Sara remembered finding Brock leaning against a tree, sobbing about the recent loss of his father. At least that’s what she had assumed at the time. Now, she wondered if he was crying because he was terrified that he would get caught.
Brock said, “I had to take advantage of the opportunity. There was only a small amount of time to take care of her. And you’re right about the hammer. I knew the number on the handle would help Jeffrey put together the pieces. That’s why I left it. But I thought it was Axle who would get in trouble. And it ended up being Daryl. Everything lined up so perfectly, Sara. It was like God meant it to be.”
It was more like dumb luck. “Don’t bring God into this.”
“I stopped a pedophile from hurting more children,” Brock said. “You know about that shed, Sara. Daryl was planning to take a child. He had everything ready to go. I stopped that from happening. I helped put a baby raper in prison.”
She bit her tongue so she wouldn’t tell him that they were both rapists.
Brock picked up on her reaction anyway. His eyes would no longer meet Sara’s. He started picking at the corner of the binder again.
Tick-tick-tick.
“Mama had that asthma attack the October before Daddy died,” he said. “That’s what you want to know about, right?”
Sara’s heart lurched into her throat. “Yes.”
“I needed comfort,” Brock said, the same thing he had told Tommi Humphrey nine years ago. “I didn’t plan on doing what I did, but I’d been watching her for so long, and the urge inside of me got so intense, and the next thing I knew, we were in the woods together.”
Sara knew this was a lie. He’d been prepared when he’d abducted Tommi. He’d brought the spiked Gatorade. He’d dipped the washcloth in bleach. He’d pressed a knitting needle against her neck. He had mutilated her so badly that she could not have children. The sadistic freak hadn’t been looking for comfort. He’d wanted to create his own macabre version of a silent wife.
“Say her name,” Sara told him. She wasn’t asking for the recording. She was asking for herself, for Tommi, for all the women he had destroyed. “Say her name.”
He wouldn’t do it.
Brock said, “That was in October. Then in March, that’s when Daddy died.”
March. Rebecca Caterino. Leslie Truong.
He asked, “Do you remember Johanna Mettes? I think you took care of her kids at the clinic.”
He was teetering back on the far end of the circle. Sara tried to push him along. “She died in a car accident.”
“I was with her when Daddy came down the basement stairs.” Brock’s voice took on a heaviness. “I was inside of her mouth, and Daddy walked in on us.”
Sara’s hand went to her throat.
“Daddy just dropped. He didn’t even clutch his arm. I thought he’d fallen down the stairs. The heart attack wasn’t what killed him. It was seeing me.”
Brock opened his desk drawer. He took out a pack of tissues. He wiped his eyes.
“I was so ashamed. But I felt this freedom, too. I didn’t have to hide it anymore, or sneak around. Mama never went into the basement. I could do what I wanted, but …” His voice trailed off. “I messed up so bad the first time. Nothing happened the way I thought it would. I didn’t know the right dosage on the Rohypnol. She kept waking up and moving around. I couldn’t get what I needed out of her. Do you get what I’m saying, Sara? I needed her to be still.”
Sara had seen exactly what he had done. “You mutilated Tommi.”
“She was so dry, and I needed—” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I know I got carried away. The hammer kept catching, and I didn’t realize how sharp the knitting needle was, and—and I was used to the blood being cold. She was so warm. Like a hand wrapping around me. I kept wanting more. It felt so good to be with someone who was a living, breathing thing.”
Angry tears burned Sara’s eyes. Tommi was not a thing.
“She tried her best to keep still, but she kept twitching,” Brock said. “That’s why I had to use the awl on Beckey. To make it so she couldn’t move.”
Sara was able to take her first deep breath. There was his confession. He had finally spoken a name.
Brock said, “The awl only paralyzed the lower extremities. I figured out how to fix that through trial and error.”
Sara could only think about all of the victims who represented those trials and errors.
“With Beckey, she kept swinging her little fists. She couldn’t keep the Gatorade down. I had to hit her to make her stop. But here’s the thing.”
Sara sat back as he leaned forward.
“Beckey got away, didn’t she?” He held up his palm, indicating that Sara wasn’t meant to answer. “I gave them a chance. I left them alone. All of them, at some point, they had the opportunity to leave me.”
Sara shook her head at the lie. He hadn’t given them a chance. He had drugged them until the drug stopped working, and then he had used the awl to paralyze them. Some of them, so very few of them, had been lucky enough to take advantage of the narrow window of time in between.
Brock said, “When I would go visit them in the woods and see that they were still there, it was just … magical.”
There was something overtly sexual in the way he lightly traced his finger along his lips.
“The ones who stayed with me, I would take my time with them. I brushed their hair. Fixed their make-up. It wasn’t always about making love. Sometimes I would hold their hands. And when they were gone, I let the animals have them. That’s the natural order of things, isn’t it? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
He was referencing their conversation from yesterday morning. Sara wasn’t going to let him justify his delusions. “They all ended up back here, didn’t they? I saw the map in the corridor. All the counties where you left the bodies are counties that you serve. That’s how Shay Van Dorne got the condom stuck in her teeth. You raped her again when she was brought here.”
Brock opened another desk drawer. He reached inside.
Sara tensed, but then she saw what he was doing.
Brock laid a pink scrunchie on top of one of the binders. The elastic band was sprinkled with white cartoon daisies. His hand disappeared again. He pulled out a plastic barrette. A pink headband. A red Chanel hair tie. A silver hairbrush. A plastic comb. A tortoiseshell hair clip with one of the teeth missing. Sara lost count of the number of ties and bands until Brock retrieved the last of his trophies, a long piece of white ribbon. Sara didn’t need to read the orange and blue letters to recognize the Heartsdale High School logo.
“Is that—”
“I would never hurt you, Sara.”
Heat rushed through her body. High school. Tennis team. Sara remembered tying up her hair with a ribbon exactly like the one that dangled between his fingers.
She struggled to ask, “You took that from me?”
“Yes, but only so you wouldn’t use it anymore.” He carefully laid the ribbon across both the binders. “That’s how they got my attention. A flick of the hair. Running their fingers through their curls. They’d be in the store or at the gym and just reach up and … It was those private moments that always pulled me in. It was special, only something that I would see. I would watch a light spread around them. Not like a spotlight, but a glow that came from within.”
Sara felt tears on her cheeks. She remembered the hair tie now. She had borrowed it from Tessa. Then she had lost it. Then there had been a screaming argument with slamming doors and Cathy had finally sent them both to their rooms.
Brock said, “Gina Vogel.”
The name echoed inside of Sara’s head. She could not take her eyes off the ribbon.
“I saw Gina at the grocery a few months ago. She’s very funny. You’d like her.”
“What?” Sara could only see herself at the store, Brock watching her from afar as she untied the white ribbon from her hair.
“Sara?” He waited for her to look up. “I was saving Gina for March, but I had to move things along. I knew that I wouldn’t fool you a second time.”
Sara felt the knowledge of what he was trying to say come down around her like another avalanche.
The thing they had all feared the most was coming true.
She said, “You abducted another woman?”
“Gina is my insurance policy.”
Sara looked around his office with a new understanding. He had known that it was going to come down to this. The boxes were carefully labeled. All of the paperwork was filed. This was the office of a man who had decided to put all of his affairs in order.
She said, “You want to trade Gina for what? You’re not walking out of here, Brock. There’s no way—”
“You’ll take care of Mama for me, won’t you?”
Sara moved to the edge of her chair. She could see over the green binders. Brock wasn’t planning on walking out of here. He had placed a syringe out of view of the camera. The liquid inside was dirty brown. The plunger was pulled back as far as it would go.
She shook her head. “No.”
“I can tell you where Gina is.”
“Brock—”
“You’re such a kind person, Sara. That’s why you’re here. Don’t you want to give the families closure?”
She watched his eyes go to her purse. He had known that he was being recorded.