jail for even the smallest violation. Was it illegal to look at these movies? Had Claire broken the law without even realizing?
Or had she overreacted like an idiot?
She turned the monitor back around. All of the web pages said she was not connected to the Internet. The movies were still frozen on-screen. Another error message had popped up.
WARNING! DISK “GLADIATOR” NOT PROPERLY EJECTED. SOME FILES MAY HAVE BEEN LOST.
Claire looked at all the cables she had unplugged. She wasn’t completely ignorant about computers. She knew that movie files were large and required a lot of storage. She knew that the lightning symbol on the back of the computer was for a Thunderbolt connection, which transferred data twice as fast as USB.
She also knew her husband.
Claire knelt down on the floor. Paul had designed his desk so that all the cables were concealed inside. Everything electrical, from the computer to the desk lamp, connected into a battery back-up tucked inside the desk. She knew the large black box was the battery back-up because Paul had labeled it: BATTERY BACK-UP.
She pulled out the drawers and checked inside and behind them. There didn’t appear to be an external hard drive inside the desk. The power cord for the back-up was concealed inside the front right desk leg. The plug came out at the bottom and connected to a floor outlet.
Nothing was labeled GLADIATOR.
Claire pushed on the desk. Instead of the whole thing rolling straight back, it went lopsided, like an excited dog wagging its entire butt. There was another cable threaded through another leg. It was white and thin, the same as the Thunderbolt cable that she’d yanked out of the back of the computer. That end was still on top of the desk. The other end disappeared into a hole drilled into the hardwood floor.
She went downstairs into the garage. Paul’s Gladiator workbench took up an entire wall. Smaller rolling cabinets with drawers were on either side with an open span of about ten feet in between. Claire pulled out all of the cabinets. No stray cables trailed from the back of the drawers. She looked underneath the bench. Claire had driven into the garage thousands of times, but she’d never noticed that the diamond-plate paneling behind the bench wasn’t the same paneling that was on the wall. She pressed against the metal and the sheet flexed under her hand.
Claire stood up. Thanks to her tennis racket, Paul’s 3-D printer and CAD laser cutter were in pieces strewn across the bamboo worktop. She swept them onto the floor with her arm. She turned off the lights. She leaned over the workbench and looked down though the narrow crack between the bench and the wall. She started at the far left end. At what she knew was the exact center, she saw a flashing green light behind the workbench.
She turned the lights back on. She found a flashlight in one of the rolling cabinets. The workbench was too heavy to move, and even without that, it was bolted to the floor. She leaned back over the bench and saw that the green flashing light was on a large external hard drive.
None of this was an accident. Claire couldn’t come up with any good excuses. This set-up had been designed into the house when it was built eight years ago. Paul hadn’t just watched those movies. He had collected them. And he had gone to great lengths to make sure that no one found them.
Tears filled her eyes. Were the movies real? Could she possibly have evidence of the torture and killing of perhaps dozens of women?
Yesterday, Fred Nolan had asked Claire about Paul’s demeanor before he died. For the first time since it happened, Claire let herself consider what her own demeanor had been. She was shocked when Paul pulled her into that alley. Excited when he made it clear what he wanted to do. Thrilled when he’d been so forceful, because it was sexy and completely unexpected.
And then what?
Claire knew she’d been terrified when she realized they were being robbed. Had she been scared before that? When Paul spun her around and crushed her against the wall, hadn’t she been a little afraid? Or was she revising her memory because the way he’d kicked her legs apart and pinned her wrists to the wall was oddly reminiscent of the spreadeagled young girls in the movies?
Those poor creatures. If the movies were real, then Claire owed it to their families to do everything