“I remember when Daddy wheeled Coach Childers into the basement. I wasn’t allowed down there on my own, but I just had to see.” Brock chuckled, as if he was relaying a youthful indiscretion. “I waited until everybody was asleep, then I went down there and unzipped the bag. Coach Childers was lying there on his back. His arm was in a plastic bag on his chest. I guess they couldn’t locate the fingers.”

Sara remembered now. The day after Coach Childers had died, Brock had gotten onto the bus to a chorus of taunting children. They all knew the details of the accident. They knew where Coach Childers’ body had been taken.

She said, “Dead man’s hands.”

Brock’s smile had no joy in it. “That’s right. That’s what they kept saying. Dead-man’s-hands, dead-man’s-hands.”

He waved his hands the same way the children had. Brock had suffered through their malicious teasing for weeks.

He asked, “Do you remember what you did?”

She tried to swallow. There was no spit left in her mouth. “I yelled at them.”

“You didn’t just yell at them. You stood up in the middle of that bus and you howled at all of them to shut the fuck up.” Brock laughed, as if he was still amazed. “I don’t think any of us had ever heard that word out loud before. Hell, most of us didn’t even know what it meant. My mama, she said, ‘Oh that Eddie Linton is a potty mouth cursing around them girls.’ But do you remember what happened next?”

This felt so normal. How could it feel normal?

She said, “I got detention.”

“You’d never been in trouble a day in your life.” His smile faltered. “You did that for me, Sara. That’s when I knew you were my friend.”

She pressed together her lips. The room felt hot. Sweat was pouring down her back. She didn’t know what to do, what to say. She begged, “Please.”

“Oh, Sara. I know this is hard.” Brock clasped together his hands on the desk. “I’m sorry.”

His voice was so familiar, so compassionate. She had heard him use the same comforting tone with countless mourners. She recalled it from her own experience the day she had gone to the funeral home to make arrangements for Jeffrey.

Brock said, “I took Coach’s arm into the woods with me.”

Sara concentrated on the anxiousness in his eyes. He had always been terrified of rejection. She tried to force off the switch in her head, to blunt her emotions.

“I was so lonely.” He was watching her, trying to test how far he could go. “I just wanted someone to be with. That’s all it ever was for me, Sara. I wanted somebody who couldn’t laugh at me or push me away.”

Her hand had gone to her mouth. Her mind refused to understand what he was saying.

He said, “It took me a while to figure out that blood is a lubricant.”

Vomit churned into Sara’s throat. She swallowed it back down, trying to steel herself. She could not recoil from him. She had to keep him talking. This was for the families. This was for the victims they did not know about.

“You make a puncture here.” Brock rubbed his fingers across his chest. “Then you press down, and blood fills the mouth.”

Her throat tensed. He was making it sound almost gentle, but Shay Van Dorne’s jaw had been dislocated. The condom had ripped against her teeth. Tommi Humphrey had been mutilated. Alexandra McAllister had been scraped out with a knitting needle.

Sara forced the images to leave her mind.

She made herself meet Brock’s needy gaze. He was waiting for permission to continue.

She could not trust herself to speak, so she nodded.

He said, “The first time was with Hannah Nesbitt.”

She felt her throat constrict.

“I was home from college. Daryl was a kid, maybe ten or eleven, when his mama died. You can look it up, right?”

He was expecting an answer. She knew that Daryl Nesbitt’s mother had OD’d when he was eight years old, but she told him, “Yes.”

“The family asked for an open casket. I was in the viewing room making sure everything looked right. And then I got this urge that I had to kiss her one last time.”

One last time?

“It was very chaste. Just touching my lips to hers.” He held his breath a moment before letting it go. “I turned around, and there was Daryl. Standing there. Watching. Neither one of us said anything, but there was this silent communication between us. We were two lonely people who knew that something deep down inside of us was wrong.”

Sara struggled to keep her silence. She had been inside of that room. She could visualize the sickening scene in her head. Daryl was a child when he’d walked in on a grown man desecrating his mother’s corpse. He’d probably been too frightened, too confused, to make sense of it.

“I just knew he was gonna tell.” Brock couldn’t look at her anymore. He stared down at his desk. “I waited for him to run off and blab, but he didn’t. He kept the secret. So, I had to keep his.”

Brock sniffed. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

“Daddy did ten or twelve services a year for a Nesbitt or an Abbott or some Dew-Lolly who’d married in.” He told Sara, “Daryl was always around the young girls. Even his own cousins. He would rub up against them. Play with their hair. Sometimes he would take them into the bathroom and they would come out crying.”

Brock’s eyes were wet with tears.

“I’d get so angry, because I knew I couldn’t report him. Daryl would tell on me, and Daddy and Mama would hear about it, and that would be the end of my life.” He looked at Sara. “I could never do that to Mama. You understand what I’m saying? She can never know.”

Sara nodded, but not in agreement. Her emotional switch had flipped off once he’d confessed to bringing a child into his sick confidence.

She slipped her hand back into the pocket of her cardigan. The revolver was sticky from her sweat.

“A lot of people, when they drink, they do awful things. Then they sober up and they say, ‘It wasn’t me. It was the booze.’” He looked down at his desk. “But I always wondered, what if the person they are when they’re drunk is who they really are? What if the person who’s sober is the one who’s really putting on an act?”

Sara had discerned a pattern. He would wander off topic, then drop in a detail that he knew would keep her listening. She did not have to wait long for him to circle back around.

“Axle, Daryl’s step-daddy, he did work for us.” Brock explained, “Sometimes, you get a metal casket in, and there’s a crushed corner or a ding. Insurance pays for it, but you can still sell it if you can find somebody to fix the damage. Somebody who knows how to work with metal.”

Sara said, “The Dead Blow kit.”

“Axle left the hammer in one of the caskets.” Brock’s weak smile had returned. “I don’t know why I kept it. I liked the weight of it. The end was pointed. I found it useful.”

Brock had stopped looking at her again. He picked at the corner of one of the green binders. The noise made a ticking sound.

She said, “You left the hammer inside Leslie. You knew it could be traced by the manufacturing number on the handle.”

“I planned on saying something when you pulled it out, like, ‘oh I’ve seen that thing before.’ But I didn’t know Axle was in prison,” Brock said. “Jeffrey told Frank something while we were all walking to the crime scene—do you remember that day in the woods?”

Sara remembered the video. The blood that had poured from between Leslie’s legs. The splintered hammer jutting out like broken shards of glass.

Brock said, “I heard Jeffrey ask Frank about Daryl. The idea was already in his head. I knew Daryl had access to Axle’s tools because sometimes Axle would bring Daryl to the house to help fix a casket.”

Sara wanted his confession clear for the recording. “You left the hammer inside Leslie Truong in order to frame Axle Abbott?”

Brock responded with a slight tilt of his head, which wasn’t enough.

She said, “The hammer was jammed so deep inside of Leslie that I had to cut it out.”

Brock wiped his mouth with his fingers. For the very first time, he expressed regret. “I got carried away. I had to—I had to work fast. She was almost to the campus when I caught up with her. There wasn’t a lot of time to think it through.”

He hadn’t been thinking at all. He had been acting on his darkest, most heinous instincts. Leslie Truong had not been one of his fantasies. She had been an impediment to Brock acting out his sick desires.

She asked, “Did you take something from Leslie? Were you stalking her?”

“I didn’t know her before that day.”

The randomness did not make the violation feel any less grievous.

“Sara, you have to understand. There was no time to plan. She was walking back to the campus. I knew that she had seen me in the woods. If you hadn’t been there, I was going to have to come up with a lie to tell Jeffrey so I could find her.”