The Fallen

by David Baldacci

  “Decker, we haven’t even been working the case for a full day. It takes time. You know that better than anyone.”

  “We don’t have that much time, Alex. We only have a week of vacation.”

  “Damn, I forgot about that.”

  “And something tells me this sucker is going to take longer than that.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Work the case hard for now, but if we start bumping up against the end of our vacation we’ll need to talk to Bogart and have him extend it, or let us work the case on behalf of the FBI.”

  Jamison frowned. “Somehow I don’t think it’s that simple, Decker.”

  “Well, it should be. Six people are dead who shouldn’t be.”

  “I get that,” she said nervously, as Decker’s raised voice made several people at other tables look around at them. She added quickly, “So I told you what I learned at the house: the two victims, the Bible verse on the wall.”

  “Right,” said Decker absently.

  “What do you think about it?”

  “I think it’s a little much.”

  Jamison looked perplexed. “What does that mean?”

  “I asked Lassiter a question and now I’ll ask you. Why Baronville?”

  “Why Baronville what?”

  “Six unusual and inexplicable murders in this town. What’s so special about this place that it garners that much unusual homicidal activity?”

  “Even towns like this have their share of bizarre crimes.”

  “That’s true, but there’s something about this one that just seems off.”

  “But you do think they’re connected?” she asked.

  He nodded. “They’re not copycats, though, because most of the critical details are different. I think we’re looking at the same person or persons doing this.”

  “So was your perfect recall any use today?”

  “I have nothing to remember that would be helpful.”

  “Really? Nothing?”

  He said, “Actually, I heard a car drive away a few minutes before I saw the sparking from the electrical short.”

  Jamison sat straighter in her chair. “You told me that before, but did you see the car?”

  “No. There was no clear sightline from where I was.”

  “Well, only three elderly people live on that street. So maybe they don’t even drive. And there weren’t any cars on the street when we drove over there. You think it could have been the killer leaving the house after dumping the bodies?”

  “Could be. Blowflies can find a body very quickly.”

  Outside, it had started to rain and the temperature had dropped, bleeding off the earlier warmth of the day.

  She said, “I told Green we’d come in tomorrow morning and share any ideas. How did you leave it with Lassiter?”

  “I didn’t leave it any way with her. She dropped me off at the house and that was that. Besides, I don’t have any ideas.”

  “Some might come to you in the night.”

  “Doubtful.”

  “Hey, you’re the one who wanted to work this case, Decker,” barked Jamison. “So stop whining and start doing your job.”

  Decker glanced sharply at her, only to see that she was smiling at him.

  He grinned sheepishly. “You’re right. I’m being an idiot.”

  “Wow. I can count on one hand with fingers left over the number of times you’ve said that I was right.”

  “You’re right more often than you think.”

  Her expression changed. “Zoe told me what you said. About my ability to read people and to see things others don’t.”

  “Don’t let it go to your head.”

  She smirked. “Thanks. Green said they’d have all the files ready for us to go over tomorrow.”

  Decker brightened at this comment. “Good. Maybe something will jump out.”

  They fell silent for a few moments.

  “Talked to Melvin lately?” asked Jamison.

  “No. He and Harper are traveling on vacation somewhere. The Mediterranean, I think. Why?”

  “I know how close you and Melvin are. I guess you could have gone on vacation with them, but it might have been awkward with the three of you. Especially in the romantic Med.”

  Decker stared absently at his plate of food and didn’t answer.

  “FYI, there’s a park near my sister’s house with a jogging trail,” noted Jamison.

  He glanced up at her. “And why do I need to know that?”

  “I know you’ve been working out, and you have dropped a lot of weight. Just want you to keep it up. You know, it’s harder to get back in shape than it is to stay in shape.”

  “Thanks for enlightening me on that.”

  He glanced out the window onto the darkened street. A few cars rolled past. And there were a couple of pedestrians. Other than that, downtown Baronville was relatively quiet in the gathering storm. For now.

  “What are you thinking about, Decker?”

  He continued to stare out into the dark. “I’m wondering who’s going to die next.”

  Chapter 11

  IT HAD ONCE been a mansion, perhaps beyond compare.

  Now it was old, falling down, and possibly no longer salvageable.

  It was from an era when money flowed freely, no income taxes were due, the world lived both more ostentatiously and more simply, and everyone knew his place. Globalization was not even a term, and information moved far more slowly, leading to a blissful ignorance among most.

  Men were the breadwinners. They came home from work, spent time with their families, smoked their cigarettes, drank their beer, listened to the same radio programs and later TV shows as the rest of the country, went to bed, and got up to do it all over again, while women did the same on the home front.

  John Baron looked out over what had once been the exquisitely landscaped rear grounds of his home, but was now merely dirt with weeds topping it.

  He was a tall man, over six-three, with broad shoulders and a lean waist. He was physically strong and fit and always had been. However, at age fifty-three he could sense feebleness drifting into some of his muscle and stiffness into some of his joints.

  His salt-and-pepper hair was long, and untouched by professional scissors.

  His clothes were a hodgepodge of old things: a faded tuxedo jacket, a pair of dungarees, a white polo shirt, and an old leather belt to hold up the britches. On his feet were work boots. His weathered and handsome face was bristly with scruff.

  He did not care about his appearance.

  He lived alone. There was no one to impress.

  His ancestral home was well over twenty-five thousand square feet, with more than half that again in outbuildings and other structures. It was far and away the largest home in the area, and maybe one of the biggest in the entire commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The estate had once covered hundreds of acres, set on the highest point in the eponymous town.

  Fitting for the Barons to look down upon all others.

  He had lived here since his birth. The only child of Benjamin and Dorothy Baron. The last married couple to reside here. Their son had never taken a wife.

  John Baron had been a tremendous athlete, as well as smart and likable. His future seemed assured—enviable and inevitable.

  Until his parents had died on the same night, victims of a horrible accident, or perhaps something else; the jury was still out on that. They left John, then only nineteen, as their sole heir. Though he knew his family was no longer fabulously wealthy, he had believed there was some money left.

  Until the lawyer and accountant met with him and informed him that the assets left behind were outweighed by debt by a ratio of twenty to one. Now it was time to pay the piper, and the son would be the one to do it.

  Thus, decades ago, Baron had sold off many of the remaining family assets and negotiated as skillfully as he could in a desperate battle to keep the house. However, the estate was buried under such a large mortgage that now most o
f his income simply went to pay the interest. Like his predecessors, he had also sold additional land around the estate. The hundreds of acres had been whittled down to a few dozen. The outbuildings were mostly in ruins. The mansion was a shabby wreck. When he died, without wife or children, he had no doubt that the bank would swoop in, sell it off, and down it would come, with something modern and fresh to take its place, if Baronville still existed by then.

  Even the family cemetery, set far away from the house and surrounded by a six-foot brick wall, might well be dug up and moved.

  He looked through the window of his study at land that as a boy he had run happily roamed over. He had a lot of stamina back then, but he could never sprint far enough to outrun the grounds of his home. It had been a both comforting and humbling feeling.

  He looked over his shoulder at the walls of books. He had read them all and had managed to keep far more than he thought possible. The rarest volumes had long since been sold to pay bills. There was no point in keeping books if he didn’t have a bookcase or a home in which to place them.

  He rose, walked over to his desk, and sat down in the chair there. It creaked and groaned under his weight. Everything in this house creaked and groaned when touched.

  I creak and groan simply by being alive.

  By any measure it was a miserable existence. And one he would have to endure for the rest of his life.

  He had had to come home from college to take care of affairs after his parents died. Then he had returned to school on his athletic scholarship, only to blow out his rotator. That was pretty much the death knell for a baseball pitcher. The next year his scholarship was revoked, and, having no funds to continue, he had left without a degree. Repeated attempts at starting a business had failed for want of capital. It seemed that those who had for so long lived under the boot of the Barons now thought it quite pleasing to turn off any aid whatsoever to the last of the family.

  Even though other owners had run them for years, when the last mine and mill closed the ousted employees and indeed the entire town blamed only one person for their downfall. Though then only in his late twenties, John Baron had taken the full brunt of the town’s displeasure. There was even a petition circulated to change the name of the town. It had failed, probably because the citizens wanted the name to remain so they could keep blaming the Baron family for their problems.

  John Baron had become a pariah. He should have moved. Just walked away from the house and the town and this miserable excuse for a life. Yet he hadn’t. He wasn’t sure if it was stubbornness or lunacy or a potent mixture of both. Yet something in his head had prevented him from chucking it all and starting somewhere fresh. And things in your head could be very powerful, he had found.

  Finally, he had sold enough property and paid down enough bills to allow himself to live here, not in any comfort, but just to exist, really. Any ambition to do more had faded along with the passage of years.

  As he stared out into the nighttime he was thoroughly cognizant that he had royally screwed up what had commenced as a promising life.

  And the town had faded right along with him.

  Once-occupied homes and businesses sat empty. The mighty mills and mines his ancestor had erected were gone.

  Baronville had come into existence as part of John Baron the First’s dream for riches. Now the dream had become a nightmare. For all of them.

  From his high perch, Baron would often watch the procession of funerals driving slowly to one of the cemeteries in town. The graveyards of the myriad churches had long since been filled. He knew fatal drug overdoses occurred far too frequently. With no hope, people were turning to needles and pills for something to make them forget how desperate their lives had become.

  And yet he had also watched moving vans coming in, carrying with them new families with fresh hopes. He didn’t know if they were just picking at a hollowed-out carcass. He didn’t know if the town had a reasonable shot at a do-over.

  But maybe it did.

  Though it was fully beyond his control, he carried the demise of his family’s creation as a personal failure. And he always would. And anyway, the town would never let him forget that he had indeed failed them.

  He rose from behind his desk.

  It was too early to go to bed. And he had somewhere he wanted to go. It was sort of a ritual of his, in fact.

  He left the house by the kitchen door and entered the six-car garage that had held only one vehicle for the last three decades.

  It was the old gardener’s pale blue 1968 Suburban. Baron had had to let go all of the few remaining household staff after his parents’ deaths, yet he had managed to hold on to the gardener, because there was a lot of property still to keep up. After the land was sold, however, that changed. The gardener, nearly ninety by then, had left his truck to Baron and gone to die in a nearby nursing home, having outlived his wife by several years.

  It was fortunate that Baron had been an engineering student in college, with a mind that seemed to know intuitively how any type of mechanical apparatus worked. He had been coaxing life out of the Suburban all this time. Yet, after five decades, he wasn’t sure how much life it had left.

  Or how much I have left.

  He climbed into the Suburban and drove out of the garage. The overhead doors no longer functioned, so he kept them open, with the key to the truck under the visor.

  He wound his way down the hill, past the neighborhoods that had sprung up from Baron land and that held the best views in the city, other than his. At least the homes that were still occupied did.

  He reached the main road and sped up.

  He had money in his pocket. He intended to spend it.

  The Mercury Bar was really the only place in town where he felt he could get some peace.

  He pulled into a parking space on the street and got out.

  He left the tuxedo jacket in the truck. He knew that he was an easy enough target around town without looking too eccentric.

  He was a Baron. The last one.

  And if his health remained intact, he had maybe thirty more years of this crap to endure. It was no wonder he needed a scotch and soda or two or three of them.

  Yet tonight the current John Baron would get more than simply a drink.

  Chapter 12

  BARON CLOSED HIS eyes and inwardly groaned.

  He reopened his eyes and kept his hands clasped around his cocktail. It was his—well, he couldn’t remember how many he’d had. The previous ones had felt great going down, though.

  This one was even better.

  And then they had come along to spoil it.

  “You that dude John Baron, ain’t you?”

  Baron looked over at the three young men who were standing next to his seat at the bar.

  The young female bartender nervously wiped out a glass and watched the confrontation.

  Baron lifted the glass to his lips, took a sip, and let the smooth scotch cut by soda work its way down his throat. He set the glass down and said, “I am. Is there an issue?”

  The men were dressed in dirty jeans, T-shirts, and oversized sneakers with no laces, and two of them wore Pittsburgh Steelers caps.

  The first man, the largest of the trio, grinned maliciously. “An issue? Man, we ain’t got issues. But maybe you got some stuff hanging over you.”

  “Such as?”

  “Your damn family screwing this whole town.”

  “And exactly how did they do that?”

  “Closed the mines. Shut down the mills.”

  “After running them for decades and providing employment for much of the town? Probably for your parents. And grandparents. And great-grandparents.” He took another sip of his drink. “Thus I see no evidence that we screwed anybody.”

  “You ain’t give me no job,” said the man.

  “I didn’t know it was my job to give you a job,” replied Baron.

  The second man spoke up. “You live up in that big house on the hill. Think you’re better’n we
are.”

  “I can assure you that not only do I not think I’m better than anyone, I know that I’m not. As for the big house, looks can definitely be deceiving.”

  “My mom says you got old coins and jewels up there. She said you just pretend to be poor.”

  Baron turned to look at him. “Pretend to be poor? Who the hell would do that? Would you?” He looked at the other two men. “Or you?”

  “Mom says you folks are inbred. Marry your sister and stuff. Screws up your mind. So maybe you would pretend to be poor.”

  “Well, I don’t have a sister. And I’m not married. And I’m not pretending to be poor. So strike three and you’re out.”

  “Don’t think so,” said the first man. He shoved Baron so hard he nearly toppled from his stool.

  The bartender said, “Hey, don’t make me call the cops. Leave him alone.”

  “You gonna let a girl fight your battles?” said the second man in a sneering tone.

  “I’m warning you,” said the bartender, her hand on her cell phone.

  The man pushed Baron again. “You gonna do that? Hide behind a girl, asshole?”

  Baron threw the rest of his drink in the man’s face.

  “No, I’m really not,” he said, standing up and towering over them.

  His face dripping with scotch and soda, the man swung his fist at Baron, who caught it and wrenched it up and then behind the man’s back.

  He gave him a hard push and sent him sprawling on the floor.

  Baron blocked the blow from the second man and lashed out with his fist, catching him on the chin.

  But the third man kidney-punched Baron from behind and he staggered and fell down against the bar.

  The other two men jumped up and started punching and kicking him. There were other people in the bar, but none of them tried to stop the pounding Baron was taking.

  Except one.

  “FBI!”

  Amos Decker had his weapon pointed at the men.

  They all froze.

  “Get away from him. Now!” barked Decker, who had just walked in to see this beating. After the men retreated, he glanced at Baron. “You okay?”

  Baron, his lip bloody and his right eye puffy, struggled up and managed to stand while holding on to the bar, clutching at his side.