Story code: ST-001340
Part 3: The Deleted Folder
The screen of Sarah’s phone went black. The violent vibration against the workbench abruptly stopped, leaving behind a ringing, heavy silence in the sweltering air of the garage.
“Did you reset my safe, Sarah?” Greg asked again.
His voice was completely devoid of its usual warmth, stripped down to a flat, demanding cadence she had never heard in the ten years she had known him. He took another deliberate step toward her, his heavy leather work boots scuffing against the oil-stained concrete. He was entirely blocking her path to the side door. The bright afternoon sunlight spilling in from outside seemed to stop dead at his broad shoulders, casting his face in dark, impenetrable shadow.
“Don’t come any closer,” Sarah warned, her voice trembling but surprisingly loud.
At her feet, Leo let out a confused little hum. He dropped his yellow plastic dump truck and grabbed a fistful of Sarah’s jeans, peering around her leg at his father. “Daddy’s mad?” the four-year-old asked softly.
“Nobody is mad, buddy,” Greg said, his eyes never leaving Sarah’s face. He didn’t look down at his son. “Mommy just made a mistake with my things. Right, Sarah? Open the door.”
“No,” Sarah said, stepping backward, putting herself squarely between Greg and the workbench. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird, the frantic rhythm making her physically dizzy. “I’m not opening it.”
Greg’s jaw tightened. The muscle feathered under his skin, tight and rigid. He shifted his gaze from her to the massive, six-hundred-pound grey bulk of the Liberty safe. Then, with sudden, terrifying speed, he lunged toward the tool pegboard mounted above the workbench.
Sarah screamed, instinctively wrapping her arms around Leo and twisting away, bracing for the impact of a strike.
But Greg didn’t swing at her. He snatched a heavy, twenty-four-inch Stanley crowbar from its metal hooks. He pivoted toward the gun safe, his face flushed with a sudden, violent rage. He jammed the flat, forged iron tip of the crowbar into the microscopic seam between the reinforced steel door and the doorframe. He gripped the iron shaft with both hands and threw his entire body weight backward.
The metal screeched, a horrible, high-pitched tearing sound that echoed off the drywall, but the massive internal locking bolts didn’t yield a single millimeter.
“It’s a Class three vault, Greg!” Sarah yelled over the noise, clutching Leo to her chest. “You can’t pry it open!”
He ignored her. He yanked the crowbar free and jammed it higher up the seam, near the top corner hinge. He grunted, a feral, desperate sound, pulling with so much force his boots slipped on the concrete. The crowbar bowed slightly under the immense pressure, scraping off a thick curl of grey powder-coat paint, but the door remained immovable.
He was frantic. Desperate. And watching him claw at the steel fortress only solidified the nightmare twisting in Sarah’s gut.
Greg dropped the crowbar. It hit the floor with a deafening clang that made Leo burst into terrified tears. Greg whirled around, his chest heaving, his eyes wild and bloodshot. He grabbed a heavy flathead screwdriver from the bench and lunged at the electronic keypad. He wedged the blade under the plastic housing, trying to snap the cover off to expose the wiring underneath.
“Stop it!” Sarah shrieked, backing away until her shoulders hit the wall. “Stop!”
“Then give me the goddamn code!” Greg roared, the sheer volume of his voice paralyzing her. He wrenched the screwdriver, snapping a piece of the black plastic casing. “You don’t lock a man out of his own safe, Sarah! You don’t snoop around my things!”
“Like your phone?” she screamed, the words tearing out of her throat before she could filter them.
The screwdriver slipped, gouging a deep, jagged scratch across the keypad. Greg froze. The frantic, violent motion of his shoulders stalled instantly. The deafening silence rushed back into the garage, broken only by the sound of Leo’s muffled sobbing against Sarah’s collarbone.
Greg didn’t turn around. He stayed perfectly still, facing the ruined keypad. “What?” he asked, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper.
“I know the password to your secure cloud, Greg,” Sarah said, the adrenaline burning cold in her veins. “You use the same one for the mortgage portal. I logged in. I saw the hidden folder. The deleted items.”
Greg slowly lowered the screwdriver. He turned his head, just enough for the harsh fluorescent light to catch the sudden, sickening drain of color from his cheeks. His skin looked like wet ash.
“I saw the first video,” Sarah continued, her chest heaving, tears of absolute revulsion spilling over her lower lashes. “The thirty-second one. With the plastic tarp on the floor. And the person tied to the metal chair. I couldn’t see your face, Greg. But I saw your left wrist in the frame.”
Greg turned fully now. The predatory, violent anger from a moment ago evaporated, replaced by a hollow, wide-eyed panic. He looked down at his own left arm, at the heavy, customized silver-link watch band strapped to his wrist.
“But that wasn’t the worst one, was it?” Sarah said, her voice gaining a razor-thin, desperate edge. “There were others. I kept scrolling. I clicked the next one. Forty-two seconds long.”
Greg took a staggering step forward, his hand reaching out. “Sarah, listen to me-”
“Stay away from us!” she shrieked.
Greg stopped dead, his hand hovering in the air. He was trembling.
“Three people died at the Westfield mall last October,” Sarah said, her voice dropping into a harsh, trembling whisper that cut through the garage like glass. “You came home covered in drywall dust. You cried in our bed. You told me, you told the police, you told the local news that you were pinned down behind the food court. That the gunfire was too heavy. That you tried to reach the victims, but you couldn’t.”
Greg’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. His chest rose and fell in short, shallow spasms, as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room.
“It was a lie,” Sarah said, her disgust so absolute it made her physically nauseous. “You weren’t pinned down by gunfire. You were hiding behind a concrete planter. Perfectly safe.”
“I… I panicked,” Greg whispered, the deep baritone of his voice cracking into a pathetic, reedy rasp.
“You didn’t just panic!” Sarah yelled, the sound tearing at her vocal cords. “That woman was right in front of you! She was bleeding out on the tiles, dragging herself toward you, begging for help! And what did you do, Greg?”
He squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head rapidly. “Please. Don’t.”
“You didn’t pull her behind the planter,” Sarah pressed relentlessly, pointing a shaking finger at his dark phone on the workbench. “You didn’t take off your shirt to put pressure on her chest. You pulled out your phone. You pressed record. Your silver watch band is right there in the bottom of the frame, holding the camera steady. It’s shaky at first, but then you brace your arm on the edge of the planter. You zoomed in on her face while she died. You recorded a forty-two-second video of a bleeding victim at a mass shooting so you could keep it in a secret folder and watch it later.”
The silence that followed was heavy and suffocating. Leo had stopped crying, staring up at his parents with wide, unblinking eyes, entirely paralyzed by the catastrophic shift in the room.
Greg looked down at the concrete floor. The terrifying, calculating monster Sarah thought she had locked out of the safe was gone, leaving behind something infinitely worse, infinitely sicker. A hollow, depraved voyeur. A man who watched a woman bleed to death for his own secret entertainment.
He slowly looked up at her, his eyes red-rimmed and wet, his shoulders sagging in defeat.
“Sarah,” he whispered, his voice pathetic and small. “I can explain.”