+ Scott offices. Honestly, their clandestine phone calls and secret texts had been more titillating than the actual acts.
Still, Claire couldn’t help wondering which files Adam meant—work files or porn files? Because Adam and Paul had shared everything, from a dorm room in college to the same insurance agent. And Claire supposed she belonged on that list of shared items, but who the hell knew whether Paul had figured that out?
Then again, what exactly had Claire figured out?
She had looked at the movies again—all of them this time. Claire had rigged up Paul’s laptop in the garage so she wouldn’t have to sit in his office. Halfway through the first series of movies, she’d found herself somewhat anesthetized to the violence. Habituation, Paul would’ve explained, but fuck Paul and his stupid explanations.
With her new-found distance, Claire was able to see that each movie series told the same linear story. At first, the chained girls were fully clothed. Subsequent installments revealed the masked man slowly cutting or slicing away their clothing to reveal leather bustiers and crotchless panties that they had obviously been forced to wear. Sometimes, their heads were covered in a black hood made of a light fabric that showed their desperate inhalations as they gasped for breath. As the story progressed, the violence ramped up. There was beating, then whipping, then cutting, then burning them with a branding iron, then the cattle prod.
The girls were unmasked toward the end. The first woman’s face was exposed for two of the movies before she was butchered. The girl who looked like Anna Kilpatrick was hooded until the very last movie on Paul’s secret hard drive.
Claire had closely studied the girl’s face. There was no way of telling whether or not she was looking at Anna Kilpatrick. Claire had even pulled up a photo from the Kilpatrick family’s Facebook page. She had positioned them side by side and still been unsure.
Then she had clicked the PLAY button and watched the last movie all the way through. Claire had the sound on at first, but she couldn’t take the screaming. The man entered wearing the same unnerving rubber mask. He had the machete, but he didn’t use it to kill the girl. He used it to rape her.
Claire had nearly been sick again. She’d had to take a walk down the driveway and up again just to get air back into her lungs.
Was it real?
Captain Mayhew had claimed there was a wire running down the girl’s side that controlled the release of fake blood. Claire had found a magnifying glass in one of Paul’s drawers. All that she could see at the girl’s side were pieces of flayed skin sticking out like broken glass. There was certainly no wire on the floor, and surely if there was an operator standing off-camera with a control unit, the wire would have to be connected somehow.
Next, Claire had searched the Internet for information on squibs, but as far as she could tell, all of them were remotely controlled. She had even done a general search for snuff porn movies, but Claire had been terrified to click on any of the links. The descriptions were too unsettling: live beheadings, cannibalism, necrophilia, something called “death rape.” She’d tried Wikipedia, but gathered that most recorded murders were frenetic and amateurish, not carefully framed and following a set progression.
So, did that support Mayhew’s assertion that the movies were fake? Or did it mean that Paul had found the best snuff porn the same way he found the best golf clubs or the best leather for his custom-made office chair?
Claire hadn’t been able to take any more. She had left the garage. She had gone inside the house. She had taken two Valium. She had held her head under the kitchen faucet until the cold water had numbed her skin.
If only she could numb her brain. Despite the pills, her mind would not stop racing with conspiracies. Were these awful movies the files that Adam wanted? Was he in cahoots with mustachioed Captain Mayhew? Was that why Adam was at the police station? Is that why Mayhew had been so strange at the end of their meeting, going out of his way to confirm that there were no more copies of the movies when he’d just told Claire that they weren’t real and she shouldn’t worry about them?
What if they really were fake, and the girl wasn’t Anna Kilpatrick, but an actress, and Adam was at the police station tonight