Memory Man

by David Baldacci

  it against him.

  But he was here now, and so he might as well get to work.

  He looked at Lancaster. “The video?”

  Lancaster hit the requisite keys, and a few seconds later Decker was staring at the grainy footage.

  “There’s the son of a bitch,” said Lancaster.

  He glanced at the time stamp. “Eight-forty-one. When did classes start?”

  “Eight-thirty sharp. Everyone needs to be in their class by then.”

  “You said he came in through the rear doors? That’s where this image is from, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t the exit doors kept locked?”

  “They’re supposed to be. But they’re also not hard to jimmy open.”

  “Did you find signs of forced entry?”

  “Those doors haven’t been replaced since the seventies, Amos. They’re beat to hell. It was really impossible to tell if they’d been forced or not.”

  She hit some more keys and zoomed in on the corridor. “Now we’ve identified this as the hall bleeding off…” She faltered. “Sorry, poor choice of words. As the hall coming off the ingress we’ve already identified. He would have made his turn, and that’s where he would have encountered Debbie Watson, say maybe a minute later.”

  “So first shot at eight-forty-two or thereabouts, allowing one minute from the video stamp and him encountering Watson?”

  “Pretty much. And shotgun blasts folks remember. In fact, a bunch of people looked at the time when they heard it. So eight-forty-two is a good number for the first shot.”

  “Okay.” Decker thought about what his next question should be. It should have come automatically, but it didn’t. He was definitely rusty. He looked around at all the seasoned investigators toiling away. He used to be one of them. The fact was, he had checked out of his professional life as soon as he’d found his family dead. Actually, he might be, he had to admit, more of a hindrance here than a help.

  He looked down at Lancaster, who was staring up at him, a sympathetic expression on her face.

  “It’s like riding a bike, Amos,” she said, apparently reading the self-doubt on his face.

  “Maybe not, Mary. I guess I’ll find out. But if I can’t carry my weight, I shouldn’t be here.”

  She looked back at the screen. “Okay, the camera doesn’t have audio, so you can’t hear it. And there was no camera on the next hall.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why else? No money in the budget. We’re lucky to have any functioning cameras at all.”

  He thought for a moment. “But they keep them up as a deterrent?”

  “Right. Because people didn’t know they weren’t operational.”

  “But our guy was able to avoid all of them except this one.”

  “It really didn’t matter whether he did or not. He was completely covered, Amos. No way to recognize any feature.”

  Decker slowly nodded, feeling once more slow and reactive in his mental process.

  He looked back at the image on the screen. Hood and face shield. And the camera shot was reflecting off the glare from the shield. He edged closer to the screen, like a scent hound ferreting prey.

  “There’s no direct hit even on his hooded face. He knew where the camera was and avoided it, even though he’s covered.”

  “You think that’s important?” she asked.

  “At this point in the investigation, there isn’t anything that’s not important.”

  Lancaster nodded. “I think that was the second rule you ever taught me.”

  “The first being to suspect everybody,” Decker added absently, his gaze still squarely on the shooter.

  She said nothing to this and he finally looked at her.

  “Like riding a bike, Amos. You were the best I’ve ever seen. I think you still can be.”

  He looked away, not really feeling better from her praise, because his altered mind didn’t respond to that anymore either. “Can you run the feed all the way until he turns the corner?”

  Lancaster did so, and then, at Decker’s request, did it three more times.

  He finally sat back, lost in thought, his gaze still on the screen, though.

  She stared over at him. “You see anything that hits you?”

  “I see lots of things that hit me. But none more than a guy dressed like that, carrying weapons, who can apparently vanish into thin air.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts or magic.”

  “I don’t either, Mary. But I do know one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That this guy is not going to get away.”

  She kept her gaze on him, her expression becoming concerned. “You sure you’re not talking about Leopold?”

  He shrugged, his eyes seeming to stare at somewhere a million miles from here. “In a way, they’re all fucking Leopolds.”

  Chapter

  13

  WITH CAPTAIN MILLER’S blessing, Lancaster had arranged temporary credentials and an access badge for Decker. He had worked enough crime scenes to watch where he walked and not disturb or corrupt potential evidence. He looked over reports, studied the video some more, chatted briefly with department folks he knew, nodded to some he didn’t. While he was a long way from feeling comfortable working a crime scene again, he was starting to feel certain things coming back to him. His chief strength had always been observation. Looking around and seeing things, but not the way most people did. He had built convictions from small details that most overlooked, including, most significantly, the ones who had committed the crimes.

  And he had observed a lot here so far, and not all of it connected to the shootings.

  Principally he noted that the FBI was playing the usual peacock game. Strutting around and overwhelming everyone with their resources. But then again, he knew the police wouldn’t mind the help. The goal was the same. Get the guy who did this.

  He fell back into the routine that he had employed in countless other investigations. He walked and observed and asked questions and read more reports. His travels took him around the entire perimeter of the school several times. He looked at it from every possible vantage point. Then he went back inside the school and looked out of every window in the place. It was the darkest moments before dawn broke. He had been here for hours. It felt like ten minutes, because he really hadn’t come up with anything. But that was okay. Miracles and epiphanies rarely happened in the middle of criminal investigations. If you wanted something like that you needed to turn on the TV. Results in the real world came from slow, dogged work, compiling facts and building conclusions and deductions based on those facts. And a little luck never hurt either.

  A few minutes before dawn broke the transports were called up to start taking the bodies to the morgue. There was a loading dock in the rear of the school. The police had shielded it from view with a tarp and steel support poles. The vehicles drove one by one through a gap in this wall. Behind the tarp Decker knew the bodies were coming out, housed in black sturdy bags. The bodies had names but also numbers. They weren’t human beings anymore. They were pieces in a criminal investigation. Debbie Watson would be Vic-1. Her body had been the starting point in numbering everybody else who had fallen. Joe Kramer, the gym teacher, had been labeled Vic-2. And on the numbering went, down the list of dead.

  Decker leaned against the outside wall of the school near the loading dock and studied the blue tarp. And then he closed his eyes, because he equated the color blue with the slaughter of his family. He didn’t need to see color in the outside world. He had enough of it going on inside his head.

  Get back to basics, Amos. Slow and easy. You know how to do this. This was all you did for so many years. Mary is right. You can do this.

  Motive.

  It always began with that, because motive was just another way of saying, Why would you do something like this? Greed, jealousy, kicks, personal vendetta, perceived slight, insanity? The last was always tough to decipher, because ho

w did you read a mind that was deranged?

  But this guy had method. This guy had some inside knowledge of the school. This guy had taken great care to not allow even a piece of his skin to be observed. They didn’t even know if he was black or white. Although most mass murderers were white. And male. And with this shooter’s size and shape, he was most definitely a male.

  The face shield was an unusual step. It was not for defense. It couldn’t have stopped a bullet. It was for concealment.

  He watched as the last of the transport vehicles pulled away, rack lights on but no sirens engaged. The dead were in no hurry. Each body would be cut up as the medical examiner looked for clues. But the best they could hope for here would be ballistics. What type of bullet had killed them? He doubted the shooter had laid a finger on any of his victims. If you didn’t touch, you didn’t leave any usable trace behind. With the bullets they could at least, one day, match them to the guns that had ben used. And if the guns had an owner, the chain of title to this horrific event possibly could be traced.

  He walked back to the library, where Lancaster was sitting and going over case notes. She looked up as he approached.

  “I’m surprised you’re still here,” she said, stifling a yawn.

  “I have nowhere else I have to be,” said Decker.

  He sat next to her.

  “Did you do your normal walk-around?” she asked.

  He nodded. “But I didn’t really see anything.”

  “You will, Amos. Give it time.”

  “Earl with Sandy?”

  She nodded. “He’s used to it. Been a lot of long nights lately.” She glanced around the room. “But nothing like this.”

  Decker nodded slowly. Again, his chitchat component was at an end. “Do you have completed witness statements yet?”

  “I’ve been putting some of them on the computer. There’s not much there. But I haven’t talked to the wounded teacher yet. Odds are he won’t make it. And if he dies that’ll make nine vics total.”

  “Andy Jackson. How was he shot?”

  “Students in the class said he tried to stop the shooter.”

  “How?” asked Decker.

  “Ran at him. Put himself between the shooter and the students.”

  “Before or after he shot one of them?”

  “After.”

  Decker settled back and thought about this as Lancaster watched him.

  “Pretty brave of the guy,” said Lancaster.

  Decker didn’t respond to the statement.

  “I need to see the witness statements.” His tone was now brisk, confident.

  Lancaster noted this and allowed a tiny smile to escape her lips as she pulled them out for him.

  He went through each page of the statements. When he was done he flipped back to page two and then over to page ten of the witness statements before putting aside the notebook.

  “See anything?” asked Lancaster, who had been watching him off and on as she worked away.

  He rose. “I’ll be back.”

  “Decker!”

  But for a large man carrying a lot of extra weight, he could move faster than one would have expected. Perhaps a little of the freewheeling football player was left inside him. He closed the library door behind him and set off down the hall.

  Lancaster hadn’t followed him. Being his partner for ten years, she was well used to his doing this. Some bee would get in his bonnet and off he would go without a word to her or anyone else. She went back to her work.

  * * *

  Decker had gone ten paces when he stopped and glanced out a window overlooking the front parking area. It was starting to rain, he could see. He could also see a large group of candles seemingly floating in midair. They weren’t candles, of course. The rain would have doused them. They were cell phone lights. It was a vigil group out front. It seemed like the whole town of Burlington was out there, and maybe it was. And after what had happened here, maybe it should be.

  There had been a vigil outside his house the night after the murders. They had been real candles then. Plus a pile of flowers, signs, and stuffed animals. It had been meant as signs of support, love, solidarity, caring. That was all good. But the sight of that pile had left him sickened and disoriented. And mad with something even beyond grief.

  He turned away from the window and kept walking as the rain started to hammer down on the school’s roof.

  He could imagine the cell phones winking off as the group hastily put them away. Or maybe they would keep them out in the rain. Let them die too, as a sign of solidarity to those who had been lost inside this place.

  Decker passed a detective he knew in the hall. He was talking to someone in a suit whom Decker had seen before in the library; the man was FBI. The detective nodded at Decker.

  “Hear you’re consulting on the case, Amos. Good to see you.”

  Decker nodded hesitantly as he glanced at the FBI agent. The man was giving Decker the once-over, and the appraisal, Decker could tell from the man’s expression, did not turn out favorably.

  “Yeah,” was all Decker could manage in a gruff voice, before he hurried on.

  But then he put aside the awkward encounter, which his mind allowed him to do quite easily. He could compartmentalize at an astonishing level. It came from not giving a shit.

  And something did not make sense. That was the reason for his abrupt departure from the library.

  Page two of the witness statements.

  Melissa Dalton, aged seventeen and a junior, had been putting books away in her locker. The time had been early, 7:28, more than an hour before school officially began. She was here to take a makeup test she had missed due to an illness.

  Dalton had known the exact time because she had glanced at the clock on the wall above her locker, afraid that she would be late. She had perfect attendance throughout high school, with not even a tardy to mar her record. This was important to her, since her parents had said four years of such perfection would merit a hand-me-down car all her own when Dalton graduated.

  So 7:28.

  That’s when Melissa Dalton had heard something. And she had told Lancaster when Mary interviewed her.

  She had heard something one hour and two minutes before the bell would ring. Maybe twelve minutes after the bell rang, or at approximately 8:42, Debbie Watson would lose her face and her life when the shooter turned the corner and raised his shotgun. All because she had an upset stomach.

  But how could Melissa Dalton have heard what she did?

  Small observations can lead to large breakthroughs.

  He kept going.

  Chapter

  14

  DECKER STOPPED AND looked around. The gym was to the far left on the last hall on the first floor. Then classrooms, then the rear entrance. On the other side of the main corridor were more classrooms, the custodial space, and the rear loading dock off that. The main corridor ran front to back, splitting the first floor exactly in half, with three corridors running off that to the left and right, like straight branches off a tree trunk.

  Since only the middle hallway had exits on either end, that meant there were four sets of entry and exit doors, situated at all four points of the compass.

  He headed to the rear entrance and peered up at the camera. -->