Текст книги "Memory Man"

Автор книги: David Baldacci

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Chapter

55

HE SPENT TEN minutes watching the store from across the street. He saw people go in and people go out. Cars came and went. And still he kept watching. He was watching to see if anyone was watching him. When Decker was satisfied that there was no one doing so, he hurried across the street and approached the door. He glanced through the glass and saw the same woman at the counter, once more counting packs of cigarettes and ticking them off on her sheets. He could see no other customers in the store.

He opened the door and the bell tinkled. The woman looked up. It took her a moment but she recognized Decker.

Because of his size and appearance he was hard to forget and harder to miss.

“You’re back?” she said.

“I’m back,” said Decker, his gaze darting around the corners of the store. His hand had slipped to his pocket where his gun sat.

She said, “I owe you change from when you were here last. The coffee, pastry, and paper didn’t add up to five dollars.”

“Keep the change. You work long hours. Morning, night.”

“I do work long hours, but I’m also on different shifts. Today I work the night shift.”

“How’s business?”

“Slow now. We sell a lot in the morning when people are going to work. Coffee, cigarettes, and sausage biscuits. And Red Bull by the gallon.”

“The other person here when I came by the first time. Billy, right? Is he here?”

She shook her head. “No, he’s not here.”

“He doesn’t work here anymore, does he?” Decker said.

She looked startled. “How did you know that?”

“When was he here last?”

“The day you came in the first time. I was pissed when he didn’t show up for work after that. I had to do his job too.”

“Do you have his employment file here?”

“Yes. In the back.”

“Can I see it?”

“No. Company policy.”

“Can you tell me his last name?”

“Why?”

“He might be the one I was looking for.”

“I don’t see how.”

Decker held up his phone. “I can have the FBI here in five minutes. And they’ll take every file in this place.” He eyed the woman steadily. “Are you an American citizen?”

She blanched. “No. But I have papers.”

“I’m sure they’re in perfect order. At least I hope they are. The FBI will check, of course. They check everything. Twice.”

The woman slowly put a pack of cigarettes in the appropriate slot and made a check on her inventory sheet. He could tell she was stalling as she thought about how to respond to this.

“I might…I mean, my work visa might be a little overdue.”

“That’s unfortunate. With the government in gridlock over immigration reform, it’s a touchy subject. I’m sure you can appreciate that.”

“And if I let you see Billy’s file?”

Decker put his phone away. “That might change things.”

The woman went into the back office and came out a minute later with a file. “You can have this. I made a copy.”

Decker went to the door, locked it, and turned the OPEN sign to CLOSED.

“What are you doing?” the woman cried out.

Decker pulled out his phone again. “The FBI will be here in a few minutes. I’m afraid this store will be closed for quite a while.”

“But I gave you the file.”

“And I thank you for that. But one has nothing to do with the other.”

“But what will the FBI do here?”

“They’ll be looking for any trace of Billy. And don’t worry. They won’t care about your immigration status.”

“But why is Billy so important? He just mops floors.”

“He’s important principally because he’s not Billy. His name is Belinda.”

*  *  *

Hours later Bogart walked out of the 7-Eleven and over to Decker, who was standing in the parking lot sipping 7-Eleven coffee while the snow slowly swirled around him.

Bogart said, “We got one usable print, seven points on a mop bucket in the storage room. We ran it but got no hits back yet. It may be Wyatt’s or whoever else handled that bucket. And she might not be on any database. Or I guess she’s a he now. This Billy guy.”

“But she was gang-raped in Utah, according to Dr. Marshall. They must have a police file on her.”

“You would think. But we checked with the police department where she grew up. They have no record of any rape of Belinda Wyatt.”

Decker looked stunned. “But that can’t be. She was raped and beaten and left for dead. It changed her brain. It’s why she was sent to the institute. You heard Dr. Marshall. And he said he’d talked to the doctor from Utah. She had been raped and beaten and left for dead.”

“Well, maybe she was. But maybe she didn’t file a police report, Decker. That’s a possibility.”

“But why wouldn’t she?”

“Consider her personal situation. It being a small town where everybody knows everybody else’s business? She might have made the decision not to report.”

“Or her parents made that decision for her,” retorted Decker.

“That’s actually far more likely,” conceded the FBI agent.

Decker finished his coffee and threw the cup into a trash can. “Belinda was very tall for a woman, about five-eleven, and skinny. Billy was that height and lean too, but he was wiry. Maybe a hundred and fifty pounds.”

“And definitely a guy?”

“I think so, but he looked androgynous too. Belinda looked the same at the institute. I’ve already given your sketch artist a description. They’re working on a finished drawing now.”

“We can get that all over the place once it’s done.”

“I would just get it out to law enforcement for now. Don’t go public. They may go underground if they discover we’ve gotten that far.”

Bogart didn’t look convinced but said, “Okay, we’ll play it that way. For now.” He put his hands in his pockets and studied the pavement. “We heard back from the pool service company the Wyatts used in Colorado. They came and winterized the pool two months ago, but didn’t see anyone. Their fees are on an automatic pay system. In fact, all their bills were on autopay. They didn’t have to interact with anyone. Dead end. No pun intended.”

“And Leopold?”

Bogart let out an extended breath. “Leopold, yes. I was getting to him. We finally got a hit.”

“His real name?”

“Surprisingly enough, Sebastian Leopold. You were right. He’s Austrian.”

“And his story?”

“Still coming in. But the gist is his wife and daughter were murdered and the killer was never brought to justice.”

“When did he come over here?”

“Hard to pin that down. The murder was eight years ago. So anytime after that, I guess. I doubt he’s here legally. But then again, I don’t think we’re as picky with Europeans as we are with other folks.”

“If he’s only been here a few years he’s worn his accent away relatively fast. He only had the one slip when I was talking with him. Can I see anything you have on him?”

“I’ll arrange it. Where will you be?”

“Back at the library at Mansfield.”

“You want a ride over there?”

“I need to make one stop first.”

“Where?”

“To pick up my partner.”

“Your partner? You don’t mean Lancaster? After what almost happened to her family I don’t think she’s up to it.”

“Mary is up to it.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I know Lancaster. She’s tougher than you and me combined.”

Chapter

56

LANCASTER AND JAMISON were sitting across from Decker in the school library. They were awaiting Leopold’s files. Decker had filled Lancaster in on everything they had learned.

He said, “Bogart thinks that Belinda might not have filed a police report. He believes her parents might have discouraged her from doing so.”

“Talk about scum,” replied Lancaster fiercely.

“The thing is, her trauma left her with perfect recall. She would have remembered her attackers.”

“If she knew them in the first place,” said Jamison.

Decker replied, “Small-town Utah. Everybody probably knew everybody.”

“At the institute did she ever talk?” asked Lancaster.

“Almost never. In the group sessions she never talked about what had happened to her. I didn’t know until Dr. Marshall told me. And she was probably attacked because her assailants knew of her intersex condition,” added Decker.

Lancaster shook her head. “I never heard the term until you told me. I can’t imagine what that must have been like. You said Marshall told you she had one testis and one ovary?”

“Yes.”

“The absolute shit she must have taken in school. In gym class, one of the other girls spots her private parts? Word spreads. It really must have been horrible.”

Decker was staring down at the document in front of him. He had just seen one fact that did not align with another.

Lancaster was well used to this look. “What?”

He glanced at her. “Dr. Marshall said the address he had in the file for Belinda’s parents was fifteen years old. But she was at the institute twenty years ago.”

“Well, maybe they kept in touch for some reason. I doubt Belinda stayed there for five years. It must be a more recent address.”

“But Marshall also said that the Wyatts never visited her at the institute. So why would he have had the later address in the first place? Were they corresponding?”

He pulled out his phone and made a call. Dr. Marshall was in a meeting but called back five minutes later.

“Yes, Amos, you’re correct,” he said. “The Wyatts did move, but we kept in touch, for about seven years after. And they sent me their new address so I could write to them from time to time.”

“You didn’t mention that when we questioned you.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But I take patient confidentiality very seriously. I tried to be as helpful as I could while still respecting that professional duty.”

“You said they never visited her at the institute. I assumed that meant they weren’t interested in her care. In fact, you said you believed them to be ignorant people in regard to Belinda’s condition.”

“That’s right.”

“How did you come by that opinion? And how did she even come to be at the institute if her parents didn’t care what had happened to her?”

“I don’t think they initiated it.”

“Who did, then?”

“I’m not sure. It might have been one of the doctors there who made the referral after it became clearer that her cognitive condition might be one that we should look into at the institute. Even twenty years ago we had a national reputation,” he added proudly. “And we had enough funding to have paid for all of her expenses.”

“Okay, but if the Wyatts had no involvement in sending her to you, why would they correspond with you?”

Decker thought he knew the answer but he wanted to hear it from Marshall.

“Well, because they were scared, Amos. They were scared of Belinda. At least that’s what they told me. When she came back home to Utah she was a different person to them. And I don’t mean for the better. Our work with her at the institute apparently did not help her. And she left home soon thereafter. But they would apparently get messages from her. Pretty frightening ones. And so they were scared.”

“That she would, what, hurt them?”

“I don’t like to speculate about that.”

“Just give me your educated guess.”

He could hear Marshall let out a long breath. “All right. I think they were terrified that she was going to murder them.”

Well, they were spot on about that, thought Decker.

“Can I have their old address? The one in Utah? Do you have it?”

Marshall gave it to him from the file. Decker thanked him and clicked off.

He got on the computer and did a satellite search of the old address.

He spun the laptop around so that Lancaster and Jamison could see.

“Okay, ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood,” Lancaster said. “Looks like mine.”

“And like mine,” said Decker. “But the point is, the Wyatts’ new house was five times the size with a pool and a separate four-car garage filled with luxury vehicles.”

Lancaster’s brows knitted together. “What did the Wyatts do for a living?”

“The info Bogart dug up says he was an assistant manager at the DMV. Mrs. Wyatt worked as a waitress in a diner.”

Jamison said, “They were definitely not pulling down big bucks. So how did they afford a house like that?”

“Well, you follow the money to answer that.” Decker got on his phone again. He asked Bogart this question.

When he clicked off he looked at Lancaster. “He’s going to check and get back to us.”

“What do you think is going on, Amos?” asked Lancaster.

“I think we’re getting close to finding out the motive behind all this, Mary. And once we do, it will all start to make sense.”

“Good. Because up to this point nothing has made sense. Nothing.”

“No, it’s always made sense, to Wyatt and Leopold. It only doesn’t make sense to us because we don’t know enough.”

“How can killing so many people ever make sense?” she said hotly.

“It doesn’t have to make sense to us. Just to the ones who did it.”

“I hate the world,” said Lancaster, looking miserable.

“I don’t hate the world,” said Decker. “I only hate some of the people who unfortunately live in it.”

Chapter

57

THEY LATER GRABBED dinner at a fast-food restaurant and brought it back with them to the library. After Decker finished eating he left Lancaster and Jamison and entered the cafeteria. From there he went through the door leading down into the tunnel and walked down the hall using a flashlight to illuminate the way.

They had been over and over this ground and the adjacent Army base but had found no new clues. The Army had gotten back to them with some information about the base and the tunnel connecting to the school, but it had shed no new light on the case.

Decker emerged on the other side and walked up into the bowels of the military facility. He sat on an old oil drum and let his mind wander back over past events.

Belinda Wyatt had been gang-raped, beaten, and left for dead. The motive was probably that her attackers had found out about her intersex condition. The trauma had changed her brain, turning her into what Decker also was.

I wonder if she remembers the rape and beating? Or if she’s forgotten it like I did the hit on me? I wonder if she can never forget all the things she wants to forget?

He did not like feeling any sort of connection to someone who had ended the lives of so many innocent people, but part of him could not help it. They were bound by their conditions. They were connected by their histories, their paths crossing at a traumatic point in their lives.

Decker and Belinda had been at the institute together. Something he had done there had caused her to target him. At some point Belinda had become Billy. Billy had met up with Sebastian Leopold, an Austrian whose family had been killed and no one had been punished for the crime. Where had their paths crossed? A lot could happen in twenty years. Was it before or after she’d made the change to Billy? Had their meeting precipitated all the killings?

And what the hell did I do to Wyatt to deserve all this misery?

“I thought I might find you here.”

Decker glanced over to see Bogart standing at the top of the steps leading from the tunnel. He held up a file.

“Information on the Wyatts’ finances. And Sebastian Leopold’s family.”

They walked back to the library together and Bogart, Decker, Jamison, and Lancaster started to go over the files.

Twenty minutes later Lancaster held up a paper. “The Wyatts sold their house in Utah for forty thousand dollars about nineteen years ago. The new one they built, at a cost of nearly two million. And it came with twenty acres.”

“And the source of the wealth?” asked Decker.

“We couldn’t find one,” said Bogart.

“How about a payoff?” said Decker.

Lancaster shot him a glance. “A payoff? You mean blackmail?”

“It would explain the absence of a police report on Belinda’s rape. It would explain where the cash came from to buy the house. Far away in Colorado.”

Bogart added, “And it might explain Belinda’s outrage. That her parents could be bribed to not press the case.”

“Abuse and abandonment?” said Decker, eyeing him.

Bogart nodded. “Hence the mutilation. And the murders of her parents.”

Decker looked at the paper again. “With her parents dead, I wonder what happened to whatever money was in their accounts?”

“But if people didn’t know they were dead?” said Jamison.

“These days money is accessible by computer. You just have to have logins and passwords,” said Decker. “Which I’m sure Belinda, or Billy, could get.”

“He would need something to live on, to fund travel,” opined Bogart.

“He might need it for something else,” said Decker.

“What?” asked Bogart and Lancaster together.

Decker stood. “We need to go to where the Wyatts lived when she was raped. And we need to find out who raped her, and how they got away with it. And we have to determine who paid all that money to the Wyatts.”

“It’s a twenty-year-old case, Decker,” protested Bogart.

“There’s another reason to go. An even more important one.”

“What is it?” asked Bogart.

“Worth a ride in your private jet, for sure.”

Chapter

58

THEY LANDED NEAR a small town in northern Utah.

“Mercy, Utah,” said Lancaster, as they deplaned into heavy snow and saw the sign on a plane hangar.

“Okay, that’s the height of irony,” commented Jamison.

Bogart shivered and pulled his parka closer around him. “So what was the reason worth a tank of jet fuel?” he asked Decker.

Decker eyed the three SUVs sitting on the tarmac, engines running and heaters, he hoped, turned on full blast.

“I’ll show you.”

They drove to the address of Belinda Wyatt’s former home. It was in a small community of post–World War II housing, each house nearly a carbon copy of its neighbor. The streets were frozen slush. The house was dark. No cars were in the driveway.

Decker sat in the backseat of the second SUV with Lancaster and Jamison next to him. Bogart was in front.

Decker looked out the window and said, “So it was recently sold?”

Bogart nodded. “Twenty months ago. Purchaser was a company.”

“Around four months before my family was killed. They’d need a place to stay and plan it all out.”

“You really think Wyatt bought her old house back?” said Lancaster. “And with it all those terrible memories?”

“This was her home. Not the behemoth where she killed her parents and wrapped them in plastic. Despite what happened to her, she might see it as a place of solace, of safety. And she probably used some of the bribe money to buy it. I’m sure she would have thought it fitting to use their blood money to buy back what they so desperately wanted to sell.”

Jamison shot him a glance. “And what do you think we’ll find inside?”

“Answers,” said Decker. “I hope.”

They went in through the front and rear while other agents manned the perimeter, to make sure no one inside could possibly escape. They cleared each of the rooms and then settled in the basement.

“Damn!” exclaimed Bogart, gazing around. “I guess I expected to see walls covered in index cards with strings attached, running to other cards, like a manual version of an air traffic control system.”

But there was nothing like that down here. In fact, there was nothing but what one would expect to see in a basement: junk.

“I was hoping for the same thing,” said Decker. He looked all around, taking everything in, and started nodding as though the answer had occurred to him.

“Ironically, I overlooked one obvious but significant point. Wyatt has hyperthymesia. She doesn’t need a wall of index cards. It’s all in her head, every detail. And we don’t know what Leopold is yet, except strange and a hell of an actor. He plays a clueless idiot better than anyone I’ve ever seen. But there’s something else about him that I can’t pinpoint.”

Bogart said, “You told us he was inexplicable.”

“He is inexplicable. Everyone has an agenda, whether altruistic or self-serving. So he has one too. I just don’t know what it is yet.”

Bogart said, “Should we call in the locals?”

Decker shook his head. “No.”

“Why not? They get ticked when we don’t at least inform them of what we’re doing.”

“Because it could be that the ‘locals’ are the reason behind this whole thing. So we’re going to process what little there is down here.”

He started poking around a plastic shelf with a few boxes of junk on them. Jamison started going through stuff in another corner. Lancaster and Bogart exchanged a glance and then did likewise.

*  *  *

Two hours later, Bogart said, “Okay, there is nothing here. Nothing!”

“No, there is,” said Jamison. She held up a newspaper clipping.

“Where’d you get that?” asked Lancaster.

“It was stuffed in a box and under that table over there with rags on top.”

“So what?” said Bogart. “It’s junk, just like everything else here.”

“No. When people save newspapers, they always save a stack of them. This was the only newspaper in this entire room. To a mind like Wyatt’s I bet it was a particle of disorder. Which made me wonder why it was here. There had to be a reason.”

Decker studied her curiously. “That’s a good deduction, Jamison.”

“Hey, I may not be a hyper-whatsis, but I have my moments. And I can smell newsprint from a mile away.”

“What does it say?” asked Lancaster.

She held up the front page of the newspaper and pointed to the large headline.

Lancaster read, “‘Giles Evers Gone Missing.’”

“Who the hell is Giles Evers?” said Bogart.

Jamison said, “He was a police officer. The news story also said he was the son of Mercy’s most prominent citizen, Clyde Evers. Former mayor, made a lot of money in mining, gave a lot of it to his hometown. Typical big fish in a small pond.”

“Why would Wyatt keep that clipping?” asked Bogart.

Decker answered. “Because Giles Evers raped her. And she made him disappear.”

“Whoa, that’s a helluva leap of logic, Amos,” said Lancaster.

“No it’s not. It would be the only reason this article would be here.”

“When was the article from?” asked Lancaster.

Jamison said, “Nineteen months ago. Right about the time the house was sold to the company we think Wyatt is behind.”

Bogart and Lancaster stared at Decker. “Okay, you’re saying she was attacked by a police officer?” said Bogart in a skeptical tone.

“By police officers,” said Decker. “It was a gang rape. And they did it because of her intersex condition, and Evers’s old man paid off the Wyatts to keep it hush-hush. He got his son in the clear and saved the police department a ton of embarrassment and the rolling of heads. I can’t imagine the Mercy Police Department is all that big. It might be that all the street cops were part of the rape. Hell of a hit for the men in blue to take. And the town. A town that maybe had no sympathy for someone like Belinda Wyatt.”

“But we can’t be sure of that,” said Lancaster. “You’re just speculating.”

“We can confirm it,” said Decker. “Let’s go talk to some folks who were around back then.”