. Then there was another long corridor, then they were in an open office space. There were no cubicles, just five desks with five men all hunched over their computers. Two rolling whiteboards were at the front of the room. All were filled with photographs and scribbled notes that were too far away to make out.
Mayhew stopped outside his office door. “After you.”
Claire sat down. Mayhew put the drive on his desk, then took a seat.
She stared at him. More to the point, she stared at his mustache so that she wouldn’t have to look him in the eye.
He asked, “Do you want something to drink? Water? Coke?”
“No, thank you.” Claire couldn’t drag this out any longer. “There are movies on that drive of women being tortured and murdered.”
Mayhew paused for a moment. Slowly, he sat back in his chair. He rested his elbows on the arms, folded his hands together in front of his stomach. “Okay.”
“I found them on my husband’s computer. Well, hooked up to my husband’s computer. An external hard drive that I found—” She stopped to catch her breath. He didn’t need to know the lengths Paul had gone to in order to hide the movies. He just needed to know that they were there. Claire pointed to the hard drive. “That has movies that my husband watched of two different women being tortured and killed.”