Pretty Girls

I told him the story of Brent Lockwood, the boy who asked permission to date my oldest, now missing, daughter.

As I expected, Paul immediately apologized for not asking me whether or not he could date Claire. He is nothing if not a good mimic of appropriate behaviors. Had we been in person rather than on the telephone, I am certain he would’ve dropped to bended knee as he asked for my permission. But he wasn’t, so it was his voice that conveyed the respect and feeling.

Conveyed.

As your mother has said, Paul could be a belt in a doughnut factory, he is so good at sticky, emotional conveyances.

On the phone call, I laughed, because Paul’s request to date your sister was very late in coming, and he laughed, too, because that was what was expected of him. After an appropriate amount of time had passed, he alluded to a future request, one that would put his relationship with Claire on a more permanent footing, and I realized that though this stranger had been dating my daughter for only a few weeks, he was already thinking about marriage.

Marriage. That’s what he called it, though men like Paul do not marry women. They own them. They control them. They are voracious gluttons who devour every part of a woman, then clean their teeth with the bones.

I’m sorry, sweetheart. Since you were taken, I have gotten so much more leery than I used to be. I see conspiracies around corners. I know that darkness is everywhere. I trust no one but your mother.

So I cleared my throat a few times and staggered some painful emotion in my tone and told Paul that I could not in all good conscience see myself giving any man permission to marry either of my daughters, or to even attend their weddings, until I know what happened to my oldest child.

Like Pepper, and like you for that matter, Claire is as impulsive as she is stubborn. She is also my baby girl, and she would never, ever go against my wishes. There is one thing I know about both of your sisters: They would just as soon break my arms and legs as break my heart.

I know this truth like I know the sound of Claire’s laughter, the look she gets on her face when she is about to smile or cry or throw her arms around my shoulders and tell me that she loves me.

And Paul knows this, too.

After I told him about my dilemma, there was a long pause on his end of the telephone line. He is cunning, but he is young. One day, he will be a master manipulator, but two days from now when I get him alone, I will be the one asking questions, and I will not let Paul Scott leave my sight until he gives me all of the answers.

CHAPTER 15

Claire clenched her hands around the steering wheel. Panic had almost closed her throat. She was sweating, though a cold rush of wind came in through the cracked sunroof. She looked down at Lydia’s phone on the seat beside her. The screen had faded to black. So far, Paul had sent three pictures of Lydia. Each one showed her from a different angle. Each photo brought Claire some amount of relief because there was no further damage to Lydia’s face. Claire didn’t trust Paul, but she trusted her own eyes. He wasn’t hurting her sister.

At least not yet.

She forced her thoughts not to go to that dark place that they were so desperately drawn toward. Claire could find no location or time stamp on the photos. She had a tenuous hold on the belief that Paul was stopping his car every twenty minutes and taking the photographs, because the alternative was to believe that he had taken all the photos at the same time and that Lydia was already dead.

She had to think of a way out of this. Paul would already be strategizing. He was always five steps ahead of everyone else. Maybe he already had a solution. Maybe he was already implementing that solution.

He would have another house. Her husband always bought a backup. A two-­hour drive from Athens could put him in the Carolinas or on the coast or close to one of the Alabama border towns. He would have another house in another name with another murder room with another set of shelves for his sick movie collection.

Claire felt sweat roll down her back. She opened the sunroof a few inches more. It was just after four in the afternoon. The sun was dipping into the horizon. She couldn’t think about Paul or what he might be doing to her sister. He had always told her that winners only competed with themselves. Claire had one more hour to figure out how she was going to get the USB drive back from Adam, how she was going to deliver it to Paul, and how in the hell she was going to save her sister in the process.

So far, she had nothing but fear and the nauseating sensation that the hour would pass and she would be just as helpless as when she’d first left the Fuller house. The same problems that had plagued her before were on an endless loop that took up every conscious thought. Her mother: persistently unavailable. Huckleberry: worthless. Jacob Mayhew: probably working for the congressman. Fred Nolan: ditto, or maybe he had his own agenda. Congressman Johnny Jackson: Paul’s secret uncle. Powerful and connected, and duplicitous enough to stand with the Kilpatrick family during press conferences, as if he had no idea what had happened to their precious child. Adam Quinn: possible friend or foe.

The masked man: Paul.

Paul.

She couldn’t believe it. No, that wasn’t right. Claire had seen her husband in front of that girl with her own eyes. The problem was that she couldn’t feel it.

She forced all the disturbing things she knew about Paul to the forefront of her mind. She knew there was more. There had to be more. Like Paul’s color-­coded collection of rape files, there had to be countless more movies documenting the girls he abducted, the girls he kept, the girls he tortured for his own pleasure and for the pleasure of countless other despicable, disgusting viewers.

Was Adam Quinn one of his customers? Was he an active participant? As Lydia had said, it wasn’t like Claire was the best judge of character. She had been with Adam because she was bored, not because she wanted to get to know him. Her husband’s best friend had been a constant in their lives. In retrospect she understood that Paul had kept him at a distance. Adam was there, but he wasn’t inside the circle.

The circle had only ever contained Paul and Claire.

Which was why Claire had never given Adam much thought until that night at the Christmas party. He’d been very drunk. He’d made a pass, and she’d wanted to find out how far he would take it. He was good, or maybe just different from Paul, which was all that she had been looking for. He could be awkwardly charming. He liked golf and collected old train cars

and smelled of a woodsy, not unpleasant aftershave.

That was the extent of her knowledge.

Adam had told her that he had an important presentation on Monday, which meant that he’d be in the office first thing tomorrow morning. The presentation would take place at the Quinn + Scott downtown offices, where they had a custom-­built screening room with theater seating and young girls in tight dresses who served drinks and light snacks.

Adam would have the USB drive on him. The files were too big to email. If he needed the files for work, then he would have to take them to the offices to load them for the presentation. If he needed the key tag because it had incriminating evidence, he would be a fool to keep it anywhere but on his person.

Claire let her thoughts drift back to the latter possibility. Paul could have another circle that encompassed Adam. They’d been best friends for over two decades, well before Claire entered the picture. If Paul had found his father’s movies after his parents’ accident, surely he would have gone to Adam to talk about it. Had they hatched a plan then to keep the business going? Had they both watched the films together and realized that they weren’t repulsed by, but attracted to, the violent images?

In which case, Adam would’ve already told Paul that he had the USB drive. Claire didn’t know what his silence meant. A falling-­out? An attempted coup?

“Think,” Claire chided herself. “You have to think.”

She couldn’t think. She could barely function.

Claire picked up Lydia’s phone. Lydia didn’t have a passcode, or maybe Paul had helpfully bypassed it for Claire. She clicked the button and the most recent photograph came up on the screen. Lydia in the trunk, terrified. Her lips were white. What did that mean? Was she getting enough air? Was Paul suffocating her?

Don’t abandon me, Sweetpea. Please don’t abandon me again.

Claire put down the phone. She wasn’t going to abandon Lydia. Not this time. Not ever again.