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.”