Memory Man

by David Baldacci

  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.