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 keytag. 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 keytag. 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 keytag 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