Claire looked away from the woman’s photo. Quinn + Scott’s downtown offices were near the convention site. Last year, Paul had sent her pictures of drunken people dressed like Darth Vader and the Green Lantern clogging the street.
Lydia slid over another file: another pretty, young blonde. “Pam Clayton. There was a story in the Patch. She was jogging near Stone Mountain Park. The attacker dragged her into the woods. It was after seven, but it was August so it was still light out.”
Paul’s tennis team occasionally had games in the park.
“Look at the dates on the files. He hired the detectives to follow them on the anniversaries of their rapes.”
Claire took her word for it. She didn’t want to read any more details. “Did the attacker say anything to either of them?”
“If he did, it wasn’t in the articles. We need the police reports.”
Claire wondered why Paul hadn’t asked the private detectives to track down the reports. Lydia’s file contained her arrest records and all the ancillary paperwork. Maybe Paul figured it was a bad idea to tip his hand by asking all of these different detectives to check up on all of these women who had been raped. Or maybe he didn’t need the reports because he already knew exactly what had happened to them.
Or maybe he was getting the reports from Captain Jacob Mayhew.
“Claire?”
She shook her head, but now that she had the thought in her mind, she couldn’t get rid of it. Why hadn’t she studied Mayhew’s expression while he watched the movies? Then again, what good would it do? Hadn’t she learned enough about Paul’s duplicity to realize that her judgment could not be trusted?
“Claire?” Lydia waited for her attention. “Did you notice something about the women?”
Claire shook her head again.
“They all look like you.”
Claire didn’t point out that that meant they looked like Lydia, too. “So, what now? We’re holding these women’s lives in our hands. We don’t know if we can trust Mayhew. Even if we did, he didn’t take the movies seriously. Why would he investigate the files?”
Lydia shrugged. “We can call Nolan.”
Claire couldn’t believe what she was suggesting. “Better these women than us, you mean?”
“I wouldn’t put it like that, but now that you—”
“They’ve already been raped. You want to sic that asshole on them, too?”
Lydia shrugged. “Maybe it’ll give them some peace knowing that the man who attacked them isn’t around anymore.”
“That’s a bullshit excuse.” Claire was adamant. “We know firsthand what Nolan is like. He probably won’t even believe them. Or worse, he’ll flirt with them like he flirts with me. There’s a reason most women don’t go to the cops when they’re raped.”
“What are you going to do, write them a check?”
Claire walked into the family room before she said something she would regret. Writing some checks didn’t sound like a bad idea. Paul had attacked these women. The least she could do was pay for therapy or whatever else they needed.
Lydia said, “If Paul had actually raped me, and I found out that every September for almost eighteen years, he’d been stalking me, taking pictures of me, I would want to grab a gun and kill him.”
Claire stared at the Rothko over the fireplace. “What would you do if you found out that he was already dead and there was nothing you could do about it?”
“I would still want to know.”
Claire felt no temptation to reveal the truth. Lydia had always blustered about how tough she was, but there was a reason she was already numbing herself with drugs at the age of sixteen.
Claire said, “I can’t do it. I won’t do it.”
“I know you don’t want to hear it, but it makes me glad to know he’s dead. And to know how he died, even though it must have been rotten for you.”
“Rotten,” Claire repeated, thinking the word was borderline insulting. Rotten was being late for a movie or losing a great parking space. Watching your husband get stabbed and bleed to death in front of your own eyes was fucking excruciating. “No. I won’t do it.”
“Fine.” Lydia started grabbing folders and stacking them together. She was clearly angry, but Claire wasn’t going to back down. She knew what it was like to be the focus of Fred Nolan’s interest. She couldn’t unleash that on Paul’s victims. There was already enough guilt on her conscience without throwing these poor women into the lion’s den.
She walked farther into the family room. The sunlight was blinding. Claire closed her eyes for a moment and let the heat from the sun warm her face. And then she turned away because it seemed wrong to enjoy something so basic considering all of the misery they had uncovered.
Her gaze traveled to the area behind one of the couches. Lydia had spread out some paperwork on the floor. Instead of more private detective reports, Claire was surprised to recognize her father’s handiwork.
Sam Carroll had devoted an entire wall in his apartment to tracking down leads about Julia. There were photographs and note-cards and torn sheets of paper with phone numbers and names scribbled across them. In all, the entire collection took up around five by ten feet of space. He’d lost his deposit for the apartment because of all the holes the thumbtacks had left in the Sheetrock.
She asked Lydia, “You kept Dad’s wall?”
“No, it was in the second file box.”
Of course it was.
Claire knelt down. The wall had defined her father for so many years. His desperation still emanated from every scrap of paper. Vet school had taught him to be a meticulous note-taker. He had recorded everything he’d read or heard or witnessed, combined police reports and statements, until the case was as imprinted on his brain as the structure of a dog’s digestive system or the signs of feline leukemia.
She picked up a sheet of notebook paper that had her father’s handwriting on it. In the last two weeks of his life, Sam Carroll had developed a slight palsy after a minor stroke. His suicide note had been barely legible. Claire had forgotten what his original penmanship looked like.
She asked Lydia, “What’s it called?”
“The Palmer Method.” Lydia was standing behind Claire. “He was supposed to be left-handed, but they made him use his right hand.”
“They did that to me, too.”
“They made you wear a mitten so you wouldn’t use your left hand. Mom was furious when she found out.”
Claire sat down on the floor. She couldn’t stop touching the only pieces she had left of her father. Sam had handled this picture of a man who talked to another man who had a sister who maybe knew something about Julia. He had touched this matchbook from the Manhattan, the bar where Julia was last seen. He had written notes on this menu from the Grit, her favorite vegetarian restaurant. He had stared at this photograph of Julia leaning against her bike.
Claire stared at the photograph, too. A gray houndstooth fedora was in the handlebar basket. Julia’s long blonde hair cascaded around her shoulders in a soft perm. She was wearing a man’s black suit jacket and white dress shirt with tons of silver and black bangles on her wrists and white lace gloves on her hands because it was the late 1980s and every girl they knew back then wanted to look like either Cyndi Lauper or Madonna.