Chapter Eighty-Nine
Eighty-Nine
Mary had always been a great planner. She wouldn’t have survived this long in the con game if she weren’t. But the quality that really set her apart from other con artists was her incredible ability to compartmentalize.
Dr. Fox was right. Mary had known Quaddra for almost two years, and in all that time she’d never, not even once, felt threatened or in danger while in his company.
Quaddra had never even raised his voice at her, never mind showing any signs of being physically violent.
Their sex life was varied – sometimes tender, sometimes rougher, sometimes kinky, sometimes a mix of all three, but always consensual…
always within limits… never pushy… and never, ever aggressive.
If Quaddra had a sick urge to torture and murder women, then, just like Dr. Fox had said, Mary didn’t seem to meet his ‘victim’ criteria.
If she did, she’d be another Polaroid on that wall by now.
So, theoretically, as long as Mary carried on acting like Mary…
like she never knew about that secret basement, she would stay out of danger, and the best way for her to do just that was to compartmentalize – something that she was brilliant at.
This wouldn’t be easy. Mary knew that. Especially given the fact that she had less than a day to get her mind wrapped around the absolute insanity of what she’d discovered and into the right frameset.
The idea was very straightforward. Mary would have to bundle the new Quaddra – the one with a basement of horrors under his office, the one with a sick urge to torture and murder innocent women – into a tight package and store that package away in a hidden compartment inside her mind.
That compartment wouldn’t be touched until she was ready to go to the police with the proof she needed.
The other Quaddra – the one that she had married, the one that she was conning, the one that she was falling in love with – would stay exactly where he was, at the forefront of her mind.
And that would be the Quaddra that she would see every time that she looked at him, every time that she kissed him.
That was the compartmentalization part of the plan.
The ‘obtain proof’ part of the plan was just as straightforward.
Quaddra kept the keys to his office on a keychain that he carried with him everywhere he went.
But because access to his secret basement came via a state-of-the-art Murphy door hidden behind a filing cabinet, a door that he had no idea that Mary knew about, that keychain was just that – a regular keychain.
He didn’t keep it on a piece of string around his neck at all times, or locked inside a combination safe somewhere.
When Quaddra was at home, he would empty his pockets onto his bedside table in their bedroom, and that was that.
The office key, together with his wallet, and whatever else he had in his pockets, would be right there – on the table.
Mary saw that key every day. All that she needed to do now was grab it, and she was planning on doing so as soon as possible for a very simple reason – the compartmentalization of the two Quaddras wouldn’t be easy to execute, but Mary knew that she could do it, she just didn’t know how long she’d be able to do it for before the enormity of the danger that she was putting herself under began to really creep in, and once that happened – game over.