Текст книги "Memory Man"

Автор книги: David Baldacci

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Chapter

33

THEY ALL WALKED outside. Bogart looked at his men and said, “Give us a minute. I’ll meet you at the vehicles.” They left. Bogart turned to Lancaster. “I’d like a private word with your partner.”

Lancaster glanced at Decker, who said, “I’ll see you later, Mary.”

“You sure?”

“He’s sure,” said Bogart sharply.

Lancaster stared at Bogart. “I’m sorry about Agent Lafferty.”

“Special Agent Lafferty. Thanks.”

She turned and walked off, glancing back over her shoulder once before she rounded a corner and disappeared from sight.

The next moment Bogart had pushed Decker up against the brick wall of the morgue. He wedged his forearm against his throat.

“Okay, you fat-ass son of a bitch, we’re going to have this out right here and now.”

Bogart was big, strong, and in far better shape than Decker. And he had a freight train load of hate and frustration fueling his physical side. Still, Decker had him by well over a hundred pounds and had once been a professional football player. After the men struggled for about a minute, each trying to gain the upper hand, Decker bent his knees and pushed off the wall, and that momentum combined with his bulk thrust both men forward, although it was really backward for Bogart. At the same time Decker hooked his left ankle behind the FBI agent’s right one and the man went down. Decker landed right on top of him with the impact of a wall collapsing.

While lying flat on his back with over three hundred and fifty pounds wedged on top of him, Bogart still managed to clock Decker in the jaw. Decker tasted his own blood and felt a tooth loosen. He slammed his elbow into the side of Bogart’s head and heard the other man groan with the impact as his skull ricocheted off the pavement.

“I will kill you!” screamed Bogart as he continued to kick and punch while Decker tried to subdue the flailing limbs.

Decker rose a few inches off Bogart and then dropped heavily down, driving his massive shoulder right into the man’s diaphragm. Then he did it once more. Bogart grunted, gasped, moaned, and then stopped struggling.

Decker rose off him, staggered back, bent over, and tried to regain his own breath, his hands on his shaky knees, his gut heaving, his lungs doing the same.

When he looked over, Bogart had sat up and his gun was pointed at Decker’s head. In obvious pain, the man slowly rose, keeping his pistol aimed at Decker.

“You just assaulted a federal agent,” gasped Bogart, holding his injured, bleeding head with his free hand.

Decker looked at the gun and then at Bogart.

“I could arrest you,” added the federal agent.

Decker straightened and then collapsed against the brick wall for support. Finally getting his breathing under control, he said, “Didn’t you want to tell me something?”

Keeping his gun pointed at Decker, Bogart swiped his hair out of his face and smoothed out his tie. He moved closer. “What?”

“You said you wanted to have it out. I don’t think that meant kicking my ass. I think that meant saying something.”

Bogart pointed at the door of the morgue. “He left a message on…on my agent that was directed at you.”

“I know he did.”

“Which means you must know this guy. You must have done something to this guy. He calls you bro.” Bogart shouted out this last part.

Decker gave one last heaving breath and pushed off the wall, standing on his own. “I don’t know this guy. And I’m not his bro.”

“You say you never forget. Well, apparently neither does this guy. You did something. Maybe you didn’t realize what it was, but he’s killed…he’s killed…” Bogart’s voice trailed off and he lowered his weapon and then stared at the pavement shaking his head, his expression one of complete despair.

Decker rubbed at the cut and bruise on his cheek where Bogart had punched him. His tongue pushed against the loosened tooth.

“He’s killed a dozen people, including my family and Special Agent Nora Lafferty,” said Decker.

Bogart glanced up at him and nodded slowly. “Including Nora.” Bogart put his weapon away. “Look, I’m sorry I…If you want to press charges, go ahead. It was indefensible.”

Decker said, “I’m not sure what happened, other than I stumbled and fell and took you with me. Pretty clumsy. But then I’m a big, fat, out-of-shape guy. I think you might need to dry-clean your suit and see to that cut on your head.”

Bogart rubbed at some dirt on his sleeve and then glanced at Decker. “Where do we go from here?”

“With all we’ve done we’ve really gotten nowhere. You find anything useful at the Army base?”

“Nothing. It was a petri dish of crap. All degraded to mush. And the Pentagon has yet to get back to us. Not sure what they could add anyway. What about that story in the paper?”

“I talked to the reporter.”

“Lancaster told us. Gave us the IP info. My guys are tracking it, no luck so far.”

“I doubt it will lead anywhere. Too obvious.”

“So we’ve still got nothing, then?” said Bogart miserably.

“We have a lot of things, if we can make sense of them. We have Sebastian Leopold.”

“But he had alibis for both sets of murders.”

“But not Lafferty’s.”

“So you’re saying he’s working with someone? That’s what you meant when you said no one can be in two places at the same time?”

Decker nodded.

“But how can you be sure he killed Nora?”

“I can’t. But I don’t think it was Leopold who carved those words in her.”

“Why?”

“I met Leopold. I would’ve remembered this guy if I’d seen him before. But I don’t, which means I didn’t. That leaves his partner. This guy wouldn’t have allowed Leopold to do it. It was personal. I’m his bro. No one else. He’s the one with the beef against me.”

“But Decker, how could you have run across this other guy and not remember him? If he hates you so much that he’s slaughtering people?”

“I can’t answer that because I have no answer,” admitted Decker. “But I promise you that I will.”

Chapter

34

DECKER STARED UP at the front of the bar. Then he looked on the right side of the façade and then on the left. The buildings here were brick and dilapidated.

He walked down the stairs and into the dark, smoky interior.

He gazed around and saw two working-class men at a booth in the back, both hefting beer mugs. There was a woman alone at a counter-height round table with a glass of white wine in one hand and a half-smoked cigarette in the other. As he watched she placed her cigarette in a black plastic ashtray and set her wineglass down, pulled a compact and lipstick from her purse, and redid her mouth.

Decker passed by them all and walked up to the bar. The same barman was there. Decker sat and ordered a Coors. The barman poured out the draft, skimmed off the foam on top with a butter knife, and slid it across, in return for which Decker passed him a fiver and told him to keep the change. This got the man’s attention.

“You were in here before,” said the barman.

Decker nodded and sipped his beer. “I was. With the other guy.”

“Yeah, that other guy. Weirdo.”

“Has he been back in?”

“Nah.” The man started to wipe down the mahogany bar using a rag with a circular motion briskly applied.

“Had he been in before?”

“Couple times.”

“You ever talk to him?’

“He never talked to nobody. Except you.”

“He live around here?”

“Don’t know. Only saw his back leaving the place. Never saw him past that.”

“I don’t see that waitress around.”

The barman chuckled. “That’s right.”

“What happened to her?”

“Her?” He chuckled harder and then stopped wiping, put his elbows on the bar, leaned across, and said, “You call it a her. Maybe I don’t.”

“Then what do you call it?”

The barman pointed a finger at Decker. “Now that’s a damn good question. I don’t do the hiring here. I just pour the drinks and wipe stuff down and throw the occasional drunk bastard out the door.”

“Who hired her?”

“Management, whoever they are. Place has been sold four times in three years. Only constant is yours truly, and I wouldn’t be here ’cept I can’t find nothing else that pays better.”

“So are you saying she was a guy in drag?”

“Or something, yeah. Don’t know for sure. And I wasn’t about to check to confirm. I don’t hit from that side of the plate.”

Decker closed his eyes and the frames flipped through his head.

Tall, thin, blonde curls.

That hid pretty much all of her face.

Or his face.

And maybe the Adam’s apple, the surefire giveaway. Only surgery could take care of that.

“You have any info on the person? Must have given a name, address. Stuff for payroll?”

“Management has all that. And they’re not even local. Maybe even another state. Think they rolled up a bunch of businesses and combined it into one entity. Economy of scale or some shit like that. I bet they’re making a crapload of money, me not so much.”

“So none of those records are kept here?”

“No.”

“Who interviewed the person for the job?”

“Came from an agency.”

“You know which one?”

The barman looked at Decker. “Why, you hit from that side of the plate?”

Decker pulled out his police credentials. “Working a case. This person might be someone I need to talk to.”

The man studied the credentials and said, “Okay. Matter of fact, I don’t know which one. It just showed up one day and started working.”

“And you didn’t question that?”

“Hey, we needed a waitress. The other one didn’t show. Said she’d been sent by the temp agency that management uses. So I put it to work.”

“When was this?”

“Day before you came in with that other guy.”

“And if she hadn’t been sent by the temp agency?”

“Well, why the hell would it lie about that?”

“You have a restroom here just for employees?”

“Yeah, in the back.”

“The person ever use it?”

“I’m sure it did. Everyone has to take a pee or something more, right? Either standing up or sitting down.”

“Show me.”

The barman led him down a rear hall to a battered door marked RESTROOM.

“You got any duct tape?” Decker asked.

“In the back.”

“Get it for me.”

The confused barman left and returned a minute later with a roll.

Decker proceeded to tape off the door with long strips crisscrossing the doorway.

“What the hell are you doing?” asked the barman.

“I’ll have a forensics team here in five minutes. No one goes in.”

“But what if I have to use the facilities?”

“Use the one the paying customers do. And you’re going to be asked to give a description of it, so start racking your memory for every little detail.”

Decker made the call to Lancaster.

She said, “I’ll send them right now. How was your talk with Bogart?”

“Predictable.”

He clicked off and walked outside.

He had solved two things by coming here.

First, the waitress had taken the photograph of him and Leopold at the bar and sent it and the story elements to Alexandra Jamison. She was the only one who could have done it. The intent had been to ruin Decker’s reputation, to the extent he had one. But more than that, they wanted him to maybe even start questioning the truth.

Second, she had left the bar, gotten a car, and picked up Leopold when he left the bar. It must have been a hybrid or electric car, because Decker had not heard a car engine and he would have.

In the frames in his mind there was only the barman left that day when Leopold had exited. The waitress wasn’t there. Because she’d gone for the car.

*  *  *

A man in women’s clothing.

Or maybe a woman who used to be a man dressed in women’s clothing. It was like that movie he’d seen years ago with James Garner and Julie Andrews, Victor Victoria.

And maybe the waitress was Sebastian Leopold’s partner in crime.

Decker had not looked at the person’s feet, but now desperately wished he had. But if he had to guess, she would have been wearing a size nine. He tried to estimate her height in his mind. He had been sitting. She might have been wearing heels. He rolled the frames through.

Maybe five-ten or -eleven. And slim, with narrow shoulders and hips.

A long way from six-two and over two hundred pounds with shoulders as wide as Decker’s.

But not inconceivable. When the will was there, anything was possible. And it seemed anything had been possible here.

He waited for the forensics team. When they showed, he told them exactly what he wanted done. Lancaster had instructed them to follow Decker’s orders to the letter. A sketch artist sat down with the barman.

Then Decker set off for the next place.

Because something else had just occurred to him.

Chapter

35

SHOP CLASS.

Shop class that never was this year because the teacher had quit before the school year started.

Decker had wondered if there was another reason—other than the passageway coming up in the storage room off the classroom—for the shooter to want access to this particular space.

He stepped through and into the storage room in the rear. He eyed the mounds of junk from old projects left behind like dinosaur bones waiting for an archaeological dig.

Well, Decker intended to dig.

He started at the top of each mound and worked his way to the bottom.

He found nothing useful. So he sat on the floor and thought about it. He went through the possible steps in his head. Up here, he decided, would not be pragmatic. The shooter would need more privacy, more of a buffer zone.

He left the storage room and went down the steps to the other room that had the false wall made of balsa wood. The junk pile here had been moved to the side by the shooter.

Decker didn’t have to dig very deeply through all the crap.

He pulled out the object and held it up.

A chicken-wire and leather contraption with padding built into it. The form was instantly recognizable to an old jock like Decker.

Football shoulder pads.

But much more than that. The structure went all the way down to the waist and included supports for the arms, broadening and thickening at every point. It was built on hinges that swung open when he undid two latches, like a shorter version of the Iron Maiden torture device from medieval times. It was like an entire torso that one could strap on and become basically twice one’s size.

He opened the contraption fully and tried to put it on. The thing was, though, he was already nearly the same size, so it wouldn’t fit him. But it would fit someone half his size. Instant giant. He marveled at how flexible and malleable were the wire and leather and straps holding it all together. It would have to be this flexible, because the person had had to both move and shoot while wearing it.

One-forty became two-hundred-plus pounds. Slim became the build of a defensive tackle.

Next in the mounds of junk he found pads that strapped onto the legs, adding weight and depth to the lower frame, matching the enhancements to the upper.

Okay, that solved the question of literal bulk.

Now came the question of height.

He kept digging.

And found it wedged between two old lamps and a table made partly from a tree stump.

He held it up, measured it with his eye. It was a boot with no heel, but rather a thickened sole running the length of the footwear. Wearing it would raise a person’s height about three or so inches. And he concluded that it would do so more effectively than a heel. Three-inch heels would severely limit one’s agility. This was simply like walking on a level raised platform. He placed the boot against his own shoe. Far smaller. Nine or nine and a half.

He found the matching one a few seconds later.

He put the boots on the floor. Even though he couldn’t wedge his far larger feet inside them, he was able to stand on top of them.

Six-five instantly became six-eight.

The same way five-ten or five-eleven became six-two.

He doubted that the shooter could have brought this equipment in with him on the night of the school play, stashed it in the cafeteria, and then taken it with him along the passageway. But he didn’t have to. He could have snuck all this in anytime he wanted and left it right here.

He found a trash bag and piled all of the items into it.

Okay, that solved the size, and also how the man had gotten through the door from the passageway without moving the AC units. He had been a much thinner man then, perhaps as lean as Lancaster, who’d had no trouble getting through the narrow opening. Lean like the waitress; she could have managed it.

Decker’s mind flashed to the camera at the rear entrance to the school. Only from the waist up. The shooter didn’t want any possibility that the platform boots would be videotaped.

The shooter wouldn’t have worried about eyewitnesses observing his feet. Those who weren’t dead surely wouldn’t have bothered to notice the footwear, not when someone was shooting at them.

He called Lancaster and told her what he’d found.

Several “holy shits” later she said she would be there in ten minutes to pick up the evidence in the trash bag.

Decker perched on a counter in the middle of the shop class and looked around. He wanted to order this all in his head, putting the puzzle pieces together, if only to see how many empty spots he still had.

Shooter comes into the school the night of the play, holes up in the freezer in the cafeteria. He comes out the next morning, uses the passageway from the cafeteria to get to the back of the school unseen. He’d arranged to meet Debbie Watson in the shop class. He knocks her out, changes into his gear, guns up, walks in front of the camera after dragging Debbie out of the shop class and positioning her next to her locker, and then turns the corner and shoots her. Then he goes on his killing spree. From the back to the front of the school. Then he flees through the passage in the cafeteria that connected to McDonald Army Base, the existence of which he found out from Debbie Watson. He stashes the elements of his disguise in the junk pile, which would account for the second set of shoeprints going up those stairs. After that, he makes his escape through the old Army base after accessing the passageway revealed through the supposedly solid wall Decker had discovered.

Okay, if that’s how it went down, Decker had one very important question.

Why Mansfield? Why shoot this place up?

He had one idea.

He had attended school here. But if this really was personal to him, there were things here that were very personal to Amos Decker. They literally had his name on them.

He lowered himself off the counter and strode down the hall.

School had not resumed and there was talk that students would be transported to other high schools in the area to finish out at least the first semester. Then over the holidays the town would figure out what to do about the rest of the year.

Decker was torn about students ever returning here.

Part of him wanted this place demolished and turned into some sort of memorial for the dead.

The other part of him didn’t want to give the bastards the satisfaction of having forced the town to take such a drastic step. It would be like giving in to terrorists.

He entered the gymnasium and walked quickly over to a large display cabinet set against one wall. In here were all the trophies and other awards won by Mansfield over the years. They were arranged in chronological order, so it was easy enough for Decker to find what he was looking for.

Only they weren’t there.

Every award that he had won, every trophy that had held his name—and there were about a dozen—was gone. He checked and rechecked. They were not there.

He leaned against the case and put his hand up to his mouth.

Someone had come in here and shot up Mansfield High. And the mass murderer had done it because of him. Amos Decker.

Same motivation for his family’s being murdered.

Me, Amos Decker.

He suddenly felt like Dwayne LeCroix had leveled him again.

His phone buzzed. He thought it was Lancaster.

It wasn’t. It was Bogart.

“Decker, we found something in a Dumpster in the alley where Nora Lafferty was taken. You were right. It was a policeman’s uniform.”

Decker sensed something else coming, though, from the man’s unnerved tone.

“What else?”

“The uniform was authentic. It was a Burlington Police Department standard issue.”

“And?”

“And the uniform had a name stitched on it.”

“They all do. Whose name was it?”

But somehow Decker already knew the answer.

“It was your name,” replied Bogart.

Chapter

36

DECKER ARRIVED BREATHLESS outside the building. He rushed over to the gate and input the code in the security box. It was not a very secure code. It was Molly’s birthday.

The gate clicked open and he walked through. The storage units all had exterior doors, and he hustled over to the one at the very end. He pulled the key from his pocket, but then saw that the lock was gone from his unit.

They had done that intentionally. They had wanted him to know.

He lifted the roll-up door, his gun in hand just in case. But the place was empty. Empty of living things.

In here were the possessions he had taken from his old home, because where he had moved to after that didn’t have the room. But he couldn’t get rid of them. In here were also his tangible memories of a life spent with the two people he was closest to in the world: Cassie and Molly.

They were all neatly boxed and labeled and placed on sturdy metal shelving. This place was an expense he couldn’t really afford, but he had never missed one payment, going cold and hungry, to afford keeping this place, these memories, intact. This mirrored his mind—full of things but neatly organized, with everything capable of retrieval with minimal effort.

There was one box in here that he needed to look at. Only one.

It was in the rear, to the left, second shelf, fourth box from the right.

He reached that spot and stopped. The box was there but the top was open. He lifted it off the shelf and set it down on the concrete floor. This box contained the remaining items from his career in law enforcement. And part of that was his old police uniform that he had kept when moving up to detective. He had done so because there were times at the department when even plainclothes were expected to don their uniform. When he had left the department, technically he should have turned the uniform in, but it wasn’t like it could have been recycled. There was no one near his size in the Burlington Police Department.

The uniform was not in the box. Someone had used it to fool Nora Lafferty into letting down her guard for a few precious—and ultimately lethal—seconds in that alley.

They know where I live. They know I have this storage unit.

They had desecrated it.

He clicked back in his mind to the last time he had come here.

Twenty-seven days ago, 1:35 in the afternoon. Had they observed him then? Or was it before that last time?

Then he hurried to the gate, where there was a security camera.

He didn’t think it would provide a likely lead and he turned out to be right.

The camera lens had been spray-painted black. Obviously no one had been monitoring this camera if they hadn’t noticed it could no longer record anything for at least nearly a month.

He called Bogart.

Fifteen minutes later several SUVs pulled up to the gate. Decker let them in and then led the team back to the storage locker.

He explained as he went along. When they arrived at the locker, Bogart’s team went into action, searching for prints or other traces and any leave-behinds.

Bogart and Decker stood side by side and watched.

“Why didn’t you turn your uniform back in when you left the force?” the FBI agent asked.

Decker knew exactly where this conversation was going, but there was nothing he could do about it. And, in some ways, Bogart was right.

“I should have,” conceded Decker. “But I didn’t.”

Bogart nodded slowly.

Decker wasn’t sure if the guy was going to lose it again, but he figured probably not, not with his team all around.

“Well,” said Bogart, “it would have taken a real police uniform to fool Lafferty anyway. These guys probably understood that.”

This made Decker feel even guiltier, which was obviously the other man’s intent. A staggering body blow without one physical punch thrown.

“Do you have the uniform?” asked Decker.

“Evidence bag in the truck.”

“Can I see it?”

They pulled the bag.

Bogart said, “The uniform and cap have already been examined for traces. There was nothing usable.”

But Decker wasn’t checking for that. He was probing the pants near the cuff. About six inches from the bottom of the pants he found what he was looking for.

He pointed it out to Bogart.

“Holes?” said the FBI agent.

“From pins. Hemming pins.”

“Hemming pins?”

“I’m six-five with exceptionally long legs,” explained Decker. “The guy who wore this had to take the pant legs up about half a foot. Otherwise Lafferty would have noticed the uniform was not his. I was slimmer back then, but I’m sure the guy had to cinch the waist tight and maybe pin it in the back. The shirt the same.”

He examined the shirt and found two pinholes in the fabric near the center of the back panel. “Here and here. And the guy could have rolled the cuffs over and buttoned them to account for the difference in arm length. And a strip of padding in the cap makes a large cap fit a medium head.”

“So a much smaller man?”

“About five-eleven. And thin.”

“Lancaster told me what you found at the school. Platform boots for height and some sort of contraption to make the shooter look big in the upper body.”

“Like football shoulder pads and padding for the thighs. Made a five-eleven and lean man look much bigger.”

“We found nothing on the email trail. IP went nowhere,” Bogart said.

“Not surprised.”

Decker looked down at the name on the uniform’s chest.

Decker.

The man in blue. The man he used to be.

Then he saw something else. It was faint, but he also knew it was fresh.

“Look at the badge,” he said.

Bogart did so. “Is that an…?”

“It’s an X. Someone has marked an X on the badge.”

“What might that represent? To signify Lafferty’s murder?”

“I don’t know.”

He handed the uniform back to Bogart. The FBI agent took it and then gazed at the activity going on inside the storage unit.

“How come you kept all this stuff?”

Decker looked up and said slowly, far more to himself than Bogart, “It’s all I had left.”

Bogart glanced at him, sympathy flitting across his features.

Decker must have noticed this, because he said, “No reason to feel that way. You make choices. And you live with them.”

“You didn’t choose to have your family murdered, Decker.”

“I think the man who did it believed the choice was all mine.”

“That’s truly sick.”

“Yes, he is.”