Memory Man

by David Baldacci

  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 sch

ool 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.

  He stared once more at the locker’s contents.

  The bloody notebook and other items that had been on the floor next to Watson’s body had been taken by the police along with her remains. But not the stuff in the locker. No, not that. That was all still there. And it was in decent shape because her body had mostly shielded the contents from the shotgun blast.

  He grabbed the stack of items, went back to Classroom 144, and sat down. He opened the first book and went through it page by page. He went through all the textbooks, looking for marginalia, notes, sketches, anything.

  He had gone through three of her lined notebooks and had reached the nineteenth page of the fourth when he stopped looking.

  Debbie had drawn a picture on this page. It was a good sketch, actually. The girl had possessed talent.

  But Decker was far more focused on the subject of the drawing.

  It was a man in full camouflage gear.

  With a big heart drawn right next to it.

  Chapter

  21

  DECKER HAD SHOWERED, changed his clothes, carefully combed his hair, and put on his most professional expression. He believed that the folks sitting opposite him deserved nothing less than that.

  Debbie Watson’s mother and father stared back at him. The dad was a small, mousy man in his midforties, with a little scrap of mustache above his thin top lip. He had a stunted right arm, the malformed hand hanging from the elbow.

  He looked like a freight train was bearing down on him.

  Debbie’s mom was chain-smoking. The ashtray in front of her was filled with butts. Nicotine’s ability to rob the blood of oxygen had whittled fine lines prematurely around her mouth and deeply and unflatteringly chiseled a face that had probably not been pretty even in youth. Her forearms were veiny and darkened and spotted, probably from lying out during the summer in the hammock Decker had seen strung between two trees in the small side yard. The mom didn’t look like she’d seen a freight train. She looked as though someone had sucked her soul out. And the smell of the liquor easily crossed the width of the scarred coffee table set between them.

  On Decker’s right, Lancaster was perched on the couch like a cat on a ledge. Her features were tight and serious and hunkered down and had been ever since Decker had showed her the drawing of cammie man in Debbie’s notebook. She occasionally looked lustfully at Beth’s cigarette, as if waiting for an invitation to pull out her own smokes.

  They had not shown the sketch to the FBI or anyone else. They had decided to keep it to themselves for now. Decker had said, and Lancaster had agreed, that before anything was released publicly they needed to talk to the parents. If the sketch was unconnected to the murders, then they didn’t want Debbie’s family to suffer unnecessarily. In the world of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the Watson family would be sliced and diced to such a degree that no matter what exculpatory facts were revealed later, the truth would never be able to rise above the earlier electronic tsunami.

  Decker had prefaced his questions with a lot of disclaimers. He had waited until the Watsons were fully prepped before showing them the sketch. When their gazes had held on the image, both had recoiled and then stiffened like they’d been electrocuted.

  Decker saw them both outlined in a creamy white. For him death was blue, while white represented despair. When he looked at himself in the mirror for a full year after his family’s murders, he had figured he was the whitest white man in the whole world.

  “Can you think of a reason why Debbie would have drawn these images?” asked Decker quietly. He pointed first to the cammie figure and then the heart. “Was she seeing anyone?” he added. The heart seemed to indicate this was a possibility. Even in the twenty-first century a heart drawn by a young woman next to the image of a man probably meant exactly what it had always meant throughout time.

  George Watson shook his head, his mustache trembling along with the rest of him. His stunted arm swung next to his torso. Decker wondered how many jibes the man had endured over his life for his unusual appendage. That abnormality had probably defined everything about him, not because it should but because sometimes the world and the people in it could be so cruel.

  Beth Watson didn’t shake her head. She nodded slightly and both Decker and Lancaster immediately focused on her.

  “Who was he?” asked Lancaster.

  “Never knew,” said Beth haltingly. “I mean, she never brought anyone home that we didn’t know.”

  “We’re interested in anyone she might have brought home,” said Decker.

  “No, I mean those were boys. You said this person was big. The paper said six-two, couple hundred pounds or more. Debbie never brought anyone home bigger than her father.”

  George cleared his throat and said ruefully, “And I’m not even five-eight. Had my first growth spurt in tenth grade and never had another.” Then he fell silent, looking perplexed and a bit appalled that he had bothered to offer up triviality in the face of such tragedy.

  “And they were all boys from school,” said Beth. “One of them’s dead too, in fact. Like my poor Debbie.”

  “Which one?” asked Lancaster, her pen poised over her pad.

  “Jimmy Schikel. Nice kid, played on the football team. Very popular. We’ve known them for years. Debbie and Jimmy went to elementary school together. He took Debbie to the junior prom, but they were just friends.” She bowed her head and said, “You just can’t imagine what it’s like to lose your child.” She picked up a paper towel off the coffee table and dabbed at her eyes while her husband awkwardly rubbed her shoulder.

  At the woman’s words, Lancaster had shot Decker a glance, but he didn’t return it. He kept his gaze on Beth. He knew exactly what it was like to lose a child. And that fact wouldn’t matter in the least in this circumstance. There could be no commiseration among such people despite the seeming commonality of loss, because it was actually each parent’s totally unique hell.

  “But there was someone else?” prompted Decker. “Someone you didn’t know but that Debbie also didn’t bring here? That’s what you mean, right?”

  Beth balled up the paper towel and dropped it on the carpet. Her husband picked it up and placed it on the coffee table. She flicked him an annoyed look, and in observing that, Decker wondered how bad the marriage was. Just the little paper cuts that added up over the long term and that most unions survived? Or was it more than that? Enough to bring them to the point where losing Debbie might become the irreparable crack? Then again, it could cause them to circle the wagons. He had seen that happen too.

  “She’d post stuff online about him. But she never talked directly about him. Even so, I picked up the signs here and there. A mom just does.”

  “So you read the online posts?”

  “I had her password for a while. When she found out, she changed it. She never named him. But she did have a pet name for him.”

  “What was that?” asked Lancaster.

  ��Jesus.”

  “How do you know that? Was it in one of the posts?”

  “No. I saw it on the chalkboard that’s in her room. She had done some little poem about Jesus. Debbie wasn’t religious. I mean, we don’t go to church or anything, so it wasn’t that. It was a guy. The poem…was a little personal. It was definitely about a guy. When I went to ask her about it, she ran to her room and erased it.”

  Decker and Lancaster exchanged a glance. He said, “But do you know if it was biblical or a Latino reference?” When she looked at him puzzled, he added, “I mean Jesus or Hey-soos.”

  “Oh, well hell, I never thought about that. I just…I just thought she had some sort of God complex with the guy. But I don’t think my Debbie would have been hanging out with some Hey-soos Mexican,” she added in an offended tone. She wiped her nose and smoked her cigarette. “I mean, moms always know, even if their daughters don’t believe they can know stuff. Debbie certainly thought we were clueless.” She gave a sideways glance at her husband. “And some are clueless. Really clueless.”

  Hubby removed his hand from her shoulder and dropped it between his legs, like a dog doing the same with its tail. He might have trousers on, thought Decker, but he clearly didn’t wear the pants in this family.

  Decker flicked a glance at Lancaster. “Online posts?”

  She nodded. “We’ll get all of it.”

  “So she never said anything about this person? Nothing?”

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