Brock said, “I didn’t really give those women a choice …”
She closed her eyes, but she had watched the scene so many times that she could still see the wisp of a smile on his face. Brock had been in control from the moment Sara had walked into his office. She had watched him roll up his sleeves. He’d prepared the hotshot ahead of time. He’d concealed it inside the edge of one of the binders. He had made sure that his mother would never hear about his crimes. He had dangled Gina Vogel’s life over Sara’s head.
Unlike his victims, he had gone out on his own terms.
On the video, Brock said, “I always did like a fire road.”
Sara opened her eyes. This was the part that always got her. The only indication that Brock was injecting himself was an almost imperceptible twitch in his shoulders.
She heard her own gasp on the recording.
He was pushing down the plunger.
She stopped the video.
Gina Vogel. Still salvageable.
Sara’s hand curled into a fist. The familiar admonishments rolled like breaking news at the bottom of a television. This hand had been gripping a loaded revolver. This hand could’ve grabbed the syringe away. This hand could have slapped Dan Brock across the face, beaten him, pummeled him, instead of remaining safely tucked inside of her pocket.
Sara did not know what to do with her anger. There was a part of her that longed to see Brock in shackles, shuffling across the courtroom, head hanging down, his brutality exposed to the world.
Then there was the part of her who had been on the other side of that courtroom. A victim watching her rapist. Her eyes swollen from crying. Throat raw from crying. Taking the stand, weakly raising her arm to point at the man who had taken away her sense of self.
Could Tommi Humphrey do that? Could she walk across a packed courtroom and take the stand? Would the chance to confront Brock help heal her soul? Sara would never have the opportunity to ask her. Tommi had blocked Sara’s number. Delilah had closed her email account.
Callie Zanger had not been granted the same invisibility. Faith had told her in person. The woman had a right to know. It wasn’t their secret to keep.
None of the victims or their families would have ownership of their secrets for long. The news organizations were already suing for details under Georgia’s Sunshine Laws. They wanted access to the green binders.
Dan Brock had left six inches of pages meticulously recording his crimes against both the dead and the living. His stalking diaries went back to high school. He had raped for the first time while attending mortuary college. Tommi Humphrey had been his first mutilation. Rebecca Caterino his first paralysis. Leslie Truong his first murder.
His notations included the victim’s hair color, eye color, physical build, and information on their personalities. His collection of stolen hair accessories had been described down to the exact location they’d been found. Brock had brought his coroner’s talents to the crime scenes, describing wounds and gashes, detailing the locations, the degradations, the return visits, the waning effects of the Rohypnol, the points at which he’d decided to permanently paralyze them, the approximate times of death, the slicing tool he’d used to draw blood so the animals would take care of any trace evidence.
Murder, rape, assault, stalking, forcible sodomy, mutilation of a corpse, necrophilia.
Dan Brock had built nearly one hundred cases against himself.
And then he had made sure that he would never have to answer for any of them.
“Help.” Faith knocked on the doorjamb as she came into the office. She held out her phone to Sara. “Is this Ebola?”
Sara looked at the photograph of the rash on Emma’s belly. “Have you changed your laundry detergent recently?”
“I’m sure her cheap-ass father has.” Faith slumped down in a chair. “We finished looking at all of the security footage from Callie Zanger’s building. Brock went into her apartment three months before she was attacked, just like he outlined in his stalking journal.”
Sara knew they would spend the next few months verifying the details from Brock’s binders. Only a fool would take him at his word. “What about the man in the black beanie from Leslie Truong’s crime scene video?”
“Nothing. It’s VHS. All they could get was a blob.”
Sara looked back at the paused video. Brock’s thumb rested on the plunger of the hypodermic needle. She wanted to leave him like that—forever frozen in the process of taking the easy way out.
Faith said, “I’m telling you this as your friend. You need to stop watching that video.”
Sara closed her laptop. “I should’ve done something.”
“Take out the part where you saved Gina Vogel’s life by going into that office in the first place,” Faith said. “If you had reached for that needle, Brock could’ve injected you instead. Or hit you. Or something bad, Sara, because he was nice to you for some reason, but he was a psychopath who murdered and mutilated women.”
Sara clutched her hands in her lap. Will had told her the same thing. Repeatedly. “I’m so angry that he had agency. He got to end it on his terms.”
“Dead is dead,” Faith said. “Take the win.”
None of this was a win. Everyone had lost.
Except for Lena Adams. Nothing they had found would contradict Lena’s testimony detailing how the child porn was found on Nesbitt’s laptop. Yet again, she had managed to walk away unscathed.
Only this time, she was walking away with a baby in her arms.
Sara didn’t need another thing to be outraged about. She changed the subject, asking Faith, “How is Gina Vogel doing?”
“Maybe okay? She said something about moving to Beijing, then she said she could never leave Atlanta.” Faith shrugged. “One minute she’s crying, the next minute she’s laughing, then it’s back to crying again. I think she’s going to get through this, but what do I know?”
Sara didn’t know, either. She had somehow found her way back. She didn’t know how or why. Some people just got lucky.
“Daryl Nesbitt’s in the hospital. His leg is septic.” Faith didn’t seem bothered by the man’s condition. “The doctors are saying it’s not looking good. They’re going to have to take more of his leg.”
Sara knew that this would be the beginning of the end for Daryl Nesbitt. The intellectual part of her wanted to rail against the unusually cruel system, but the baser part of her nature was glad that Daryl would be gone. Losing Jeffrey had taught her that sometimes justice needed a nudge.
She asked Faith, “What about Nesbitt’s offer to trade intel on the illegal phones being smuggled into the prison?”
“Now that he knows he’s not getting the pedophile charge off his sheet, he doesn’t give a shit about the phones.”
“Con’s gonna con,” Sara said, anticipating Faith’s views on the matter.
“At least Gerald Caterino got something out of it.” She shrugged. “He won’t let us test Heath’s DNA against Brock’s. But last I heard, the kid’s been enrolled in elementary school. That’s something, right?”
“It’s something.” Sara wondered if Caterino was trying to maintain plausible deniability. One day, Heath would ask about the circumstances of his birth. It was easier to lie if you never looked for the truth.
She told Faith, “I heard Miranda Newberry copped a plea.”
“She’ll be out in eighteen months.” Faith sounded bitterly disappointed. Gerald Caterino was not Miranda’s only victim. She had bilked dozens of grieving parents and spouses out of tens of thousands of dollars.
Sara said, “She did some solid detective work. Almost every name on that spreadsheet checked out.”
“If she wanted to be a detective, she should’ve gone to the police academy or gotten her PI license.” Faith had paid her dues. She had very little tolerance for people who didn’t. “You know what they say. ‘When you do clownery, the clown comes back to bite.’”
“Jane Austen?”
“Mo’Nique.” Faith pushed herself out of the chair. “I’m out of here, friend. Please stop looking at that video.”
Sara forced a smile onto her lips until Faith was gone.
She opened her laptop. She played the video again.
Brock laid the white ribbon across the green binders.
Sara had no idea why she so clearly remembered losing the hair tie. The fight with Tessa had been one of many. Sara’s hair had always been long. Over the years, she had lost hundreds of ties and bands. She’d had no idea that Brock had stolen this particular ribbon. And she had been so certain when she walked into Brock’s office inside the AllCare warehouse that he would not hurt her.
Now, she wondered.
Her cell phone chimed. Will had sent a car emoji. She texted back a running woman and a man behind a desk, letting him know that she would meet him in his office.
Sara stuck her laptop into her briefcase. The brown paper bag inside the outer pocket crumpled. She had to take out everything and readjust it. She found her purse on the couch. She checked to make sure she had her keys and locked her office door.