Morning sun streamed into her office. Lydia was gone. The plastic boxes were empty. The files were gone.
Claire lunged toward her desk. She opened the drawer. Lydia’s file was still hidden inside. Claire’s relief was so pronounced that she wanted to cry.
She touched her fingers to her cheek. She was crying. Her tear ducts were on constant standby for anything that would send them over. Instead of giving in to it, Claire shut the drawer. She wiped her eyes. She stood up. She straightened her shirt as she made her way to the kitchen.
She heard Lydia’s voice before she saw her. She was obviously talking on the phone.
“Because I want you to stay at Rick’s tonight.” Lydia paused. “Because I said so.” She paused again. “Sweetheart, I know you’re an adult, but adults are like vampires. The older ones are much more powerful.”
Claire smiled. She had known Lydia would be a good mother. She sounded just like Helen before Julia disappeared.
“All right. I love you, too.”
Claire stayed in the hallway long after Lydia had ended the call. She didn’t want her sister to have any fears about being overheard. If Claire was going to continue to lie about knowing every single detail of Lydia’s life, she could at least do a good job.
She smoothed down the back of her hair as she walked into the kitchen. “Hey.”
Lydia was sitting at the bar. She was wearing reading glasses, which would’ve been funny if Claire wasn’t a couple of years away from needing them herself. Paul’s files were scattered across the kitchen island. Lydia had Claire’s iPad in front of her. She took off the reading glasses as she asked, “Did you sleep all right?”
“I’m sorry.” Claire didn’t know what she was apologizing for; there were so many things to choose from. “I should’ve helped you go through all of this.”
“No, you should’ve gotten some sleep.” Lydia started to lean back in the chair, but she caught herself before she fell over the low back. “These are the stupidest chairs I’ve ever sat in.”
“They look good,” Claire said, because that was all that had ever mattered to Paul. She went to the video screen on the kitchen wall. The flashing time read 6:03. She pulled up the mailbox camera. Adam hadn’t been by yet. Claire didn’t know what to make of that, because she still didn’t know which files Adam was after.
She told Lydia, “The USB drive is still in the mailbox.”
“You have a camera in your mailbox?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
Lydia gave a sour look. “What was the name of the woman you saw on the news?”
Claire shook her head. She didn’t understand.
“In the garage, you said that you recognized a woman’s name from one of the files because you had seen her on the news. I looked them all up on your iPad. Only two had news items.”
Claire spitballed an explanation. “She was in Atlanta.”
“Leslie Lewis?” Lydia pushed an open file folder across the counter so that Claire could see the woman’s photograph. She was blonde and pretty and wearing thick black glasses. “I found a story about her in the Atlanta Journal archives. She was staying in a hotel during Dragon Con. She thought she was opening her door for room service, but a guy pushed his way in and raped her.”
Claire looked away from the woman’s photo. Quinn + Scott’s downtown offices were near the convention site. Last year, Paul had sent her pictures of drunken people dressed like Darth Vader and the Green Lantern clogging the street.
Lydia slid over another file: another pretty, young blonde. “Pam Clayton. There was a story in the Patch. She was jogging near Stone Mountain Park. The attacker dragged her into the woods. It was after seven, but it was August so it was still light out.”
Paul’s tennis team occasionally had games in the park.
“Look at the dates on the files. He hired the detectives to follow them on the anniversaries of their rapes.”
Claire took her word for it. She didn’t want to read any more details. “Did the attacker say anything to either of them?”
“If he did, it wasn’t in the articles. We need the police reports.”
Claire wondered why Paul hadn’t asked the private detectives to track down the reports. Lydia’s file contained her arrest records and all the ancillary paperwork. Maybe Paul figured it was a bad idea to tip his hand by asking all of these different detectives to check up on all of these women who had been raped.