Pretty Girls

Lydia felt the same way, and she’d only been doing this for a few hours.

Claire said, “Nolan flirts with me, right? The way he looked at me tonight, like he was checking me out. You picked up on that?”

“Yes.”

“He’s creepy, right?”

He was beyond creepy, but Lydia just said, “I guess.”

“Ha.” Claire stood, holding up the separated key tag in triumph. The plastic medallion was imprinted with the orange and blue logo of Auburn University. Claire pulled it apart, then shoved the USB connector into the laptop. She clicked open the drive. Lydia saw that it was empty save for the software folder.

She breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God.”

“No kidding.” Claire copied the Work in Progress folder onto the drive. “I hope these are the files Adam was talking about. I don’t think I can take it if they’re not.”

Lydia noticed a striking similarity between the way she talked about Paul and the way she talked about Adam Quinn. And then she remembered something Nolan had intimated as they all stood at the front door. “You were sleeping with Adam Quinn.”

Claire shrugged with feigned innocence. “My court-­appointed therapist would say I was trying to fill a hole.”

“Is that what you call your vagina?”

Claire chuckled under her breath.

“Unbelievable,” Lydia muttered, though history told her it was completely believable.

When Rick had asked Lydia to tell him about Claire, she had left out the part about her sister being sexually liberated. Not that Claire was sloppy about it. She was remarkably adept at compartmentalizing everyone in her life. Her townie friends never met her college friends. Her cheerleading friends never mixed with her track club friends, and hardly anyone knew she was on the tennis team. None of them would’ve ever guessed she was sleeping around. Especially whichever man she was dating at the time.

“Finished.” Claire ejected the USB drive. “All right. That’s at least one thing that’s done.”

Lydia didn’t care about Adam Quinn anymore. Some component in the back of her brain had been working the puzzle of Paul’s code, and she finally understood what he’d done. “The movie names. They’re coded dates.” She turned to Claire. “Like, if a file was named 1-­2-­3-­4-­5, the code would be 1-­5-­2-­4-­3. You take the first number, then the last number, then the second number, then the second-­from-­last number, and work your way into the middle until they’re all accounted for.”

Claire was already nodding. “So, November 1, 2015, is 11-­01-­2015, which would make the code 1-­5-­1-­1-­0-­0-­1-­2.”

“Exactly.”

She pointed to the screen. “The last file on the list is the first movie with the girl who looks like Anna Kilpatrick.”

Lydia translated the date. “It was made a day after she went missing.”

Claire leaned heavily on the workbench. “This is how it’s been for the last two days. Every time I convince myself the movies aren’t real, something else comes along and I think maybe they are.”

Lydia had to play devil’s advocate. “I’m not taking up for Paul, but so what if it’s real? There’s all kinds of shit on the Internet showing ­people being shot or beheaded or raped or whatever. It’s disgusting to watch it, and if Paul knew it was Anna Kilpatrick, he should’ve reported it to the police, but it’s not illegal to just shut up and watch it.”

Claire seemed battered by the brutal truth behind Lydia’s words. She tucked her chin down the same way Dee did when she didn’t want to talk about something.

“Claire?”

She shook her head. “If it’s not illegal, then why does Nolan keep coming here? And why did Mayhew act so weird when he asked me if I made any copies?”

“Maybe Nolan’s just a prick and he can’t stand it that Paul got away with breaking the law.” Lydia had to give Captain Mayhew’s part a bit more thought. “Mayhew could be trying to protect you. That’s what men do around you. They always have. But let’s say the movies are real. So what?” Saying those two words a second time made Lydia realize how awful she sounded, because these women were human beings with families. Still, she had to push on. “Worst-­case scenario, Mayhew was trying to keep you from thinking your husband is morally bankrupt.”

“Paul was morally bankrupt.” Claire spoke with deadly cold conviction. “I found more files. Paper files.”

Lydia felt panic wind up inside of her chest like a watch.

“Paul kept them upstairs in his office. Two big boxes of files and God knows what else. I recognized one of the names on the labels.” Claire’s gaze shifted to the side the same way it did when she was little and she was trying to hide something.

“What name did you recognize?”

Claire looked down at her hands. She was picking the cuticle on her thumb. “The woman’s name was familiar to me. I saw her on the news. A story, I mean, not actually her. She came forward because normally the news wouldn’t print, I mean, interview—­”

“Claire, use your words.”

Claire still would not look up. “Paul was collecting information on a lot of women, and I know that at least one of the women was raped.”

“How do you know?”

Claire finally looked her in the eye. “I saw her name on the news. I don’t know her. Paul never mentioned her to me. She’s just this stranger who’s been raped, and Paul has a file on her. And he has a lot of files on other women, too.”

Lydia felt a sudden cold come over her body. “What kind of information was he collecting?”

“Where they work. Who they date. Where they go. He hired private detectives to follow them without their knowledge. There are pictures and reports and background checks.” Claire obviously felt cold, too. She stuck her hands deep into her front pockets. “From what I saw, he checks in on them once a year, the same time every year, and I keep asking myself why would he have them followed if not for a reason, and what if that reason is that he raped all of them?”

Lydia felt like a hummingbird was trapped in her throat. “Does he have a file on me?”

“No.”

Lydia studied her carefully. Claire had always held on to secrets like a cat. Was she lying? Could Lydia trust her about something so important?

“They’re in my office.” Claire hesitated. “Not that I’m saying you should look at them. I mean . . .” She shrugged. “I don’t know what I mean. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’ve pulled you into this. You can still go. You should probably go.”

Lydia looked down the driveway. Rick’s truck was parked in a turnaround by the front of the house. He wouldn’t let Lydia drive the van until he changed the wiper blades, which kindness she had returned by letting a special agent with the FBI record his license plate number.

Rick had crossed paths with the various law enforcement agencies during his time as a heroin addict, because he’d managed to sell almost as much as he’d used. Nolan would need to block out a few hours to read his rap sheet. And then what would he do? Go to the gas station and harass Rick until his boss had to let him go? Swing by the house to interrogate him, and maybe run a check on his neighbors and find out that Lydia lived next door?

And then Dee would be pulled into it, and the Mothers would find out, and the ­people who worked at Lydia’s shop would be harassed, and maybe her clients, who would make lame apologies about how they couldn’t let a woman being investigated by the FBI give their poodle a sanitary shave because it was too complicated.

“Pepper?” Claire had her arms crossed low on her waist. “You should go. I mean it this time. I can’t involve you in this.”

“I’m already in it up to my neck.”

“Pepper.”

Lydia climbed her way back through the garage. Instead of going down the driveway, she headed toward the house. She had dealt with her share o

f cops, too. They were sharks looking for blood, and by the sound of it, Claire had two boxes of chum in her office that might just get Agent Fred Nolan off all of their backs.