He had designated Sara as the executor of his estate. He’d left exact instructions on how his mother’s remains were to be handled. He’d pre-paid for everything, a common practice in the industry. Sara had ensured that Myrna had been given a proper Christian burial in the Heartsdale Memory Gardens. Her own mother had attended the graveside, but the rest of the town had stayed away.
As for Brock’s remains, nothing had been specified in any of his documents. He had left it to Sara to dispose of his body. She imagined that he’d assumed Sara would be kind.
She had paid for his cremation out of her own pocket. She had stood over the toilet in the funeral home and kept flushing until every last bit of his ashes were gone.
Sara pressed the space bar to start the video.
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
