“Without meeting this man or knowing more about him as an adult, my hands are somewhat tied. But—he was physically different from the other kids throughout his childhood. He was in the one hundredth percentile for height and the fortieth for weight.”
“So tall and thin,” Rowan says. “To the point of standing out.”
Landyn nods. “Yes. He would have stood out. Add to that twelve relocations around the world starting in first grade, and an extremely introverted personality, and you have a recipe for social alienation.”
“Why so many moves?” Rowan asks.
“It says his mother was a consultant. They followed her jobs.”
“And this social isolation—what did that do to him?”
Landyn tilts his head left, then right, indicating his ambivalence. “In middle school they had him evaluated for behavior that his parents described as reclusive. He had no friends that year after their latest move. It was bad timing. The whole grade was moving up from lower school—a hard transition to begin with. The kids who were at the top are suddenly at the bottom and they search for ways to fit in, to find their social rank in this new environment. Brett Emory went into that situation not knowing a single kid.”
“So he was without friends and didn’t know how to make them. He stood out physically,” Rowan says, growing impatient. “That must have made him angry.”
Landyn nods but again with the tilted head. “There is some indication that he had repressed anger. He expressed it only with his mother, which is very normal. Kids often feel safest showing feelings that scare them to a primary caregiver.”
“How did he express this anger?” I ask now, as flashes of that day on the back road come and go. Wade’s arms around my neck. His body slamming mine into the side of my car. I stop myself before any more come.
“Look,” Landyn says, closing the file and leaning forward. “The kid in this file had struggled with social interactions for most of his school life. It’s likely that this was discussed at home, out of concern, but in a way that made him aware of the problem. He said in the evaluation that his parents were always pushing him to eat more, lift weights, be more outgoing. And his sister teased him. She had adapted to the lifestyle, moving into each new school with a successful strategy to make friends. Part of that was distancing herself from her awkward younger brother. It was survival for her. His home life and school life became part of a feedback loop—each one fueling the other.”
Rowan leans back and lets out a sigh. This is not enough for him. Or for me. Lots of kids were awkward in middle school. They were tall or short, pudgy or skinny. There were budding breasts and acne, body odor and periods and hair in new places. Everyone was changing at different rates and in different ways. Some bodies were graceful about it while others seemed tortured. And everyone knew kids who were introverted, geeky. They survived it.
Landyn senses his frustration. “You know, society underestimates the impact of chronic childhood trauma like your guy suffered. It doesn’t have to be one big event. Sometimes it’s the accumulation of smaller cuts that causes the deepest wound. It would help me to know what this boy grew up to become,” he says. “What he’s done that now requires an understanding of his past.”
Landyn is right. I was hoping for a diagnosis, maybe like the one we had for Clay Lucas. Something to connect the dots more easily.
I look at Rowan and nod, giving him my approval to tell the story of the tall man. Wade Austin. The 404. And now a geeky actuary named Brett Emory.
He starts with the shooting, and the second the words leave his mouth, Dr. Landyn looks at me.
“The tall man?” he asks, and I nod. And then he nods.
Rowan tells him everything. What he did to Vera Pratt and the woman at his office and how he was fired for sexual harassment, draining his bank accounts and disappearing, moving here, we think, shopping for pants at Nichols, and finally, his contact with me. The gifts and flowers and then the meeting. The assault, going off the rails. Stalking me, my children, my husband’s former lover. And now, seemingly, dormant.
Rowan finishes with the last contact he knows about—the filming of my girls at their school and then our failed attempt to lure him to the diner. How he mocked the entire department by paying a guy with a blue truck to drive through the parking lot.
Landyn looks straight at me. “Is that the last thing? There’s been no more contact?”
Rowan nods, and I do the same, trying not let the blood rush into my face. It hits me now, hard. I’m no longer just hiding, omitting facts. I’m actively lying.
The sessions we had in this office just weeks ago come rushing back. The investigation into my emotional state following the shooting, which feels almost irrelevant now. The assessing of my stability, my sanity. Talk of trauma recovery and what it can do to a person who interrupts the process, skips the stages. And I wonder if I’ve gone completely mad. Because the thing about that—about losing your mind—is you’re the one person incapable of seeing it.
“Okay,” Landyn says. “This is the best I can do without observing Mr. Emory or speaking with him directly. So take it for what it’s worth.”
He begins with shrink speak—the fragility of Brett Emory’s ego from his childhood experiences, his ability to overcome them in college, at least academically. We have no information from anyone there. No professors who really noticed him. No friends who’d come forward. Still, had he been emotionally unstable, it is unlikely he could have concentrated on his classes and attained such a high GPA.
And then his success at work, eleven years with multiple promotions. There were hits on his phone records, numbers of people who saw him socially. Rowan relays this to Landyn when he asks, and then he says this confirms his thoughts, which are that Brett Emory had found his place in the world. A job, enough friends to have human contact. His visits with his parents and demeanor with the staff at their nursing home—all of that indicated that the scars had either healed or he’d found a way to ignore them.
“The termination was a trigger,” Landyn says. “No question. It tore down the life he’d managed to build. And all of the parts of him that he had come to see as positive were suddenly taken away. The assault on his coworker in the elevator at her apartment building, and then leaving town the extreme way that he did, indicate a mental break.”
Landyn says he likely came here as an attempt to rebuild. He suspects he had a new fixation on a woman, whether she knew it or not. “The problem was that he could never go back. Any attempt to rectify the past, clear his name, would risk being exposed for what he did to his coworker. I also suspect there were similar acts of aggression that were not reported—in college, with people he met outside of work. The behavior toward this last woman shows underlying predatory tendencies.”
“And now?” Rowan asks. “Are they worse—these predatory tendencies?”
Yes, I think. He has become a predator, and I’ve been using myself as bait. I want to run from this room and Landyn’s eyes, which keep shifting to mine, searching. He knows something’s not right.
“There are likely two things at work here,” Landyn explains. “First is the compromised person he was before. Essentially, he already had one piece of a common stalking profile—delusion. Your guy deluded himself about his coworker, ignoring her social cues, inventing a scenario where she was secretly in love with him. The delusion was necessary to his emotional stability, the image he had of himself that he needed to protect at all costs—even his job.”
