who her sister was. Surely he had watched Julia’s movie dozens, maybe hundreds of times by then.
Claire’s hands were surprisingly steady on the keyboard as she typed in the password: 03041991.
No mnemonics. No acronyms. March 4, 1991, the day that her sister had gone missing. The day that had started it all.
She pressed enter. The rainbow wheel started to spin.
The folder opened. She saw a list of files.
.xls—Excel spreadsheet.
There were sixteen spreadsheets in all.
She opened the first spreadsheet. There were five columns: Name, email, address, bank routing info, member since.
Member since.
Claire scrolled down the list. Fifty names in total. Some of the memberships went back thirty years. They were anywhere from Germany to Switzerland to New Zealand. Several addresses were in Dubai.
She had been right. Paul needed his customer list. Was Mayhew looking for it, too? Did he want to take over Paul’s business? Or was Johnny Jackson sending the police to clean up his nephew’s mess?
Claire closed the file. She clicked open all of the other spreadsheets and scrolled through each name because she had paid the price that came with not looking at everything once before.
Fifty names on each spreadsheet, sixteen spreadsheets in all. There were 800 men scattered all over the world who were paying for the privilege of watching Paul commit brutal, coldblooded murder.
If only Claire had clicked open all of the files on the USB drive back in the garage. Then again, there was no way she would’ve guessed the same password, because back in the garage, she’d thought her husband was a passive viewer rather than an active participant.
Claire held the mouse over the last file, which wasn’t really a file. It was another folder, this one titled JJ.
If the FNF folder contained things that Fred Nolan wanted to get his hands on, she knew that the JJ folder would contain information valuable to Congressman Johnny Jackson.
Claire opened the folder. She found a list of files with no extensions. She scrolled over to the column on the far right.
Kind: JPEG image.
Claire clicked open the first file. What she saw made her gag.
The photo was in black and white. Johnny Jackson was standing inside what could only be the Amityville barn. He was posing with a body that was suspended upside down from the rafters. The girl was trussed up like a deer. Her ankles were tied together with barbed wire that sliced into the bone. She was hanging from a large metal hook that looked like something from a butcher’s shop. Her arms dragged the floor. She had been cut open stem to stern. Johnny Jackson held a sharp-looking hunting knife in one hand, a cigarette in the other. He was naked. Black blood covered the front of his body and engulfed his rigid penis.
Claire clicked open the next file. Another man in black and white. Another dead girl. Another bloody scene of carnage. She didn’t recognize the face. She kept clicking. And clicking. And then she found what she should’ve guessed would be there all along.
Sheriff Carl Huckabee.
The photograph was in Kodachrome color. Huckleberry had what could only be called a shit-eating grin under his neatly combed mustache. He was naked but for his cowboy hat and boots. There was a splash of blood on his bare chest. His thick thatch of pubic hair was caked with dried blood. The girl hanging beside him was trussed up like all the others, except this girl wasn’t just any girl. Claire immediately recognized the silver and black bangles that hung from her limp wrist.
It was Julia.
Her sister’s beautiful blonde hair dragged the dirt floor. Long cuts exposed the white of her high cheekbones. Her breasts had been cut off. Her stomach was sliced open. Her intestines hung down to her face and wrapped around her neck like a scarf.
The machete was still inside of her.
Paul, aged fifteen, was standing on the other side of Huckabee. He was dressed in acid-washed jeans and a bulky red polo shirt. His hair was feathered. He wore thick glasses.
He was giving the man behind the camera two thumbs up.
Claire closed the photograph. She looked out the window. The sky had opened up, sending a deluge of water into the park. The clouds had darkened to an almost black. She listened to the insistent tapping of rain against glass.
She had lulled herself into hoping that Paul would not irreparably harm Lydia because he still wanted to please Claire. The justifications followed a simple pattern: He had obviously terrified Lydia. He