Opening
Grief, love, and fanatic purpose collide as K. William Hodges and Janelle "Janey" Patterson brace for a funeral while Brady Hartsfield claws his way out of despair to hunt again. A brutal family history surfaces, recasting Brady not as an unfathomable monster but as one forged in secrecy, abuse, and murder—and now pointed straight at Hodges.
What Happens
Chapter 76: A Plan Forms in the Dark
Hodges and Janey lie in bed, making final plans for Elizabeth Wharton’s funeral: a 10 AM service on Wednesday, followed by a luncheon at the Sugar Heights home. Janey dreads the reception most, with Aunt Charlotte and her cousin Holly Gibney guaranteed to make the day harder. She asks Hodges to come to both events, and their gentle banter and casual intimacy show how quickly they’ve become each other’s anchor.
The perspective cuts to Brady’s basement. Numb with grief over his mother’s death, he avoids the reeking upstairs and sleeps on a leaky air mattress. The poisoned burger meant for the Robinsons’ dog returns in flashes—his mother convulsing, the vomit on the couch—images that freeze him between paralysis and suicidal determination. He thinks of his dead younger brother, Frankie, whose name he weaponized against Olivia Trelawney. “I had to… We had to,” he mutters, as if addressing someone beside him in the dark.
Chapter 77: The Making of a Monster
The narrative rewinds to Brady’s childhood. After his father, a lineman, dies in an electrical accident, his mother, Deborah Ann Hartsfield, is left with eight-year-old Brady and three-year-old Frankie. Brady steps into the role of “man of the house,” basking in his mother’s beauty and attention. Then Frankie chokes on an apple slice and suffers catastrophic brain damage, and the household spirals.
Frankie’s care drains the family’s money and hope. Deborah drinks; Brady carries too much responsibility for a child, his love curdling into resentment. The flashback’s centerpiece arrives on an ordinary morning: over smoking pancakes, Deborah kicks Frankie’s favorite toy, a red fire truck named Sammy, down the open basement stairs. When Frankie crawls to the edge, Deborah gives Brady a small nod. Brady, acting without thought, kicks his brother down the stairs. Frankie lives—paralyzed and moaning. Deborah sends Brady for a pillow. Together they smother Frankie, then rehearse a simple lie about a tragic fall. The shared murder binds mother and son in a secret that metastasizes into lifelong corruption.
Chapter 78: A New Target
Back in the basement, Brady absently shreds the plastic off the morning paper—and freezes at Elizabeth Wharton’s obituary. Dates, times, addresses: everything he needs. The fog of depression clears, replaced by cold purpose. He hears his mother’s voice as if she stands behind him, purring caution and encouragement. Hodges will be looking, she warns. Brady murmurs, “You won’t see me coming,” savoring the line he once used to taunt the detective, and sets his alarm for dawn.
Chapter 79: The Uncle
On Tuesday morning, Hodges and Janey dress for the viewing. While they get ready, Hodges calls Marlo Everett in the Records Department, asking discreetly about a cluster of downtown car burglaries near upscale condos from a couple of years back. He frames it as a neighborhood worry, careful not to loop in his old partner, Pete Huntley, and equally careful not to sound like an “uncle”—a retired cop who can’t stop meddling. Janey teases the term out of him, and he plays off the call as curiosity, but his quiet momentum is unmistakable.
Affection steadies them before they leave, even as the narrative undercurrent tightens. Hodges balances the tenderness of this budding relationship with a secret pursuit that keeps drawing him back toward danger.
Chapter 80: The Hunt Begins
Brady waits in a strip-mall lot near Hodges’s street, engine ticking, eyes fixed. When Hodges and Janey step out together, jealousy and fury flare: the “fat ex-cop” is sleeping with a woman Brady once used as bait, a happiness that feels like theft. Brady tells himself Hodges probably slept on the couch, then snaps the lie shut and starts his car.
He places “Thing Two,” his remote detonator, on the passenger seat. He calls Discount Electronix and reports a week-long flu he doesn’t plan to outlive. Laughter bubbles up—too loud, too long—spooking a woman in the next lane. The virtual taunts become a physical pursuit as Brady tails Hodges and Janey into the day, his plan hardening with every mile.
Character Development
Brady’s backstory recasts him with terrible clarity: a boy groomed into complicity, then fortified by secrecy, who now directs his grief into lethal purpose. In contrast, Hodges finds renewed life through companionship and quiet determination, even as he edges back toward risk.
- Brady Hartsfield: The flashback supplies his core wound and the origin of his pathology: complicity in fratricide, a coerced intimacy with his mother, and a lifelong script of guilt transmuted into violence.
- K. William Hodges: He reengages with the world—emotionally with Janey and intellectually through off-the-books inquiry—without broadcasting his intentions.
- Deborah Ann Hartsfield: Not merely a tragic alcoholic but the architect of a murder and the primary corrupting force shaping Brady’s moral collapse.
Themes & Symbols
The chapters lay bare Dysfunctional Family Dynamics: poverty, addiction, and caregiver burnout coalesce into an atrocity staged in a tidy kitchen. King refuses melodrama; the horror grows from routine gestures—a kicked toy, a nod, a pillow—that reveal how family roles warp under pressure until affection becomes complicity.
In this ordinariness lies The Banality of Evil. Frankie’s death is not a crime of passion but a domestic procedure, followed by a plain, practiced lie. The aftermath cements Guilt and Responsibility as the motor of the story: Brady’s guilt doesn’t birth remorse but metastasizes into predation, while Hodges channels responsibility into quiet action, edging toward Vigilantism and Justice Outside the Law as a counterweight to the system and as a salve against the Psychological Toll of Retirement.
- Symbol: Sammy the Fire Truck. The toy embodies Frankie’s innocence. Deborah’s kick sends it—and Frankie—toward the dark. Later, placing Sammy with Frankie becomes Brady’s perverse ritual of grief, love, and denial.
Key Quotes
“I had to… We had to.” Brady’s fragmented confession collapses agency and blame. The shift from “I” to “we” exposes the fused identities of mother and son and the shared secrecy that defines his adulthood.
“You won’t see me coming.” A recycled threat becomes a mission statement. Brady reclaims the line to convert despair into momentum, signaling the move from online menace to physical pursuit—and promising a public collision.
“Uncles.” Hodges’s shorthand for retired cops who can’t let go doubles as a warning to himself. He jokes about the label while embodying its danger, toeing the line between harmless curiosity and risky obsession.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters supply Brady’s origin story and shift the novel from digital cat-and-mouse to a real-world hunt with a fixed time and place—the funeral. Understanding the Hartsfield secret reframes Brady’s crimes as the culmination of a long-brewing pathology, even as Hodges’s quiet reawakening raises the personal stakes. The countdown to the service functions as a ticking clock, aligning character arcs and narrative momentum for an imminent, violent confrontation.