From what we could piece together, the men who took Greer hadn’t necessarily intended to kill him but rather used his abduction to convince Sasha to take her own life. Since they left him alone afterward, it appeared that he hadn’t been the primary target.

Once again, just like when I was at Jon Murray’s funeral, I was forced to think about life and death.

Vapor.

Our lives appear for a little while and then, like mist, they vanish away.

No matter how hard we attempt to cling to life, we cannot. Time passes over us, and we’re left behind, trying desperately to grab hold of something solid in its fleeting, amorphous shadow.

Sand in an hourglass, flying away—just like that image on James Leeson’s gravestone. Or those words, “Remember death.” Yes, this week, how could I forget it?

How do you let it register that a woman you spoke with earlier in the day is now dead and will never speak, never dream, never breathe again?

It’s tempting to pretend that she’ll somehow appear alive again, that death isn’t really the end, but unless the afterlife exists, nothing awaits us beyond death’s door, and there’s really no lasting solace or anything solid to put your hope in.

Back in the sixties, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlined five stages of grief in her book On Death and Dying: Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.

Because of the nature of my job, I tend to move past the denial stage pretty quickly. I just see too much death—so much more than most people—that I’ve learned to acknowledge its universal inevitability.

And so, tonight, I found myself leaping over denial and landing headfirst into anger.

Territory I was pretty familiar with.

Sometimes it seemed like I spent way too much of my life stuck in that stage rather than moving on, rather than finding closure, healing.

That last stage of true acceptance might be a worthy goal, but right now, I wanted the anger to remain fresh and tender in my heart. It was part of what served to keep me going in an investigation like this.

Over the years, I’ve found that anger is necessary, but it must reach an equilibrium: You need just enough but never too much. If you don’t let it in, you become hollow; but if you let it take over, you become its slave.

When you see evil like what this case was exhibiting, you either become numb to it, or you have to find a way to put your rage on a leash. Then you need to be careful not to let it gnaw through whatever coping mechanism you’re using to restrain it.