Rowan nods and smiles a little. “That must have been awkward—working in this small room, Brett right beside you, knowing you’d spoken to HR about his flirtations.”
Georgina nods. “Yeah.”
“How did he behave after that kind of public rejection?”
The second hesitation gives her away. I decide to take the lead again.
“It’s difficult when you see an otherwise good person doing something he shouldn’t. I sense that you felt sorry for him.”
Now a long sigh. She closes her eyes and gets a curious look, like she’s seeing something behind them. “In all the time I knew him, he never dated anyone. He was awkward. Insecure. It came from the inside, you know? He was agood-lookingguy. Great at his job. But it didn’t matter. So, yeah, I did feel bad for him, but I just wanted him to stop. And then when he didn’t, when I had to tell them a second time and he lost his job, I think it was just too much.”
Now Rowan. “Georgina—what did he do—after that?”
“I wasn’t obligated to tell HR anything after he was terminated,” she begins with a soft voice. “It was done. He was gone. He moved away a few days later.”
Rowan and I hold back our questions. We sit and wait and let her come to us with the answers we can tell she wants to reveal.
“He did leave quietly that day. And I thought it was over. The guys took me for drinks after work to blow off some steam. I don’t know what I thought—because he was always walking this line between good and bad. Malignant and benign. There was a desperation about him, like he needed a win in his personal life. Like he had a score to settle. I knew it was there. I should have been more careful.”
She tells us then how she left the bar, drove to her apartment, and parked her car in the garage. And how Brett Emory was waiting for her in the shadows.
“He came out of nowhere. Right when the elevator opened. I felt his hands on my shoulders, and he pushed me inside with him. I thought... well, I thought that was it, you know? I thought he was going to kill me. That’s when I knew that my instincts had been right. Even when all he had done until then was follow me around, try to get close to me. That was my thought—not that he wanted to yell at me or even try to, you know, be with me somehow. My thought was that he was going to kill me.”
She describes her fear, how it must have been sitting inside her, waiting for a spark to set it on fire. We always want to see the good in people. To believe in a world where there are no monsters. So much that we pretend they’re not standing right in front of us.
The assault lasted mere seconds. It was not sexual. He pinned her, then leaned down to see into her eyes.
“He was inches away from my face. I could feel his breath on my lips when he said the word.”
“What word did he say?” Rowan asks now.
Georgina slumps back in her chair and crosses her legs and arms, folding into herself. “‘Whore,’” she says, playing back the memory. “He called me a whore and then he started to laugh—like a little kid who’s finally gotten the courage to do something naughty and then feels excited but also scared because he might get punished for it.”
“Or,” I say, looking at Rowan, “scared because he wants to do it again.”
She tells us the rest. How he let her leave when the elevator reached her floor, and she ran to her apartment, scrambled for the keys in her purse, opened her door, and got inside. How she locked it behind her and then walked around, turning on lights and checking in closets and under the bed. Checking for monsters. How she stood still and cried.
We take turns asking more questions, like did she call the police or tell a friend or someone at the office?
She says she told her sister but then kept it to herself. She didn’t want to provoke him. “I stayed with a friend for a few days—made up a story about them having to redo my floors. But then I heard he’d moved. HR told me they got a request to send his last paycheck to a post office box. I drove by his house, and sure enough, a rental sign was outside. And he changed his phone number.”
There has been no contact since.
“I just want to forget about it.”
We finish with Georgina, offering our sympathy and encouraging her to file a report. Rowan gently reminds her that what happened was an act of violence, and she says she knows. Then she reminds us that these things happen to women all the time. We can’t argue with her. She just wants to move on.
The similarities between our stories are striking, and as terrible as it may be, this makes me feel better. I didn’t create this monster. I didn’t unearth what was hiding inside this man. His behavior that day at Nichols—how he first froze with fear but then followed Vera Pratt into that stall and threatened the life of her baby. The sudden violence is consistent with Georgina’s assault, which happened before he even came to town.
But then I think that it happened to me as well, on that back road. I had been the doe in the herd with the broken leg. Easy prey. The kind a predator doesn’t even have to work for. The shooting had made me vulnerable.
Rowan and I discuss our findings on the drive back after speaking with the two guys in the office, Josh and Pete, who painted the same portrait. Brett Emory was a geek. Socially incompetent. Neither of them wanted to hang out with him after work. His jokes were off color, and he couldn’t execute them. He was trying to be something he wasn’t. Someone people liked and wanted to be around. The more he tried, the further away he moved from these objectives.
“I don’t know,” Rowan says. “So he gets fired. And then what? Moves two hours away, creates a false identity? Maybe this was a last straw for him, this termination. Something cracked.”
We get reports as we drive. About his last known address near Hartford, now rented to someone else, his bank accounts, tax returns. He was a good boy. No late payments. Meticulous in his money management. He’d saved quite a little war chest, which he’d withdrawn within days after his termination from Astor Life and which had yet to show up in another account under his name.
There were no hits on his social security number. No criminal arrests. No divorces. No marriages. No children. His credit score was 810, and he graduated college with a 3.8 GPA. The manager at the nursing home said he visited his parents twice a month and was always pleasant and polite. He visited them right before he left town, told them he was being transferred to a field office but would come see them as soon as he got back.
