Текст книги "Memory Man"

Автор книги: David Baldacci

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“And if he isn’t guilty?” asked Decker.

“Do you think he is?” asked Miller.

“I met with the guy once. I can’t say definitely what I think.”

“Well, none of this is going to happen today. So we’ve got time.” Miller glanced at Lancaster. “You better get back to Mansfield. I hear the FBI is working hard to take over the case.”

“And if they want to can we really stop them?” asked Lancaster.

“We’re not going to roll over and play dead for the Feds, Mary,” said Miller sternly. He looked at Decker. “You going to be able to continue helping us on it? Leopold will keep. This prick at Mansfield, the longer it goes, the harder it’ll be for us to find him.”

Decker looked off. The answer should have been easy. Only it wasn’t.

Miller studied him for a few moments. “Well, let me know.”

He turned and walked off, leaving Lancaster and Decker standing in the hall. Activity in the courthouse had started to heat up and the corridors were growing full. Moms crying about sons in trouble. Lawyers clustered like chickens in a pen. Cops were coming and going, and folks were wandering around who were already in trouble or about to be.

Lancaster said sharply, “Why the wavering? Last night you said the shooter wasn’t going to get away with it.”

Decker didn’t answer right away. He was watching the reporter standing next to the entrance to the courthouse. She was obviously waiting for him.

“Amos?” said Lancaster.

He glanced back at his former partner. “I’ll be at the high school later today.”

“Does that mean you’re still engaged on it?”

“Later today,” said Decker. He headed for the rear exit.

The reporter caught up to him halfway down the hall.

“Mr. Decker? Mr. Decker?”

Decker’s first plan was to just keep walking, but the woman gave every indication that she would simply follow him out of the building, down the street, and into his next life if need be. So he stopped at the exit, turned, and looked down at her. His mind automatically collected observations and distilled them into an assortment of deductions.

She was in her late twenties, pretty, tall, slim, and brunette, with her hair cut short around her ears. Ears that weren’t pierced even for earrings. He saw tat letters on her left wrist where her cuff rode up.

Iron Butterfly. Well, they did make a comeback after she was born.

Her eyes were a dull blue that clashed with her complexion. One of her incisors was chipped, her nails were bitten down to the rims, her right index finger had once been broken and healed badly with a little bend to it in the middle, and her lips were overly thin and chapped. She didn’t smell of smoke, drink, or perfume.

Her clothes were not new, nor overly clean, but they rode well on her tall, slender figure. She had a dark blotch on the inside of her right middle finger where the pen was held. Not just a keyboard clicker, then. She used ink.

Her face held the wonderful enthusiasm of youth as yet unblemished by life. That age was a nice time in anyone’s life. And it was necessary. To get through what was coming in later years.

If we all started out cynical, what a shitty world that would be.

“Mr. Decker? I’m Alex Jamison with the News Leader.”

“You like ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’? It was Butterfly’s biggest seller. Thirty million and still counting. In the top forty of all time.” Decker had read this in a Rolling Stone article three years ago while eating a PBJ and drinking a cup of coffee at a diner downtown while he was a witness in a case involving a burglary ring he and Lancaster had busted. It was on page forty-two of the magazine, lower right-hand corner. He could see the page and the accompanying picture in his head so clearly it was like he was watching high-def TV. At first this total recall had scared the crap out of him. Now it was as natural to him as swallowing.

She seemed surprised by this until she glanced down at her tat. She looked back at him, smiling. “My mom got me into their early music. Then when the band re-formed the last time I became sort of obsessed. I mean, they played with Jimmy Page and Zeppelin. Lot of tragic stuff with them, though.”

Decker did not follow this up with anything, because music was not why she was here, and he had places to be. She seemed to get this point by his silence.

“I tried calling you. I don’t like to chase people down in the courthouse,” she said a bit defensively.

Decker just kept staring at her. All around them the courthouse activity went on, bees in a hive, oblivious to the pair of intruders into their world of legal higgledy-piggledy.

“Sebastian Leopold didn’t have counsel.”

“That’s right,” said Decker. “But he will.”

“What do you think about all of this?” She held up her recorder. “You mind?”

“I don’t have anything to say.”

“I’m sure you’re going through hell right now. I mean, this guy just pops up out of nowhere and confesses. You must be reeling.”

“I don’t reel,” said Decker. He turned to leave.

“But you must be feeling something. And how was it facing Leopold in there? It must have brought everything back to you.”

Decker faced her. “It didn’t bring everything back to me.”

She looked stunned. “But I thought—”

“Because it never left me. Now, I have someplace to be.”

Decker walked out of the courthouse and Jamison did not follow him.

Chapter

18

DECKER CAUGHT A bus a block over from the courthouse and rode it to within a half mile of where he was going. As his large feet carried him down the sidewalk, the color blue intensified in his head until it seemed that the entire world had been covered in it. Even the sun seemed to have been transformed into an enormous blueberry so utterly swollen that it seemed it might burst at any moment.

It sickened him but he kept on going, his breath growing heavier and his tread slowing. He was out of shape, but that was not the reason. The reason was just up ahead.

When he turned the corner and saw the house he stopped, but only for a moment. If he didn’t pick up his pace, he knew he would turn and run away.

It was still bank-owned. No one had wanted to move in there even at a reduced price. Hell, they probably couldn’t give it away. And there were lots of empty houses in Burlington. It was a place one wanted to get away from, not move to. The front door, he knew, was locked. The door off the carport and into the kitchen had always been easy to jimmy. He wondered if the killer had gone in that way. Leopold had said that was his ingress, if he was to be believed.

He passed by the front and opened the chain-link gate to the backyard. The color blue had initially been limited to the bodies. Now the entire property and everything within a half mile of it was blue. He had first experienced this the third time he had returned to the house, and it had been that way ever since. He could never adequately explain to anyone what it felt like to see blue grass, blue trees, blue siding on a house you knew was painted yellow. Even the blue sky felt different because all the clouds were also that color.

He eyed the tree in the back and the swing dangling from it. He’d put that up himself because Molly had wanted one. When she was little Decker would push her. Sometimes he had pushed Cassie and Molly together. It had been cheap entertainment for a young couple with little money.

Now the rope was rotted and the long plank of wood Decker had fashioned for a seat was warped and splintered. The bank was having someone cut the grass, but it was full of weeds.

He turned to look at the rear of the house. The back door led into a small utility room. Had that actually been how the killer had entered?

He jimmied this door easily enough. It seemed none of the locks on the house worked very well, something that, again, caused him enormous guilt. A policeman who couldn’t even secure his own house?

He closed the door behind him and looked around. Short flight of steps up to the kitchen. Where his brother-in-law had sat drinking beer until someone had sliced his neck from ear to ear.

He went up the blue steps and stepped into the blue kitchen. It was full of dust and some dead insects were on the floor and on the countertops. He eyed the spot where the kitchen table had been. That’s where Johnny Sacks had been attacked.

The blood had long since been cleaned up, but Decker remembered where every drop had been. Not red now, all blue, like the color of blood as seen inside veins through one’s skin, only a thousand times more potent.

He passed into the next room and up the stairs. The same stairs he had taken three at a time on that night. Bouncing off walls, oblivious to whoever might have been in here harming his family.

The mattress and box springs were gone from their bedroom. Evidence. They were at a secure storage unit maintained by the Burlington police. They might be there forever.

Still, he clearly saw her bare foot raised up above the bed. He crossed the room and looked down and saw neon-blue Cassie on the floor. The only thing that wasn’t blue about her was the single gunshot wound to her head. Even in Decker’s altered mind it would forever be just like it actually was: black and blistered.

He turned and left because his resistance was wearing down and he had other rooms to visit.

He opened the bathroom door and looked at the toilet where his child had been seated, the bathrobe cord cruelly holding her dead body in place.

Leopold had not explained that. He had just done it. Didn’t really know why. Felt right. He said. The man no one could identify. The man who wanted to plead guilty and die.

He looked down at the spot where he had sat cross-legged with the gun first inside his mouth and then pressed against his temple. His dead daughter in front of him. He had wanted to join her, he guessed, in death. But he hadn’t pulled the trigger. The cops had come and recognized him and talked him out of the weapon. It was a wonder they hadn’t shot him. Maybe it would have been better if they had.

He turned and walked back down the hall to the next door.

Molly’s room. He had only been here a few times since cleaning it out after her death.

The noise from inside caused him to stop, his hand halfway to the knob. He looked around. He had left his gun back in his room because he knew he had been going to the courthouse. He listened some more and then his tension eased. It was not human feet he was hearing.

Scampering, tapping, tiny.

He opened the door in time to see a rat disappear into a hole in the drywall.

He could recall every stick of furniture, the placement of every stuffed animal, the location of each book, for Molly had been a voracious reader.

Decker had been about to fully enter the room when he stopped and stiffened. There was something here that his perfect memory did not recall, and with good reason. Because it had not been here the last time Decker had been in this room.

On the wall, written in red block letters.

We are so much alike, Amos. So much. Like brothers. Do you have a brother? Of course you don’t. I checked. Sisters, yes, but no brother. So can I be yours? We’re really all the other has now. We need each other.

He read through this message three times. He wanted to dig beneath the words and discover the author. But the more he stared at the words, the more unsettled he became. The person had come back here. Had come back here to write this message to him. This was not about some perceived slight at a 7-Eleven. This was deeply personal with Decker.

As the message had said, Decker had no brother. He had two sisters. Long since moved away. One in California with her Army husband and four kids. The other was in Alaska, childless but prospering and enjoying life with her oil executive husband. They had come for the funerals and then had gone back home. He had not spoken to them since. His fault. They had tried. Repeatedly. He had rebuffed. Repeatedly.

But still, he had to make sure. Whoever had written this message had done his homework. Sisters.

He slowly pulled his phone from his pocket and texted each of them. He waited, waited, waited. Then a pop on his phone. California sister was fine and happy to hear from him.

Two minutes later he hadn’t moved. It was even earlier in Alaska. Maybe she wasn’t up—

Another pop. His sister from Fairbanks had texted. She was fine. To please call when he got a chance.

He punched in another number and waited for the person to answer.

“Lancaster,” the voice said.

Decker said, “Mary, you need to see something. And you need to see it now.”

Chapter

19

LANCASTER HAD COME. Then Captain Miller. Then the uniforms. Then the forensics team with all its bags of gadgets. It was like that night all over again, only he wasn’t staring at his dead daughter while holding a gun against his head.

The message had been written with a red Sharpie. The ink dried almost immediately, and there was no telling how long it had been there. Thus Leopold was not in the clear. He had only been locked up since very early yesterday morning.

Miller had wanted to know how the killer would have known Decker would come back here, enter this room, and see this message.

“I’ve been back here before,” admitted Decker.

“And you went inside each time,” said Lancaster.

“Not every time, no. I couldn’t…every time.”

“When was the last time you were in this room?” asked Lancaster.

“Four weeks and three days ago, right about this time.”

“So at least we have a time window to work with,” noted Lancaster.

“Maybe this guy has been following you and knows you come here,” said Miller. “That’s why he put this message up.”

“We can canvass the neighborhood, see if anyone saw something,” said Lancaster.

“They didn’t see who murdered three people,” countered Decker. “I don’t see why they would have seen the person who did this.”

“But still,” replied Miller. “We’re going to do it.”

“Brothers?” said Lancaster curiously as a police photographer took shots of the message. “We might want to get a shrink in on this to analyze what’s going on inside the dude’s head.”

“So you think this is Leopold’s work?” asked Miller. He was staring at the graffiti like it was part of an inscription on the doorway to hell.

Decker said nothing because he had nothing to say. In his head the words were indeed a flaming red, thus not so far away from hell. Whoever had written this was either being straightforward, at least in a deranged way, or else he was playing head games with him. Decker turned and left, ignoring Lancaster’s calling after him.

He never saw Miller grab Lancaster by the arm. He didn’t hear his old captain tell her to let him be. He didn’t hear Lancaster’s retort, and then Miller’s request sharpen into a direct order for her to stand down.

They both watched him from the window striding down the sidewalk with a purpose. He soon turned the corner and was gone from their sight.

Decker didn’t stop walking until he reached the 7-Eleven on DeSalle at Fourteenth. This marked the first time in his life he had not traveled there by car.

There were no cars parked in front. He opened the door, heard the bell tinkle, and then let it close behind him.

There was a woman behind the counter. She was short but looked taller because of the elevated floor there. Her hair was dark and straight, falling to her shoulders. She looked Latina. She had on a beige long-sleeved blouse with a bra strap showing on one side. She was around fifty and her eye sockets were starting to recede into her face like a pond starting to dry up. A large dark mole was on her left cheek. She had some sheets of paper in front of her and was studying them and then counting off packs of cigarettes shelved in slots overhead.

A man appeared from down one aisle. He had a mop in hand and was using it to steer a bucket with soapy water in it. Decker ran his gaze over him, his police training guiding his eye to certain vital statistics. He was white, midthirties, an inch under six feet, very lean and wiry, with narrow shoulders. His short-sleeved shirt showed off the veins in his arms. His hair was brown and curly and fell like apple peelings across his head.

The woman looked up at him just standing there in the doorway. “Can I help you?” she asked. She had no accent.

He came forward and took his phone from his pocket. He hit a couple buttons and held it up.

“You ever see this guy before?”

She looked at the photo of Sebastian Leopold. “Who is he?” she asked.

“Some guy that either might have worked here once or hung around here at some point.”

She shook her head. “I don’t remember seeing him. Why you want to know?” Decker fished out his PI license and flashed it in front of her. “I’m trying to find him. He might be due some money. Got a line on him that brought me here. How about your friend over there?”

He looked at the man who was leaning on his mop and studying him quizzically.

The woman said, “Billy, you want to look at this picture?”

Billy parked his mop and bucket against a rack of candy bars, wiped his hands on his faded jeans, and ambled over. He looked pleased to have an excuse to stop cleaning the linoleum.

He looked at the photo and then shook his head. “Nope. Don’t look familiar to me. Weird-looking dude. Spacey.”

Decker lowered the phone. “How long have you two been here?”

The woman said, “Nearly six months for me. Billy came just a few weeks ago.”

Decker nodded. Too recent, then. “And the people here before you?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. There was a woman, a couple of men. Turnover is high here. The pay is not very good. And the hours are long. I wouldn’t be here if I could find something better. But the job market sucks,” she added bluntly.

Decker looked at Billy. “You?”

Billy grinned. “I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout this place. Just drawing a paycheck, man. Beer money on the weekends. Looking to have a good time with the ladies. Need cash for all that.”

He went back to his mopping.

“I’m sorry we can’t help you,” said the woman.

“Part of the job,” said Decker. “Thanks.”

He turned and left.

His phone buzzed. He looked at it.

Lancaster.

He put it away without answering.

It rang again.

He looked at it again.

Lancaster.

He sighed, hit the answer button.

“Yeah?”

“Amos?”

Decker immediately went rigid. Lancaster sounded nearly hysterical. And she wasn’t the type ever to do so.

“Mary, what is it? Not another shooting?” Decker had been worried about this from the start. Things about the attack at Mansfield had made him believe that the guy was—

“No,” she said breathlessly. “But, but there’s some-something—”

“Where are you?” he interrupted.

“At Mansfield.”

“So it has to do with Mansfield? You found some—”

“Amos!” she shrieked. “Just let me finish.”

Decker fell silent, waited. It was as though he could hear her heart beating from across the digital ether.

“We ran ballistics on the pistol used at Mansfield.”

“And what did—”

Interrupting, she said, “And we found a match.”

His grip tightened around the phone. “A match? To what?”

“To the gun that killed your wife.”

Chapter

20

A .45 ROUND.

Semi-jacketed. Hollow-point.

An SJH, in ballistics shorthand.

It was a brutally efficient piece of ordnance. Not exactly a dum-dum, named after Dum-Dum, India, where a British army officer had invented a bullet that mushroomed out on impact and acted as a miniature wrecking ball inside the body.

Innovation wasn’t always good for you.

The .45 SJH had blown right through the front of Cassie Decker’s skull and ended up lodged deep in her brain. It had been dug out of her during the autopsy and the slug preserved as evidence in her murder investigation. It had retained enough of its shape and lands and grooves to one day be matched to the weapon that had fired it. Well, they didn’t have the weapon, but they had something else.

Now they knew that the very same pistol that had fired the bullet ending Cassie Decker’s life had also terminated the lives of half the victims at Mansfield. The other half had endured the blunt force of the shotgun. The medical examiner had removed the matched round from Kramer, the gym teacher and, per normal protocol, run it through the department’s database. The hit had been immediate.

Because of the magnitude of the finding, the FBI had run its own tests on the slug and came back with the same conclusion.

Same gun. Ballistics didn’t lie. The grooves and lands on the bullets’ respective hides had matched like a fingerprint. And that wasn’t all. They had recovered the single bullet casing from the Deckers’ bedroom. They had compared it with several of the casings found at the school. The pinprick on the bottom of the casing where the firing pin strikes was nearly as good as a fingerprint. And it too had matched on all salient points.

The murders of Decker’s family and the massacre at Mansfield were now inextricably connected.

*  *  *

Decker huddled in his coat as he stood outside the darkened façade of the school, enduring the driving rain pinging off his hair and burly shoulders. The case had mushroomed from Mansfield High to his home on a quiet street with symbolically an ocean’s distance in between. He had never given any thought to a connection between the two crimes. Now that fact dominated him.

There was a chance that there were different killers. Since the shooting at his house, the gun could have been lost by, taken from, or sold by the original killer. The same gun was often used in different crimes by different perps. But Decker believed it was the same shooter in both instances. And if that was the case, it let Leopold out. So Leopold was lying. Yet it was possible he had been told facts of the Decker case by the real killer. And if that were so, then Leopold was the best hope he had to find the person who had murdered his family. And all these others.

Despite the recent writing on the bedroom wall, the case was cold on the Decker family end. Conversely, it was red hot on the Mansfield High School end. So the Mansfield end was where he would focus—that and on Sebastian Leopold. If Leopold knew who the Decker killer was, then he knew who was behind the Mansfield crimes too.

He flashed his credentials at the perimeter security and walked through the front entrance. Yesterday had been disjointed and confusing for him in all respects. He didn’t know if he belonged in the middle of all this. He felt cut off from everyone and everything going on around him. But with the possible connection to the murders of his family, Decker knew that he did belong. He would be on this case for as long as it took. They would have to dynamite him out of here.

He didn’t head to the command center in the library. He went to the cafeteria and stared at the freezer. Then he looked at the ceiling tiles.

Cammie fiber, possible gun oil. Maybe all bullshit. Maybe.

He looked at the exit door. False lead too, or so he now believed.

He left the cafeteria, walked down the hall fronting the library, turned right onto the main corridor that bisected the first floor, and counted his steps off as he made his way to the rear of the school.

At each intersection with another hall he studied the lay of the land, first left, then right. Classrooms on both sides. The last corridor was where Debbie Watson had died. And where, to the left, so had Kramer the gym teacher over his breakfast sandwich and coffee. The rear entrance with the camera faced him. The angle of the camera still intrigued him. That had been deliberate. And deliberate action always had a deliberate motivation.

Then he looked at the classroom to the right of where Debbie had perished. ROOM 141 was stenciled on the glass.

He tried the door but it was locked. He pulled a pick set from his pocket and unlocked it. He stepped inside and turned on the light. He was surprised to see that it was set up as a shop class. They had had shop class back when Decker attended here. But he had thought it now a thing of the past. He looked around at the work places, table and miter saws, planers, drills, buckets of tools, vises clamped to wood, shelves on the walls holding metal tubing, nuts, bolts, wood, more power tools, extension cords, work lights, pretty much anything someone would need to build something. There were three doors at the back of this room. He opened two of them. Storage. He saw stacks of what looked to be old school projects: jumbles of half-finished furniture, metal twisted into various shapes, wire cages, part of a roof section, sawhorses, plywood sheets, stacks of wood, lots of dust, and lots of nothing.

The last door would not open. He took out his lock-pick set again and used it to open the door. He peered in. There was an old boiler in the far corner, now connected to nothing. Some window air-conditioning units were stacked on the floor against one wall up to about ten feet.

Again, a lot of nothing. He closed the door, walked back through the shop class, snapped off the light, and shut the door behind him. Down the hall from the shop class was Classroom 144, the one Debbie Watson had been coming from when she had been shot.

Decker looked over at the open locker on the wall. That was Debbie’s. She had been at her locker when she’d been murdered. Probably getting something to take with her to the nurse’s office. That might explain the detour here. Or it might not. Teenagers were unpredictable. They could be sick as dogs and stop at their locker to look for some gum. Or examine her face for zits in the mirror that hung on the inside of Debbie’s locker. He noted the tube of pimple cream standing up on her locker shelf next to a small opened pack of breath mints.

Blood splatters showed that she had been standing in front of her locker when she’d been shot. She had turned around to face her assailant, because she’d taken the blast from the shotgun directly to her face.

She had died at 8:42.

Decker had concluded that Watson was indeed the first victim. Which made him wonder what the shooter was doing between the whooshing sound at 7:28 on the front hall that Melissa Dalton had heard and Debbie losing her face on the rear hall one hour and fourteen minutes later.

Decker closed his eyes and thought this through.

It took me sixty-four steps and not even two minutes to go from front to back. The shooter appeared on the video at 8:41. But when did he leave the cafeteria? There is no way to be sure. And the biggest question of all: How did he go sight unseen from front to rear? I answer that, I answer everything. I don’t answer it, the case goes nowhere.

At least six-two, thick broad shoulders, over two hundred pounds. Decker had looked at the video footage of the shooter and did not dispute those physical estimates. Yet there was no male of that size and height at the school, other than the dead gym teacher and assistant principal, or a bunch of football-playing students hunkered in classrooms with a hundred alibis attached to them. And two of the players who were that size had been killed during the shootings.

It was as though the guy had appeared, done his killing, and then vanished into thin air. Since that was not a possibility, Decker had to be looking at this wrong somehow.

He went into Room 144 and sat down at the teacher’s desk. He surveyed the classroom. Twenty-one empty seats arranged in three rows front to back. One of them had been occupied by Debbie Watson. The last moments of her life were clear enough: an upset stomach; a trip to the nurse’s office authorized; a detour to her locker. And she was dead minutes later.

She’d been in the third row, fourth seat. He imagined her raising her hand, looking and feeling ill, getting permission to leave, walking out the door, never to walk in it again.

He rose and walked out the door, stopped, and turned. He was facing Debbie’s open locker. The mirror on the inside of the door reflected his image back. For some reason Decker didn’t recognize himself. This big fat bearded dude, drenched with rain, looking like hell.

But then he looked past the reflection and to something else in Debbie’s locker: a stack of textbooks and notebooks.

Decker looked back at Classroom 144 and then at the locker.

Life had coincidences. Serendipity abounded. Wrong place, wrong time. It came as the result of seven billion people jostling each other within the span of a single planet.

But there was an unwritten rule in police work: There are no coincidences. All you needed was more in-depth investigation to show that there are no coincidences.

He phoned Lancaster. She was in the library.

“Did you talk to Debbie Watson’s parents?”

“Yes.”

“Did they mention that she felt ill when she came to school?”

“No. I asked her that. The mom said she seemed fine. Might’ve been a bug that came on fast, though.”

“And what about the teacher? When Watson asked to leave?”

Decker could hear the woman flipping through her notebook.

“She said Debbie had looked fine but then raised her hand, said she felt nauseous, and asked to be excused.”

“Did she make out a note or—”

“They have them preprinted. The teacher filled in Debbie’s name and gave it to her.”

“So just thirty seconds from start to finish before Debbie left the room?”

“I guess about that.”

“What time did she actually leave the classroom?”

“The teacher thought maybe a few minutes before. Maybe five before the shot was heard.”

“That’s a big gap. Her locker is seconds away from her class. And I walked from the front of the school to the back in less than two minutes.”

“Maybe she lingered there for a few minutes. Maybe she thought she was going to throw up and was trying to collect herself. Look, why are—”

“I’ll explain later. It may be nothing.”

Decker clicked off and put his phone away. He was just about to have a very radical thought that might potentially crush certain people. He didn’t do this lightly. He did this only to get to the truth. The truth was worth everything to him. But he needed something concrete to go on before he could move forward on this.

Fate for Debbie was 8:42 outside this door. After that she would be no more, her life over. How would it run? Debbie raises her hand, gets permission to leave. She exits the class, but doesn’t go to the nurse directly. She heads to her locker and opens it. Another minute burned. But Lancaster had said the teacher thought it was several minutes, maybe as many as five. What had Debbie been doing all that time? Maybe she had been lingering or trying to steady herself, like Lancaster had said. But maybe there was something else.