Pretty Girls

  Lydia heard a whimper come from her mouth. She could handle the sickness, but the grief would kill her before Paul had his chance. Julia. Her innocent, tortured sister. There were six tapes in all, which meant Paul’s father had taken time with her. She had been all alone in that barn, waiting for him, dreading his return, up until the final seconds of her life.

  Julia had actually looked at the camera as she was dying. She had stared straight into the lens, straight into Lydia’s heart, and mouthed the word Help.

  Lydia squeezed her eyes shut. She let the feelings come uncensored. She should’ve been sweeter to Dee on the phone this morning. She should’ve called Rick to tell him that she loved him instead of texting him that she would explain everything later. And Claire. She should’ve told Claire that she forgave her, because Paul was not a human being. He was some kind of terrifying aberration who was capable of unspeakable deeds.

  Lydia fought back another whimper. She couldn’t let herself lose it again. She had to be strong for what was coming next, because Paul had a plan. He always had a plan.

  Lydia had a plan, too. She kept flexing her hands and moving her feet to make sure there was enough circulation in her body and clarity in her mind, because eventually, Paul would have to open the trunk again. Lydia was heavier than he was. Paul would have to cut the zip ties so she could climb out. That would be the only opportunity she would have to stop him.

  She kept going over the steps in her mind: At first, she would act confused. This would buy her eyes time to adjust to the sunlight. Then, she would move slowly and pretend that she was in pain, which wouldn’t be a stretch. She would act like she needed help and Paul, impatiently, would push her or shove her or kick her and then Lydia would throw her weight into her shoulder and hit him as hard as she could in the neck.

  She wouldn’t use her fist because the knuckles might glance off. She would stretch open her hand and use the webbing between her thumb and index finger, creating an arc that sliced nicely into the base of his Adam’s apple.

  The thought of hearing his windpipe crack was the only thing that kept her going.

  Lydia took several deep breaths and let them go. She worked her hands and feet. She pulled up her knees and stretched out her legs. She rolled her shoulders. Having a plan helped the panic die down to a splinter worrying the back of her brain.

  The engine changed speed. Paul was taking an off-­ramp. She could feel the car slowing. There was a flash of red light around the steel plates, then a yellow pulse as the turning signal was engaged.

  Lydia rolled onto her back. She had gone over the plan so many times that she could practically feel Paul’s throat crunching under her hand. There was no telling how much time had passed since he’d put her in the trunk. She had tried to count the minutes from when he took the photo, but she kept losing count. Panic could do that. She knew that the most important thing to do while she waited was to keep her mind engaged with something other than worst-­case scenarios.

  She grasped for memories that didn’t involve Paul Scott. Or Dee and Rick, because thinking about her child and her lover right now in this dark, death trap of a space would lead her down a path of no return.

  She had to go back several years for a memory that didn’t somehow involve Paul, because even in absence, he had been such a huge part of her life for such a long time. Lydia was twenty-two when Claire met Paul at the computer lab. Two months later, he’d managed to tear Lydia from her family. She had always blamed Paul for her darkest days of addiction, but well before meeting him, she was so deep into self-­destruction that the only memories she had were bad ones.

  October 1991.

  Nirvana was playing at the 40 Watt Club in downtown Athens. Lydia sneaked out of the house. She climbed through her bedroom window, though no one would’ve noticed if she’d walked straight out the front door. She bummed a ride with her friend Leigh and she left behind all the misery and despair trapped inside the house on Boulevard.

  Julia had been gone for over six months by then. It was too hard to be at home anymore. When her parents weren’t screaming at each other, they were so despondent that being around them made you feel like an interloper in their private tragedy. Claire had disappeared so far into herself that she could be in the same room with you for ten minutes before you noticed her standing there.

  And Lydia had disappeared into pills and powder and grown men who had no business hanging around teenage girls.

  Lydia had adored Julia. Her sister was cool and hip and outspoken and she covered for Lydia when Lydia wanted to stay out after curfew, but now she was dead. Lydia knew it like she knew the sun would come up the next day. She had accepted Julia’s death before anyone else in her family had. She knew that her big sister would never be back, and she used it as an excuse to drink more, snort more, screw more, eat more, more, more, more. She couldn’t stop, didn’t want to stop, which was why the day after the Nirvana concert, Lydia was clueless when ­people started arguing about whether the performance was awesome or dog shit.

  The band had been drunk off its ass. They were all out of tune. Cobain had started a mini-­riot when he’d ripped down the movie screen hanging over the stage. The audience went nuts. They rushed the stage. Eventually, the band piled their instruments on top of the destroyed drum set and walked out.

  Lydia had no memory of any of this. She had been so high during the concert that she wasn’t even sure she’d made it to the club. The next morning, she’d woken up in the Alley, which was blocks from the 40 Watt, which made no sense until she stood up and felt the wet stickiness between her legs.

  She had bruises on her thighs. She felt raw inside. There was a cut on the back of her neck. She had skin under her fingernails. Someone else’s skin. Her lips were tender. Her jaw was tender. Everything was tender until she found a guy packing some equipment into the back of a van and he gave her a bump and she gave him a hand job and she crawled back home in time to get yelled at by her parents—­not for being out all night, but for not being home in time to walk Claire to school.

  Claire was fourteen years old. She could walk herself to school. The building was so close to the Boulevard house that you could hear the bells ringing for class changes.

  But back then, all of her parents’ anger seemed tied up in Lydia’s failure to take care of her last remaining sister. She was setting a bad example for Claire. She wasn’t spending enough time with Claire. She should try to do more things with Claire.

  Which made Lydia feel guilty, and when she wasn’t feeling guilty, she was feeling resentful.

  Maybe that’s why Claire had perfected the art of invisibility. It was a form of self-­preservation. You couldn’t resent what you could not see. She was so quiet, but she noticed everything. Her eyes tracked the world like it was a book written in a language she could not understand. There was nothing timorous about her, but you got the feeling that she always had one foot out the door. If the situation got too hard, or too intense, she would simply disappear.

  Which is exactly what she had done eighteen years ago when Lydia had told her about Paul. Instead of confronting the truth, Claire had taken the easy route and made herself disappear from Lydia’s life. She had changed her phone number. She had refused to respond to any of Lydia’s letters. She had even moved apartments in order to erase Lydia from her life.

  Maybe that was why Lydia hadn’t been able to forgive her.

  Because, really, nothing had changed in the last eighteen years. For all of Claire’s tough talk—­her seemingly sincere apologies and blunt confessions—­she was still keeping one foot out the door. The only reason Claire had reached out to Lydia last night was because she had started to unravel Paul’s lies and couldn’t handle it on her own. She had said it herself this morning—­she wanted her big sister to make it all better.

  What would Claire do now? With Lydia gone, there was no one else to call. Helen couldn’t
be relied on. Huckabee was useless. Adam Quinn was probably in this thing right alongside Paul. Claire couldn’t turn to the police because there was no telling who else was involved. She could turn to herself, but what would she find? A kept woman who was incapable of keeping herself.

  The car slowed again. Lydia could feel the terrain turn from asphalt to gravel. She splayed her hands to keep from being jolted around the trunk. A large pothole slammed her into the sheet metal. The cut in her forehead opened. Lydia blinked away the blood.

  She struggled with the bad thoughts that were pinging around her brain. And then she stopped struggling, because what was the point? This was no longer a matter of an unhealed rift between her and Claire. This was life and death.

  Lydia’s life.

  Lydia’s possible death.

  The brakes squeaked as the car rolled to a stop. The engine idled.

  She braced herself, waiting for the trunk to open. No one knew where she was. No one even knew she was missing. If she left this all to Claire, Lydia knew that she would never make it out alive.

  It had been like this all of their lives—­before Paul, even before Julia.

  Claire made a choice, and Lydia was the one who paid for it.

  CHAPTER 14

  Claire listened to the click as Paul hung up the phone. She put the receiver back on the hook. She went outside and sat on the back porch. There was a notebook and a pen beside her leg, but she had given up listing questions when Paul had made it clear that he wasn’t going to answer any of them. Every time he called, he waited to hear her voice, then he disconnected the line, and the timer reset for another twenty minutes until he called again.

  He had called three times so far, which meant she’d wasted an hour feeling paralyzed. Lydia was in grave danger. Her safety depended on Claire. Paul was always driving when he called Claire on the phone, so she had to think that Lydia was still in the trunk. Whether or not that meant she was all right was debatable, because eventually, Paul would get to wherever he was going.

  Claire had no idea what to do. She was good at quick, thoughtless reactions, but strategizing had never been her way. Paul was the one who saw all of the angles, and before Paul she had relied on Lydia, and before Lydia there was her father to swoop down and make everything all right.

  No one was going to solve this for her. There was no one else she could think of to reach out to, which made her angry, because she should be able to depend on her mother, but Helen had made it clear a long time ago that she couldn’t be counted on. She had hidden the truth about Julia for almost nineteen years. She could’ve ended Claire’s misery, but she chose not to, probably because she didn’t want to deal with the emotional fallout.

  Claire looked down at the dirt between her feet. She let her mind run wild in the hopes that somehow, she would stumble onto a solution.

  The foiled burglary during the funeral. Claire was certain that Paul had hired those men to break into the Dunwoody house. They must have been looking for the key tag. Maybe Congressman Johnny Jackson had sent Captain Mayhew for the same reason. Or Agent Nolan. Or both of them, which would explain why they had behaved like two unneutered cats around each other.

  Was Johnny Jackson working for Paul or against him?

  The answer was most likely on the USB drive inside the key tag. The damn thing had been in Claire’s purse during the funeral. She had switched out the bag she was carrying the day of the murder to a black clutch and thrown in Paul’s keys because it was easier than going downstairs and putting them on his little labeled hook inside his mudroom cabinet.

  So, she knew what the burglars were looking for, but she had no idea how that could help Lydia.

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

  She had one more hour before Paul gave her his plan to retrieve the USB drive. Her first impulse had been to call Adam Quinn and tell him she needed the key tag back, but if Paul was really monitoring all of the phones, then she would be giving away that the drive was not sitting in evidence at the police station.

  And if he knew Claire didn’t have the drive, there was no reason for him to keep Lydia alive.

  Claire had to keep Paul believing that the cops had the drive. That could buy her some time, but she didn’t know how much time. She could pretend to call Rayman, or even pretend to go to the police station, but there would come a point at which Paul would want to know why she wasn’t making progress.

  And there was the very real possibility that her continued failure would cause greater harm to come to Lydia. Claire knew full well from the videos that there were things a man could do to a woman that didn’t kill her, but made her wish she was dead.

  Was Paul telling the truth about his role in the movies? She would be a fool to take him at his word. There was some consolation in knowing that her husband was not the man in the mask. The telltale moles under Paul’s left shoulder blade were the giveaway. But someone had zoomed in that camera to get a close-­up of the girls. Someone else had been in the room recording, witnessing, every degradation.

  That someone had to be Paul. The Fuller house was his house. He had obviously been here. No one else would bother to keep everything so clean and organized.

  Which meant that Paul knew the identity of the masked man. Her husband was friends or partners with a vicious psychopath who was stealing girls from their families and committing unspeakable horrors against them.

  Claire’s body gave a violent, involuntary shudder at the thought.

  Was that what Paul had stored on the USB drive—­proof of the masked man’s identity? Claire broke out into a cold sweat. Paul had said she was safe, but if he was threatening to expose the murderer, then that put everyone in danger.

  And it meant that yet again, Claire had caught her husband in another lie.

  Rick.

  Claire could call Rick Butler for help. He was Lydia’s boyfriend. They had been together for thirteen years. He was a mechanic. He looked like the kind of man who would know his way around a bad situation. According to Paul’s files, he’d been in and out of jail.

  No. If Claire knew anything about her sister, she knew that Lydia would not want Rick involved. Bringing in Rick would mean bringing in her daughter, and then suddenly, Paul went from having one victim to ransom to having three.

  And Claire could not help thinking that Dee Delgado looked exactly like the kind of girl who ended up in Paul’s movies.

  Claire stood up. She couldn’t sit anymore. She couldn’t go back into the house because everything was monitored. Or maybe it wasn’t monitored and Claire was still as gullible as before. She put her hands on her hips and stared up at the sky. Asking herself what Paul would do had gotten her here in the first place. Maybe she should ask herself what Lydia would do.

  Lydia would want more information.

  When Claire had first opened the door to the garage, her gaze had instantly fallen on the rows of VHS tapes, but she knew there were other things in that room that might give her clues as to what Paul was really up to. There were metal shelves that held various computer-­related equipment. There was a worktop in the corner with a large computer screen. That computer was probably connected to the Internet.

  She went back inside the house. She tracked the hidden cameras with her eyes—­first the one in the kitchen, then the one in the den, then the one mounted on a shelf at the end of the hallway that led to the one-­car garage.

  Women had been savagely murdered in that garage. Countless, damaged women had been defiled while a camera recorded every bit of their agony.

  Claire pushed open the door. The stench of blood was overwhelming, but the sight of the room was not. She was already habituated to the violence. Maybe that explained the cavalier way Paul had discussed the movies, as if he were talking about widgets instead of lives. How many women had been murdered in this room over the years before Paul
became habituated to death?

  How long before the excitement of the kill was programmed into his brain?

  Claire stepped down into the garage. She rubbed her arms to fight the chill. She was struck by an intense unease. Her body had a visceral reaction to the evil that had happened inside this room. So many women had lost their lives. But it wasn’t just that. The farther she went into the garage, the farther she was from escape. Someone could walk in on her. Someone could shut the door.

  Claire looked back at the empty doorway. Her mind flashed up a terrifying image of the masked man’s wet smile filling the computer screen.

  And then she saw the mask for herself.

  It was hanging on a hook by the door. The eyes and mouth were unzipped. The rubber underwear hung on another hook beside it, and on a shelf underneath both was a large bottle of Johnson’s Baby Powder and a small tube of Wet personal lubricant. Claire forced herself to look away. The juxtaposition was too unsettling.

  Plastic slats took up the rest of the wall by the door. She recognized the tools of torture hanging from metal hooks: the cattle prod, the branding iron with the large X at the end, the machete. They were all hung the same distance apart. The machete blade was cleaned to a mirror finish. The charger for the cattle prod had the cord neatly coiled around the base. She might as well be standing in Paul’s garage back home.

  A familiar Gladiator workbench was set up in front of the metal garage door.

  Thick foam insulation panels were stuck to the back of the door. The whole room felt warm despite the chill in the air. She assumed Paul had insulated everything with spray foam, because that was what Paul did.

  Claire checked behind a loose black curtain, which could be pulled closed to hide the room from the road when Paul opened the garage door. Leaves had blown in under the lip of the door. It wasn’t like her husband to let things like that go.