Claire opened her eyes. She closed the movie. The file names were in sequences, so she gathered there were ten more files of the woman in various scenes of torture before the death shot. According to their dates, Paul had watched them all the night before he'd died. They were each around five minutes, which meant he'd spent almost an hour watching the vile images.

"No way," Claire mumbled. She was lucky if Paul lasted more than ten minutes. Was he watching these movies for something other than sexual pleasure?

She scrolled down to the next sequence of files. There were only five in this series. Paul had watched the first one ten days ago, the next was nine days ago, and so on until the night before Paul had died. She clicked open the most recent movie. Another girl. This one even younger. Her long, dark hair covered her face. Claire leaned in closer. The girl was pulling at the restraints. She turned her head to the side. Her hair fell away. Her eyes went wide with fear.

Claire paused the movie. She didn't want to see the man again.

There was another question she should've put on the list: Is this legal?

Obviously, that all depended on whether or not it was real. If the police could arrest you for watching fake gore, every cinema in America would be part of a sting operation.

But what if Paul's movies were real?

Agents from the FBI didn't just show up at burglaries for no reason. When Julia first went missing, Helen and Sam had raised hell trying to get the FBI involved, but it was explained to them that by law, a state agency had to request federal help before the feds could review the case. Given that the sheriff thought Julia had run off in a fit of rebellion, there had been no request sent up the chain.

Claire opened the web browser and pulled up the FBI's home page. She went to the FAQs. She scrolled through questions about all the various crimes the agency investigated until she found what she was looking for.

Computer-related crime: In the national security area, the FBI investigates criminal matters involving the nation's computerized banking and financial systems. Examples of criminal acts would be using a computer to commit fraud or using the Internet to transmit obscene material.

Claire had no doubt these movies were obscene. Maybe she'd been right about Agent Fred Nolan yesterday. The FBI had tracked the downloaded files to Paul's computer. Claire had seen a 60 Minutes story where a government whistleblower had said connecting your computer to the Internet was tantamount to jacking yourself directly into the NSA. They probably knew that Paul had looked at the movies.

Which meant that they knew that Claire was looking at them, too.

"Jesus!" The Mac was hardwired to the Internet. She grabbed at the cords plugged into the back of the computer. She yanked on the cables so hard that the monitor twisted around. Thin wires stripped away from the plastic plug, severing the Internet connection. Claire nearly passed out with relief. Her heart was beating so hard that she could feel it in her neck.

Her parole officer had made it clear that he would send her to 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 she could to make sure they knew what had happened to them. Or what might happen, because there was the slim possibility that the young girl in the second movie was still alive.

Claire moved quickly because she knew that if she stopped to think about it, she would do the wrong thing.

Paul always bought two of everything for the computers. There was an extra twenty-terabyte hard drive in the garage basement. Claire leveraged the heavy box off the shelf and lugged it up to the office. She followed the directions to set up the drive using the computer, then she plugged in the Gladiator cable. She highlighted all of the files and dragged them to the new drive.

DO YOU WANT TO COPY GLADIATOR ONTO LACIE 5BIG?.

Claire clicked YES.

The rainbow wheel started spinning as the computer calculated the amount of time it would take to transfer all of the files. Fifty-four minutes. She sat down at Paul's desk and watched the progress bar inching across the screen.

Claire looked at the anniversary painting again. She thought about Paul as a child. She'd seen pictureshis winsome, toothy grin; the way his ears poked out from his giant head when he was six and seven; the way everything started to catch up when puberty hit. He wasn't dashing or flashy, but he was handsome once she'd talked him into wearing contacts and buying nice suits. And he was funny. And he was charming. And he was so damn smart that she just assumed he knew the answer to everything.

If only he were here now to answer her questions about this.

Claire's eyes blurred. She was crying again. She continued crying until the message came up that all the files had been successfully copied.

A toppled cabinet was blocking her BMW. She drove Paul's Tesla because it was getting dark and the Porsche's headlights were shattered. Claire did not question herself about what she was doing until she pulled into the parking lot in front of the Dunwoody police station. The hard drive was belted into the seat beside her. The white aluminum box weighed at least twenty pounds. The passenger airbag had turned off because the sensors assumed a toddler was in the seat.

Claire looked up at the police station, which resembled a 1950s office supply store. Fred Nolan was probably the person she should be giving this to, but yesterday, Nolan had been an asshole to Claire, and Mayhew had basically told him to shut the fuck up, so she was going to give it to Captain Mayhew.

Did she trust him to take this seriously? Unlike Fred Nolan, Claire had not gotten a clear vibe off Captain Mayhew, other than to think that he looked like a cop out of central casting. His mustache had thrown her off because Sheriff Carl Huckabee, the original Huckleberry, had sported an impotent-looking mustache that he kept trimmed in a straight line rather than grooming it to follow the natural curve of his upper lip. Claire had been thirteen the first time she'd met the man. She could still recall looking up at the strange pushbroom over his lip and wondering if it was fake.

Which mattered not one bit in her current situation, because facial hair was not a universal indicator of incompetency.

She looked down at the hard drive in the seat beside her.

Red pill/blue pill.

Mayhew wasn't the concern here. It was Claire. It was Paul's reputation. There was no such thing as anonymity anymore. This would get out. People would know what her husband was into. Maybe people already did.

And maybe the movies were real, which meant that the second girl might still be alive.

Claire forced herself to get out of the car. The hard drive felt heavier than before. Night was falling fast. Thunder rumbled in the distance. The overhead lights came on as Claire walked across the parking lot. Her funeral dress had dried, but it was stiff and chafing. Her jaw hurt from grinding her teeth. The last time she was at the Dunwoody police station, she was in a tennis dress and being escorted in through the back doors.

This time she found herself in an extremely narrow front lobby with a large piece of bulletproof glass separating visitors from the office area. The receptionist was a burly man in uniform who didn't look up when Claire entered.

She put the hard drive down on an empty chair. She stood in front of the window.

The burly officer reluctantly looked up from his computer. "Who're you here to see?"

"Captain Mayhew."

The name elicited an immediate frown. "He's busy, ma'am."

Claire hadn't expected this. "I need to leave this for him." She pointed to the hard drive, wondering if it looked like a bomb. It sure as hell felt like one. "Maybe I can write a note explaining"

"Lee, I got this." Captain Mayhew was standing behind the glass. He waved for Claire to go to a side door. There was a buzzing sound, then the door opened. Instead of seeing just Mayhew, she found Mayhew and Adam Quinn.

"Claire." Adam seemed tense. "I didn't get that email."

"I'm sorry." Claire had no idea what he was talking about. "What email?"

"The work-in-progress file from Paul's laptop."

Paul's laptop. God only knew what he had on the MacBook. "I don't"

"Just get it to me." Adam walked past her and out the door.

She stared at his back long after he'd gone. She didn't understand why he seemed so angry.

Mayhew told Claire, "Guy does not like being in a police station."

Claire suppressed the first response that came to mind: Who the hell does?

Mayhew said, "We're talking to everybody who has a key to your house."

Claire had forgotten Adam was on the list. He and his wife Sheila lived five streets over. He checked on the house when Claire and Paul were out of the country.

Mayhew asked, "What can I do you for, Mrs. Scott?"

"I have something you need to see." She started to lift the hard drive.

"I got that." Obviously, he wasn't expecting the box to be so heavy. He almost dropped it. "Whoa. What is this thing?"

"It's a hard drive." Claire felt herself getting flustered. "It was my husband's. I mean, my husband"

"Let's go back to my office."

Claire tried to pull herself together as she followed him down a long corridor with closed doors on each side. She recognized the open area for processing prisoners. Then there was another long corridor, then they were in an open office space. There were no cubicles, just five desks with five men all hunched over their computers. Two rolling whiteboards were at the front of the room. All were filled with photographs and scribbled notes that were too far away to make out.

Mayhew stopped outside his office door. "After you."

Claire sat down. Mayhew put the drive on his desk, then took a seat.

She stared at him. More to the point, she stared at his mustache so that she wouldn't have to look him in the eye.

He asked, "Do you want something to drink? Water? Coke?"

"No, thank you." Claire couldn't drag this out any longer. "There are movies on that drive of women being tortured and murdered."

Mayhew paused for a moment. Slowly, he sat back in his chair. He rested his elbows on the arms, folded his hands together in front of his stomach. "Okay."

"I found them on my husband's computer. Well, hooked up to my husband's computer. An external hard drive that I found" She stopped to catch her breath. He didn't need to know the lengths Paul had gone to in order to hide the movies. He just needed to know that they were there. Claire pointed to the hard drive. "That has movies that my husband watched of two different women being tortured and killed."

The words hung between them. Claire could hear how awful they sounded.

She said, "I'm sorry. I just found them. I'm still ..." She didn't know what she still was. Shaken? Grieving? Furious? Terrified? Alone?

"Just a sec." Mayhew picked up the phone and punched in an extension. "Harve, I need you in here."

Before Claire could open her mouth again, another man came into the room. He was a shorter, wider version of Mayhew but with the same type of shaggy mustache.

Mayhew said, "Detective Harvey Falke, this is Mrs. Claire Scott."

Harvey gave Claire a nod.

Mayhew said, "Hook this up for me, will ya?"

Harvey looked at the back of the drive, then he looked at the back of Mayhew's computer. He opened one of the desk drawers. There was a tangle of cables inside. He fished out the one he needed.

Mayhew asked Claire, "Sure you don't want some water? Coffee?"

Claire shook her head. She was scared that he wasn't taking her seriously. She was also scared that he was. They were down the rabbit hole now. There was no turning back.

Harvey made quick work of the connections. He leaned past Mayhew and started typing on the keyboard.

Claire looked around the room. Mayhew posed in the requisite framed photos of him shaking hands with city officials. A golfing trophy for the police league. Numbers from various marathons. She looked at the plaque on his desk. His first name was Jacob. Captain Jacob Mayhew.

Harvey said, "There ya go."

"Thanks." Mayhew turned the keyboard back around as Harvey left the room. He straightened the mouse, then clicked on one of the files. "Let's see what we've got here."

Claire knew what he had. She looked away while he clicked open a handful of movies and watched them. The sound on his computer was turned off. All she could hear was Mayhew's steady breathing. She supposed you didn't get to the rank of captain by being surprised by what humanity could throw at you.

Several minutes passed. Finally, Mayhew let go of the mouse. He settled back in his chair again. He pulled at his mustache. "Well, I wish I could tell you I haven't seen stuff like this before. Much worse, being honest."

"I can't believe ..." Claire could not articulate the things she could not believe.

"Listen, ma'am, I know it's shocking. Trust me. The first time I saw this kind of stuff, I couldn't sleep for weeks, even though I knew it was fake."

Claire felt her heart leap. "It's fake?"

"Well, yeah." He stopped mid-chuckle. "It's called snuff porn. It's not real."

"Are you sure?"