Memory Man

by David Baldacci

  body probably would be female.

  As they made the turn, his deduction was confirmed. She was sprawled on the linoleum that looked old enough to have been there when Decker had trod these halls.

  Photos and measurements had already been taken, and forensics gathered or nearly so, Lancaster had told him. The girl seemed posed, one hand out like she had been waving to a friend when someone had violently stolen the remainder of her life.

  “Debbie Watson,” said Lancaster as Decker stared down at the girl. “Senior. Just turned eighteen. Her parents have been notified.”

  Decker looked around. He had been working crime scenes for twenty years as a beat cop and then a detective. He should feel perfectly natural here looking for things he had looked for a thousand times before. But he did not feel natural. He felt like an outsider. He felt like all the air in the school was being sucked away from him.

  He fought hard against this inner turmoil and said, “But they haven’t seen her?”

  She shook her head. “You know the drill. Crime scene. No one gets in, including parents. Besides, why would they want to see her…like this?”

  Decker had put on plastic booties and gloves Lancaster had given him. He knelt down next to Debbie Watson. As he did so his head started to spin. He cleared his throat and focused on her body.

  She had taken what looked to be a round of buckshot full in the face. The result was she no longer had a face. He glanced at the wall behind her. It was splattered with bits of her. Books lay beside her; a notebook was soaked in blood. He looked down at a piece of paper that apparently had fallen out of a book. If these were the girl’s doodles she had been a good artist, thought Decker.

  “You have the order of shootings yet?” he asked.

  “From everything so far, it seems she might have been the first one killed.”

  “Shooter’s entry?”

  “This way.”

  Lancaster led him a short distance away to what he recognized as the rear of the school. She pointed at the rack of doors. “They’re kept locked during the school day.” She pointed at a camera attached to the upper corner of a wall. “That camera gave us a nice view of the ingress.”

  “Description?”

  “I’ve got the image loaded on my laptop in the command center we set up in the library. But it was a big guy in full camouflage gear. Face completely obstructed by a mask and a face shield.”

  “Belts and suspenders,” commented Decker. “Methodical.”

  Lancaster continued, “We believe he walked in this way, turned the corner, encountered Debbie Watson, and shot her.”

  “Wouldn’t there have been other people in the halls?”

  “At that time of morning everyone was in their classes.”

  “So why wasn’t Debbie?”

  “She was going to the nurse’s office. She had an upset stomach. That’s according to the teacher who gave her permission to leave class.”

  Decker looked around again. “Everyone was in class. So either the shooter was lucky or he knew the routine of the school.”

  “That thought struck me too.”

  “And after Debbie went down?”

  “He went to the gym, killed Joe Kramer, the teacher there, reversed course, passed Debbie’s body, and headed toward the front of the school. By then the shots had alerted everyone, but people were more or less trapped in their classrooms. He shot one more student dead in a classroom. He went into a second classroom and opened fire. One more dead and one wounded, a teacher.”

  “Andy Jackson? English? I heard it on the news.”

  “Yes. Then he walked to the opposite corridor and entered another classroom. Another dead. Another classroom on the same corridor, a sixth person shot dead. He headed to the school office, where he shot and killed the assistant principal. He then shot and killed one more student in another classroom. All told we have eight dead. And Jackson’s in critical condition, so the death count could go up by one.”

  “So six students and two adults?”

  “Yes. And one critically wounded.”

  “You said the shooter was dressed in cammies, mask, and face shield?”

  “Right.”

  “What else? Type of footwear?”

  “The video shot is from the waist up. No one we interviewed noted his footwear. He was wearing gloves. Weapons were a shotgun and handgun. Ballistics guys are still searching and spreadsheeting all of it. A lot of the ordnance is still in the victims. When he used the handgun he fired multiple rounds into his victims.”

  “To make sure they were dead,” said Decker. “Don’t really have that concern with a shotgun.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “So hood plus a face shield?”

  She nodded.

  “Concealment was important for him. He might have been afraid he would be recognized. You said big guy. How big?”

  She pulled her notebook. “Our video shot framed him with a poster hanging on the wall. We did some measurements. We’re looking at a guy at least six-two with very broad shoulders. Like yours. Strong. Definitely male. Over two hundred pounds.”

  “So he walks all over the school and we only get one video shot of him?”

  “Maybe he knew where the cameras were and avoided them,” said Lancaster. “Maybe he’s been here before doing some recon for this massacre.”

  “But in one instance he didn’t avoid the camera,” rejoined Decker.

  “Why do you think? Inconsistency? Mistake?”

  “Too early to tell, but if it was deliberate, we need to find out why.”

  Lancaster wrote down some notes.

  “You said he entered classrooms?”

  She nodded.

  “But only killed one person in each before heading on?”

  “That’s right. Except he wounded the teacher in one of them.”

  “These people have anything in common?”

  “You think he might have been specifically targeting folks?”

  “Can’t rule it out yet.”

  “He’d have to know what classrooms they’d be in at that time of the morning.”

  “And he might have found out somehow.”

  “I’ll check into that,” said Lancaster. “But it strikes me as doubtful with all the chaos going on that the guy would be able to run down a tally sheet of targets.”

  “Maybe it was chaotic for everybody else. But not him. He had the guns.”

  “But still, Amos,” she said doubtfully.

  “And the exit?” he asked, ignoring her last comment.

  “We haven’t nailed that down yet.”

  He studied her. “By the time the guy was finished shooting, how much time had passed?”

  “The prelim time frame we pieced together is ten minutes, maybe a bit more.”

  Decker glanced out a window. The front of the school was set far back from the road, within its own grounds. Across the street were residential properties.

  “Nobody over there heard anything? Shots, screams?”

  “Still canvassing. He might have used a suppressor.”

  “Not on a shotgun he didn’t. But my point is, how does a guy in cammies, hood, and face shield with at least two different weapons, and one of them a long barrel, walk out of here and nobody eyeball him? For that matter, how did he walk in and no one see him?”

  The air was starting to feel close again. Sweat sprouted on his forehead. He put a gloved hand out to the wall. If Lancaster noticed his distress, she said nothing.

  “The video shows him entering on the rear side. There’s really nothing back there except the old Army base. He might have slipped in unseen. Maybe he hid in the Dumpster back there and popped out.”

  Decker rubbed at his belly.

  “You okay, Amos?”

  “My diet is for shit. Did you check the Dumpster?”

  “We checked everything and found nothing. We even checked the fence around the base. Nothing had been disturbed. And it’s so overgrown that there pro

bably would have been some indication of someone having come that way.”

  “So he shot his way from the rear of the school to the front. Presumably he left that way. How did no one see him then? There are houses across the street. And cars going up and down the road.”

  “Well, the homes directly across the street are empty because of foreclosures. And it’s a working-class neighborhood. There might not have been many people at the other homes at that time of the morning. And the school is set far enough back that the sounds might not have carried.”

  “But presumably you had traffic along the street. And kids and teachers at the windows probably screaming their heads off. Cell phones hitting 911. Cruisers rolling. I was at Precinct Two when the guys started pouring out of the place. What is the time to the school from there by car? Fifteen minutes?”

  “About that, yeah.”

  “And even if nobody on the outside saw him leave, there had to be eyeballs at the school windows. Kids using phones as cameras. From what I remember, there’s not an exit in this building that’s not visible from some classroom window.”

  “And you knew this because you, what, snuck out a lot?”

  “All the time.”

  “Well, you got me there. I went to high school in the next county. This is your turf, not mine.”

  “And that still doesn’t cover his ingress. How did he walk in here and no one see him? Even if it was in the rear. There are windows overlooking it.”

  “Yeah, but the second and third floors are unused.”

  “But the first floor has windows looking out over the rear of the school.”

  Lancaster could only shake her head.

  “Has the school been searched?”

  “It’s being searched right now.”

  “And the teachers, admin, and students?”

  “Evacuated to safety.”

  “To safety?” said Decker, ignoring now the pains in his head and belly.

  “We weren’t sure whether the shooter was still here, Amos. The first priority on something like this is to get the innocent to a safe place and secure the area.”

  “Well, to state the obvious, if no one saw him leave, how do you know you also didn’t evacuate the shooter to a safe place?”

  “No one was allowed to leave the area until we got descriptions of the shooter. The women were obviously above suspicion. All witnesses said it was a man. And there’s not one guy in the building who fit his description.”

  “Not even the students? They’re growing kids pretty big these days.”

  “All the male students who were of that size had alibis. Most of them are on the football team and are well known. They were all in their classrooms with thirty other kids. They couldn’t have been the shooter. There were four male students who were out of class for various reasons. Not one of them is taller than five-nine and weighs more than a buck fifty. All witnesses said the shooter was easily two-hundred-plus pounds in addition to the height. And jacked, like an athlete.”

  “How about guys who were absent from school that day?”

  “Still checking on that. It might turn up something. But my gut tells me this is a stranger.”

  “And none of the male teachers is that size?”

  “The gym teacher was. But he’s dead. So was the assistant principal. He’s dead too. Everybody else was under six feet and no more than one-seventy. And not one of them is what you would call broad-shouldered. The only living teacher approaching the requisite weight was the chemistry guy, and he’s five-seven and a heart attack waiting to happen.”

  “So where did the guy go? Did he drive up here?”

  Lancaster shook her head. “Don’t think so. No one saw any vehicles come or leave at the requisite times.”

  “According to you, no one saw anyone come or go at those times, Mary.”

  “It’s problematic, I know,” she admitted. “Look, if the guy is hiding in the building still, we’ll get him. The place is surrounded by cops. Nobody is getting out of here.”

  “You said a search is being conducted?”

  “We’ve been going through the school one inch at a time as soon as we got the place emptied out. Nobody could have gotten out unseen, Amos.”

  “Then you’re walking right into a dead-end maze.”

  She cocked her head and chewed her gum. “Come again?”

  “If the place turns up empty and nobody saw the guy leave, then the shooter has to be someone who was in the school. A teacher or a student or an admin. All custodial folks accounted for?”

  She nodded. “They’re older and all have big guts. But I see your point.”

  “Can I see the video footage of the guy?”

  He followed her to the library. After they passed through the double wooden doors, Decker could see that the library had become the opposite of a quiet sanctum. The FBI had their corner, the state police their spot, and Lancaster and her crew were relegated to the far back left slice of the place.

  Lancaster started walking to where her colleagues had set up shop, but Decker just stood there at the entrance to the library. He had been away from this world for a while now, but it suddenly felt like forever. He did not like crowds. He did not care to walk in here and join this large group of investigators even if they all had the same goal. Part of him wanted to slink back to the Residence Inn, close his door, shut his eyes, and let his cast of colors envelop him. And what good would he be anyway? He couldn’t find his family’s killers. How would he have a shot to find this one? He eyed the door. He could still escape.

  “Amos!”

  He looked over and watched in silence as Captain Miller headed his way. He had on his police uniform this evening. He held out a hand, which Decker shook unwillingly.

  “Thank you for helping us, Amos,” said Miller. “We can use it.”

  Decker eyed the manpower in the library. “Looks like you have all the help you need.”

  He tried to pull his hand away, but Miller kept hold of it, his gaze locked on his former detective.

  “Looks can be deceiving. And I want you involved. You see things. I mean, you see things, Amos. And we have to catch this guy. We have to make this right. We have to give closure.” He continued to keep his gaze directly on Decker’s face until the latter looked back at him. “Amos, we need closure. You understand that. I know you do.”

  “I do,” said Decker. “I understand it, if only because I never got it.”

  Miller let his hand go. “Why don’t you go over and join your ‘partner’? Good to see you two together again.”

  Decker said nothing. He just turned and walked over to where Lancaster was waiting for him.

  His opportunity for escape was now gone. And more than a part of him believed that Miller knew exactly what he was thinking when he’d been standing over by the door. And the police captain had decisively cut off his retreat.

  Decker settled his large bulk next to Lancaster at a table in the middle of the local cops’ command center. Laptops were set up across the length of the table. Multiport outlets littered the floor connected to extension cords, and computers, printers, and scanners were plugged into them. People moved around with files, papers, electronic tablets, all bearing an air of quiet desperation, Decker noted. He also knew that many of the cops had kids in the school. Not that they needed any extra incentive to nail the shooter.

  After Miller had called out his name, several suits and a couple of uniforms had recognized Decker and given him nods or grim looks, but none had spoken to him. He had not left the department under the best of circumstances, yet he doubted anyone really held -->