watched pornography. Claire herself wasn’t adverse to the soft-core sex of a pay-cable show. The thing was that their sex life had been fairly tame. They’d tried different positions or variations on a theme, but after eighteen years, they knew what worked and they stuck with the old standards. Which was likely why Claire had ended up taking Adam Quinn up on his offer last year at the company Christmas party.
Claire loved her husband, but sometimes, she craved variety.
Was Paul the same? She had never considered the possibility that she wasn’t enough for him. He had always been so smitten with her. Paul was the one who reached down to hold her hand in the car. He was the one who sat close to her at dinners and put his arm around her at movies and watched her cross the room at parties. Even in bed, he was never pleased until she was. He rarely asked Claire to use her mouth on him, and he was never an asshole about it. Back when she still had friends, they had jealously teased her about Paul’s devotion.
Had that been for show? Through all the seemingly happy years of their marriage, had Paul yearned for something more? And did he find that something more in the disgusting contents of that movie?
Claire wrote down another question: “Is it real?”
The production had an amateurish feel, but that could’ve been on purpose. Computers were capable of amazing things. If they could make it look like Michael Jackson was dancing on stage, they could make it look like a woman was being murdered.
The pen was tapping again. Claire watched it bounce between her fingers. The workbench top was bamboo. The damn thing had proven to be indestructible. She’d been half tempted to take a page from Lydia’s book and piss all over it.
Lydia.
God, what an unexpected slap in the face to see her sister after all these years. She would not be telling her mother about the meeting, mostly because Helen had enough to fret over between Paul’s murder and the burglary. Besides, the irony was not lost on Claire that less than a year after her family broke ties, Lydia had finally managed to get herself clean. Between looking for Julia and paying bail bondsmen and lawyers and rehab clinics for Lydia’s upkeep, Sam Carroll had been nearly bankrupt when he’d finally taken his life.
For that sin alone, Claire should’ve cut off her sister, but then she’d accused Paul of trying to rape her, and that had been the final straw.
Did Paul hurt you? Lydia had asked, standing less than ten yards from Paul’s grave. Is that what this is about?
Claire knew what the “this” was. It was doubt. She was doubting her husband because of what she’d found on his computer. Her mind had made the leap from Paul watching violence to actually committing it, which was a stupid connection because millions of young men played violent video games but only a handful went on spree killings.
Then again, Paul had once told her that there was no such thing as coincidence. “The Law of Truly Large Numbers provides that given a large enough sample size, any outrageous thing can happen.”
Claire looked down at the three items on her list:
Accident?
More files?
Is it real?
At the moment, only one of those outrageous questions could be answered.
Claire went up the stairs before she could stop herself. She keyed in the code to open the door to Paul’s office. Agent Nolan had made a comment about all the codes needed for the house, but Paul had made it easy for Claire by making all the door codes a variation on their birthdays.
The office looked the same as it had been the day before. Claire sat down at the desk. She hesitated as she reached out to tap the keyboard. This was a red pill/blue pill moment. Did she really want to know if there were more files? Paul was dead now. What was the point?
She tapped the keyboard. The point was that she had to know.
Claire’s hand was surprisingly steady as she moved the mouse to the dock and clicked on the Work folder.
The rainbow wheel spun, but instead of a list of files, a white box popped up.
CONNECT TO GLADIATOR?
There was a YES and NO button underneath. Claire wondered why she hadn’t been prompted to log in the day before. She had a vague recollection of clicking CLOSE on several messages yesterday when Agent Nolan was creeping his way