PART 3
Finally, he packed away the camera, notebook, and laptop. Before leaving, he leaned over and kissed my forehead with the same tenderness he normally showed me.
“Sweet dreams, Anna.”
Hearing that gentle voice after what I had witnessed was almost unbearable. A few minutes later, the front door quietly closed, and I heard Dererick’s car leave the driveway shortly before three in the morning.
Only then did I allow myself to shake.
My husband hadn’t merely been secretly sedating me. He had photographed me, repositioned me, collected samples, documented everything, and communicated with other people while doing it.
Dererick had told me he was leaving for a three-day business trip to Chicago, so I knew I had a limited opportunity to discover what was happening. I waited another ten minutes before getting out of bed and searching for the personal laptop he kept separate from the computer he used for work.
I eventually found a locked briefcase beneath our bed. The combination was our anniversary, and when the lock clicked open, I felt a sickening mixture of relief and dread.
The laptop contained hundreds of photographs arranged in folders by date. Some went back eight months, long before I had noticed anything unusual, but what terrified me most was discovering folders labeled with other women’s names.
Jennifer. Patricia. Michelle.
There were at least six women.
I opened Jennifer’s folder and found photographs resembling the ones Dererick had taken of me. Later images, however, showed her looking increasingly weak and unwell, and Patricia’s and Michelle’s folders revealed the same disturbing progression.
Then I discovered a document labeled “Client Communications.”
It revealed that Dererick had been running a criminal operation in which paying customers requested photographs and specific staged scenarios involving women whose conditions gradually deteriorated. Different services had different prices, and messages showed customers giving instructions about what they wanted Dererick to document.
I kept searching until I found an email from only two days earlier that mentioned me by name. A customer had asked about something called “Graduation Services,” and Dererick’s response made my hands begin trembling.
He had written that I was “almost ready” and that he would “begin the final phase soon.”
I didn’t know exactly what those words meant, but after seeing the later photographs of the other women, I knew I couldn’t afford to wait and discover the answer. I copied everything I could onto a flash drive, then searched the bedroom until I found Dererick’s notebook hidden inside his sock drawer.
The entries documented substances, amounts, my reactions, and customer requests. More recent notes mentioned people asking about “permanent access,” while Dererick had written that I was becoming suspicious and he might need to “accelerate the timeline.”
That was enough.
Whatever Dererick had planned for his “final phase,” I believed my safety was in immediate danger. I photographed every page, returned everything exactly where I had found it, and tried to think clearly.
Dererick couldn’t know that I had discovered his secret.
Not yet.
But he would eventually come home.
And I had three days to make sure I wasn’t there waiting helplessly when he did.
