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 was 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.