woman’s body convulsed, arms and legs pulling at the chains, head jerking. Blood poured down her chest, pooled at her feet.
The man started fucking her.
“Mrs. Scott?”
Claire jumped back so hard that the chair slammed into the wall.
“Are you up there?” Fred Nolan was walking up the stairs.
Claire banged on the keyboard, blindly searching for a way to stop the movie.
“Hello?” Nolan’s footsteps were getting closer. “Mrs. Scott?”
She held down the control button and furiously tapped on the Q to quit the program. Error messages started popping up. Claire grabbed the mouse and clicked each one closed. The rainbow wheel started to spin. “Shit!” she hissed.
“Mrs. Scott?” Fred Nolan was standing in the open doorway. “Something wrong?”
Claire looked back at the computer. Sweet Jesus. The desktop was blank again. She willed her voice not to shake. “What is it?”
“Just wanted to say that I’m sorry about before.”
Claire nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
Nolan let his gaze travel around the room. “Nice office.”
She tried not to blink because every time her eyes closed, she saw the woman. The man. The blood.
“Anyway,” he tucked his hands into his pockets, “I wanted you to know that I talked to Detective Rayman about your husband’s case.”
She had to clear her throat a few times before she forced out, “What?”
“Detective Rayman with the Atlanta Police? You spoke to him the night your husband was murdered?”
She held her breath, trying to calm it. “Yes.”
“I want you to know that we looked at all possible connections, and there doesn’t seem to be one between what happened to your husband and what happened today.”
Claire nodded. She felt a sharp jab of pain in her jaw from clenching her teeth.
Nolan let his eyes slowly take another tour of the office. “Your husband was a tidy guy.”
Claire didn’t respond.
“Kind of a control freak?”
She shrugged, though Paul had never tried to control her. Except when he jammed her face into that brick wall in the alley.
Nolan indicated the digital lock on the door. “That’s some pretty serious security.”
She echoed the words that Paul had often told her. “Doesn’t really matter if you don’t set the alarm.”
Nolan smiled his deeply unsettling smile. He wasn’t standing over her, but he might as well have been. “We’ll need to send a crew up here anyway.”
She felt her heart stop. The computer. The files. The movie. “That’s not necessary.”
“Better safe than sorry.”
Claire tried to think of a good excuse to contradict him. “Did the security cameras show the men breaking into the garage?”
“You can never be too sure.”
She summoned a weak copy of her mother’s librarian voice. “I would think sixteen cameras would make you as sure as possible.”
Nolan shrugged. He was smiling at her again.
“Not to mention half a million dollars’ worth of automobiles that are still parked in the garage.”
He kept smiling, and Claire realized that she was talking too much. Her hands were sweating. She gripped the arms of the chair.
Nolan asked, “Something up here you don’t want us to see?”
Claire forced herself not to look at the computer. Instead, she looked at his lips and tried not to think about the red, wet lips behind the zippered mask.
He said, “I’m curious, Mrs. Scott, did your husband say anything to you before he was murdered?”
She remembered the alley, the rough texture of the brick, the burn of skin being scraped from her cheek. Was Paul suddenly into that kind of thing? Was that why he had this movie on his computer?
“Mrs. Scott?” Nolan mistook her silence for embarrassment. “Don’t worry. Detective Rayman told me why you and your husband were in the alley. No judgment here. I’m just curious about what your husband said.”
She cleared her throat again. “He promised me he wasn’t going to die.”
“Anything else?”
“I already told all of this to Detective Rayman.”
“Yeah, but that was a few days ago. Sometimes it takes some perspective to jog your memory.” He pressed a little harder. “Sleep usually does it. I’ve dealt with a lot of victims of violent crime. There’s this adrenalin rush that gets them through the hard parts, and then they have to tell their story to old gumshoes like me, and then they go home and they’re alone and they start to crash because the adrenalin’s gone and there’s no forward momentum and they fall into a heavy sleep and then suddenly they wake up in a sweat because they remembered something.”
Claire swallowed again. He was perfectly describing her first night alone, but the only revelation that had