Memory Man

by David Baldacci

  Bogart pointed at the door of the morgue. “He left a message on…on my agent that was directed at you.”

  “I know he did.”

  “Which means you must know this guy. You must have done something to this guy. He calls you bro.” Bogart shouted out this last part.

  Decker gave one last heaving breath and pushed off the wall, standing on his own. “I don’t know this guy. And I’m not his bro.”

  “You say you never forget. Well, apparently neither does this guy. You did something. Maybe you didn’t realize what it was, but he’s killed…he’s killed…” Bogart’s voice trailed off and he lowered his weapon and then stared at the pavement shaking his head, his expression one of complete despair.

  Decker rubbed at the cut and bruise on his cheek where Bogart had punched him. His tongue pushed against the loosened tooth.

  “He’s killed a dozen people, including my family and Special Agent Nora Lafferty,” said Decker.

  Bogart glanced up at him and nodded slowly. “Including Nora.” Bogart put his weapon away. “Look, I’m sorry I…If you want to press charges, go ahead. It was indefensible.”

  Decker said, “I’m not sure what happened, other than I stumbled and fell and took you with me. Pretty clumsy. But then I’m a big, fat, out-of-shape guy. I think you might need to dry-clean your suit and see to that cut on your head.”

  Bogart rubbed at some dirt on his sleeve and then glanced at Decker. “Where do we go from here?”

  “With all we’ve done we’ve really gotten nowhere. You find anything useful at the Army base?”

  “Nothing. It was a petri dish of crap. All degraded to mush. And the Pentagon has yet to get back to us. Not sure what they could add anyway. What about that story in the paper?”

  “I talked to the reporter.”

  “Lancaster told us. Gave us the IP info. My guys are tracking it, no luck so far.”

  “I doubt it will lead anywhere. Too obvious.”

  “So we’ve still got nothing, then?” said Bogart miserably.

  “We have a lot of things, if we can make sense of them. We have Sebastian Leopold.”

  “But he had alibis for both sets of murders.”

  “But not Lafferty’s.”

  “So you’re saying he’s working with someone? That’s what you meant when you said no one can be in two places at the same time?”

  Decker nodded.

  “But how can you be sure he killed Nora?”

  “I can’t. But I don’t think it was Leopold who carved those words in her.”

  “Why?”

  “I met Leopold. I would’ve remembered this guy if I’d seen him before. But I don’t, which means I didn’t. That leaves his partner. This guy wouldn’t have allowed Leopold to do it. It was personal. I’m his bro. No one else. He’s the one with the beef against me.”

  “But Decker, how could you have run across this other guy and not remember him? If he hates you so much that he’s slaughtering people?”

  “I can’t answer that because I have no answer,” admitted Decker. “But I promise you that I will.”

  Chapter

  34

  DECKER STARED UP at the front of the bar. Then he looked on the right side of the façade and then on the left. The buildings here were brick and dilapidated.

  He walked down the stairs and into the dark, smoky interior.

  He gazed around and saw two working-class men at a booth in the back, both hefting beer mugs. There was a woman alone at a counter-height round table with a glass of white wine in one hand and a half-smoked cigarette in the other. As he watched she placed her cigarette in a black plastic ashtray and set her wineglass down, pulled a compact and lipstick from her purse, and redid her mouth.

  Decker passed by them all and walked up to the bar. The same barman was there. Decker sat and ordered a Coors. The barman poured out the draft, skimmed off the foam on top with a butter knife, and slid it across, in return for which Decker passed him a fiver and told him to keep the change. This got the man’s attention.

  “You were in here before,” said the barman.

  Decker nodded and sipped his beer. “I was. With the other guy.”

  “Yeah, that other guy. Weirdo.”

  “Has he been back in?”

  “Nah.” The man started to wipe down the mahogany bar using a rag with a circular motion briskly applied.

  “Had he been in before?”

  “Couple times.”

  “You ever talk to him?’

  “He never talked to nobody. Except you.”

  “He live around here?”

  “Don’t know. Only saw his back leaving the place. Never saw him past that.”

  “I don’t see that waitress around.”

  The barman chuckled. “That’s right.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Her?” He chuckled harder and then stopped wiping, put his elbows on the bar, leaned across, and said, “You call it a her. Maybe I don’t.”

  “Then what do you call it?”

  The barman pointed a finger at Decker. “Now that’s a damn good question. I don’t do the hiring here. I just pour the drinks and wipe stuff down and throw the occasional drunk bastard out the door.”

  “Who hired her?”

  “Management, whoever they are. Place has been sold four times in three years. Only constant is yours truly, and I wouldn’t be here ’cept I can’t find nothing else that pays better.”

  “So are you saying she was a guy in drag?”

  “Or something, yeah. Don’t know for sure. And I wasn’t about to check to confirm. I don’t hit from that side of the plate.”

  Decker closed his eyes and the frames flipped through his head.

  Tall, thin, blonde curls.

  That hid pretty much all of her face.

  Or his face.

  And maybe the Adam’s apple, the surefire giveaway. Only surgery could take care of that.

  “You have any info on the person? Must have given a name, address. Stuff for payroll?”

  “Management has all that. And they’re not even local. Maybe even another state. Think they rolled up a bunch of businesses and combined it into one entity. Economy of scale or some shit like that. I bet they’re making a crapload of money, me not so much.”

  “So none of those records are kept here?”

  “No.”

  “Who interviewed the person for the job?”

  “Came from an agency.”

  “You know which one?”

  The barman looked at Decker. “Why, you hit from that side of the plate?”

  Decker pulled out his police credentials. “Working a case. This person might be someone I need to talk to.”

  The man studied the credentials and said, “Okay. Matter of fact, I don’t know which one. It just showed up one day and started working.”

  “And you didn’t question that?”

  “Hey, we needed a waitress. The other one didn’t show. Said she’d been sent by the temp agency that management uses. So I put it to work.”

  “When was this?”

  “Day before you came in with that other guy.”

  “And if she hadn’t been sent by the temp agency?”

  “Well, why the hell would it lie about that?”

  “You have a restroom here just for employees?”

  “Yeah, in the back.”

  “The person ever use it?”

  “I’m sure it did. Everyone has to take a pee or something more, right? Either standing up or sitting down.”

  “Show me.”

  The barman led him down a rear hall to a battered door marked RESTROOM.

  “You got any duct tape?” Decker asked.

  “In the back.”

  “Get it for me.”

  The confused barman left and returned a minute later with a roll.

  Decker proceeded to tape off the door with long strips crisscrossing the doorway.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

asked the barman.

  “I’ll have a forensics team here in five minutes. No one goes in.”

  “But what if I have to use the facilities?”

  “Use the one the paying customers do. And you’re going to be asked to give a description of it, so start racking your memory for every little detail.”

  Decker made the call to Lancaster.

  She said, “I’ll send them right now. How was your talk with Bogart?”

  “Predictable.”

  He clicked off and walked outside.

  He had solved two things by coming here.

  First, the waitress had taken the photograph of him and Leopold at the bar and sent it and the story elements to Alexandra Jamison. She was the only one who could have done it. The intent had been to ruin Decker’s reputation, to the extent he had one. But more than that, they wanted him to maybe even start questioning the truth.

  Second, she had left the bar, gotten a car, and picked up Leopold when he left the bar. It must have been a hybrid or electric car, because Decker had not heard a car engine and he would have.

  In the frames in his mind there was only the barman left that day when Leopold had exited. The waitress wasn’t there. Because she’d gone for the car.

  * * *

  A man in women’s clothing.

  Or maybe a woman who used to be a man dressed in women’s clothing. It was like that movie he’d seen years ago with James Garner and Julie Andrews, Victor Victoria.

  And maybe the waitress was Sebastian Leopold’s partner in crime.

  Decker had not looked at the person’s feet, but now desperately wished he had. But if he had to guess, she would have been wearing a size nine. He tried to estimate her height in his mind. He had been sitting. She might have been wearing heels. He rolled the frames through.

  Maybe five-ten or -eleven. And slim, with narrow shoulders and hips.

  A long way from six-two and over two hundred pounds with shoulders as wide as Decker’s.

  But not inconceivable. When the will was there, anything was possible. And it seemed anything had been possible here.

  He waited for the forensics team. When they showed, he told them exactly what he wanted done. Lancaster had instructed them to follow Decker’s orders to the letter. A sketch artist sat down with the barman.

  Then Decker set off for the next place.

  Because something else had just occurred to him.

  Chapter

  35

  SHOP CLASS.

  Shop class that never was this year because the teacher had quit before the school year started.

  Decker had wondered if there was another reason—other than the passageway coming up in the storage room off the classroom—for the shooter to want access to this particular space.

  He stepped through and into the storage room in the rear. He eyed the mounds of junk from old projects left behind like dinosaur bones waiting for an archaeological dig.

  Well, Decker intended to dig.

  He started at the top of each mound and worked his way to the bottom.

  He found nothing useful. So he sat on the floor and thought about it. He went through the possible steps in his head. Up here, he decided, would not be pragmatic. The shooter would need more privacy, more of a buffer zone.

  He left the storage room and went down the steps to the other room that had the false wall made of balsa wood. The junk pile here had been moved to the side by the shooter.

  Decker didn’t have to dig very deeply through all the crap.

  He pulled out the object and held it up.

  A chicken-wire and leather contraption with padding built into it. The form was instantly recognizable to an old jock like Decker.

  Football shoulder pads.

  But much more than that. The structure went all the way down to the waist and included supports for the arms, broadening and thickening at every point. It was built on hinges that swung open when he undid two latches, like a shorter version of the Iron Maiden torture device from medieval times. It was like an entire torso that one could strap on and become basically twice one’s size.

  He opened the contraption fully and tried to put it on. The thing was, though, he was already nearly the same size, so it wouldn’t fit him. But it would fit someone half his size. Instant giant. He marveled at how flexible and malleable were the wire and leather and straps holding it all together. It would have to be this flexible, because the person had had to both move and shoot while wearing it.

  One-forty became two-hundred-plus pounds. Slim became the build of a defensive tackle.

  Next in the mounds of junk he found pads that strapped onto the legs, adding weight and depth to the lower frame, matching the enhancements to the upper.

  Okay, that solved the question of literal bulk.

  Now came the question of height.

  He kept digging.

  And found it wedged between two old lamps and a table made partly from a tree stump.

  He held it up, measured it with his eye. It was a boot with no heel, but rather a thickened sole running the length of the footwear. Wearing it would raise a person’s height about three or so inches. And he concluded that it would do so more effectively than a heel. Three-inch heels would severely limit one’s agility. This was simply like walking on a level raised platform. He placed the boot against his own shoe. Far smaller. Nine or nine and a half.

  He found the matching one a few seconds later.

  He put the boots on the floor. Even though he couldn’t wedge his far larger feet inside them, he was able to stand on top of them.

  Six-five instantly became six-eight.

  The same way five-ten or five-eleven became six-two.

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