Memory Man

by David Baldacci

  hit her so hard they thought they’d killed her. She was unconscious and bleeding and everything. And Giles told me she stopped breathing. So they got a little scared and they threw her in the Dumpster behind the school and then they all took off. But she come to and dragged herself outta there. She went to the cops and reported it. Like I said, the chief was my old buddy, owed me for things in the past. Called me. Her parents knew, of course. She told ’em. I scraped every dime I could get my hands on to keep it quiet.” His face turned into a mask of fury. “The Wyatts sucked me dry. The bastards.”

  “Is that the way you saw it?” asked Bogart. “A negotiation?”

  “It’s the way they saw it. Look around. I live in this shitpile now. Wife long dead. It killed her. She knew. Killed her dead. Took every penny I got. Sold every property I had, all my assets, gone. The damn Wyatts probably built some mansion somewhere, hell, I don’t know. And they were the ones brought that freak into this world. And I live here after busting my hump for sixty years. This is all I got to show for it.” He looked around. “My fridge is twenty years old. Haven’t had a new car in forever. One out there don’t even run.”

  “Well, I’m sure it’s been painful for you,” said Bogart dryly.

  Decker said, “But why do anything? Why pay any money? It was they-said, she-said. The whole town was against her. The cops could have gotten rid of the evidence. Protecting their own. And the chief was your buddy. The Wyatts suckered you.”

  Evers puffed on his cigarette and shook his head resignedly. “No sir, they weren’t bluffing. They had evidence.”

  “How?” asked Bogart.

  “Before Belinda Wyatt went home she walked herself on over to the damn hospital and they did a rape and assault kit. No question she’d been raped and beat up bad. Had my boy’s evidence on it. And everybody else’s. DNA, blood, and skin under her fingernails, all that shit. Dead to rights. Then, like I said, Belinda told her parents what happened.”

  “But they didn’t call the cops,” said Decker.

  “No, they knew the lay of the land in Mercy. The Everses were at the top. Everybody else, not so much. No one here woulda given a damn, but the Wyatts played it smart. Had to hand it to them. They threatened to turn everything over to the state police, the FBI even. Well, I had to do something.” He finished his cigarette and stared over at Decker. “Couldn’t let my only son go down over messing up some piece of trash.”

  Decker said, “I thought you were of the mind to live and let live? The Lord makes ’em in lots of different ways? What will be will be?”

  Evers looked at him cagily. “Yeah, well, the Lord wasn’t going to get my boy off a rape charge if we let it get outside’a Mercy, was he?”

  “What were the circumstances of your son’s disappearance?” asked Decker.

  “Pretty damn simple. Went out drinking one night and never came back.”

  “Is he married, have any kids?”

  “Divorced. Wife’s gone and took the kids. Got his ass kicked off the police force. He lived here with me.”

  Well, that’s some justice, thought Decker.

  “Why all this interest now?” Evers wanted to know.

  “Have you received anything that seemed off, weird, inexplicable?” asked Decker, ignoring the old man’s question.

  Evers thought for a moment. “Well, there’s that one thing.”

  “What thing?” said Decker quickly.

  “Hell, I’ll go fetch it.” The old man struggled up and was gone for a minute.

  Bogart looked at Decker. “Well, this explains why Wyatt is doing what she’s doing. Revenge. She picked Mansfield because of what happened to her at the high school here.”

  Lancaster added, “And she picked her victims the same way. Mirrored the people who nearly killed her. Six football players, the coach, and the assistant principal.”

  Jamison looked at Decker. “But it still doesn’t explain why she came after you.”

  Decker stared back at her. “No, it doesn’t.”

  Evers returned with a single piece of paper. “Somebody slipped this under my door a few months back. Never could make heads nor tails of it.”

  He handed it to Decker. The others gathered around to look at it.

  It was a printout of a Web page. Its title was “Justice Denied.” Underneath was a list of names, and next to each was a crime: murder, rape, assault, kidnapping.

  At the bottom of the page there was a declaration. “Each of these crimes was committed by a man in a police uniform. And every single one was covered up. But we will not forget. Justice will not be denied.”

  Decker quickly read down the list of names until he came to one that made him stop. “We just found how Belinda Wyatt and Leopold hooked up.”

  All three of them stared at the names: Caroline and Deidre Leopold. Next to their names was the crime committed against them.

  Murder.

  Chapter

  60

  DURING THE FLIGHT back to Burlington they all read over the case notes of the Leopolds’ murders in a village twenty kilometers from Vienna. At the request of the FBI the Austrian police had also sent along information on Leopold’s background.

  “There is nothing in here about cops possibly killing Leopold’s family,” said Lancaster.

  “Well, if it was true, I doubt they’d put that in the file,” said Bogart.

  Decker, who had been reading over the autopsy reports on the two victims, looked up at Bogart. “You have any string on this jet?”

  “String?”

  “Or rope.”

  They found some rope in an emergency kit stowed in a storage bin, and Bogart watched as Decker took lengths of rope and started forming knots out of them.

  “What’s that?” asked Bogart.

  “It might be something or it might not,” was all Decker would say.

  Later he read down the “Justice Denied” paper that someone had left at Clyde Evers’s door. Then he looked at the knots he had formed with the rope and then at the page. He read over the Leopold murder file, again absorbing every bit of information. Finished, he closed his eyes and began putting the pieces together. His eyes were still closed when the jet touched down.

  “Amos, time to go,” said Lancaster.

  As they drove away in the SUV, Bogart said, “My people will trace this website and see what we can find out.”

  Lancaster nodded and then glanced at Decker, who was staring out the window.

  “What do you think, Amos?”

  He was sitting in his seat still holding the knotted lengths of rope.

  “I’m thinking that a lot of people are dead because of a bunch of ignorant folks.”

  “Wyatt and Leopold made choices, bad ones,” said Bogart. “Horrible ones. They’re responsible for this and no one else.”

  “And human beings have limits,” said Decker. “And you can say all you want about the world being unfair and people rising above the atrocities done to them, but everyone is different. Some are hard as steel, but some are fragile, and you never know which one you’re going to get.”

  “They killed your family, Decker,” barked Bogart.

  Lancaster and Jamison exchanged nervous glances.

  Decker didn’t look at the FBI agent. “Which is why we’re going to catch them and their lives will end either in prison or in a death chamber. But don’t expect me to fully blame Wyatt for this. Because I can’t, and I won’t.”

  “I wonder where Giles Evers is,” said Jamison.

  “In hell, I hope,” replied Decker.

  * * *

  Decker asked to be dropped off at the Residence Inn. He walked up the steps to the second floor and gazed back as the SUV rolled out of the parking lot. Jamison was staring out the window at him. She gave him a tiny wave.

  He didn’t return it.

  He went into his room and sat on the bed, the springs sagging under his girth.

  He closed his eyes and let his mind whir back to two images of the same pe

rson but in different situations and garb.

  Billy the waitress at the bar.

  Billy the mop boy at the 7-Eleven.

  He had gotten a good look at Billy the mop boy’s face, not so with Billy the waitress. He scrunched his eyes tighter as though refocusing a camera. The chin was the same on both. The line of the jaw. And the hands. People always forgot about the hands, but they could be as distinctive as a fingerprint if you knew what to look for.

  Long, delicate fingers, short right pinky, no nail polish on the waitress, split nail on the left index, small wart on the right thumb. Same person absolutely.

  He opened his eyes wide in surprise.

  He had just seen Billy. In color. For the first time.

  Gray.

  For him, as for many folks, it was a confusing color. It lent itself to no particular interpretation. It was a color that could go one way or the other. People desperately wanted the world to be clear-cut in black and white. It made life so much easier: Tough decisions faded away; everything was nicely organized and cataloged. And so were people. But the world was not like that. And neither were the people who inhabited it. At least for those who bothered to explore its complexity.

  Its grayness.

  Now, for him, Leopold was yellow. Yellow was not ambivalent. Yellow was hostile, cunning. Sometimes colors were spot on. As clear-cut as numbers, actually.

  The pieces were falling into place.

  But why target me? What the hell did I ever do to you, Belinda/Billy? What?

  Their only contact had been at the institute twenty years ago. His family had been killed more than sixteen months ago. Quite a gap. Why the wait? Because she had run into Sebastian Leopold during that time? And he had given her a way to get back at Decker? Avenge herself? But for what?

  The institute. Ground zero for them both. Interaction limited. Words spoken directly to each other? Exactly none.

  He closed his eyes again. He had to get this right. He had to be thorough. Wyatt had a reason for everything. She had been amazingly meticulous. The symmetry was spellbinding in its depravity. In its horror. So there had to be a reason for this too.

  His DVR whirred back and forth. Images flashed past with astonishing speed, but he missed nothing. He saw everything that was there as though it was happening to him right then and at normal speed. No, in slow motion. Every word, every moment, everything moving at the pace of a snail.

  In the group sessions he had spoken of his future. His hopes and dreams. But so had everyone else. Well, everyone except Belinda. She had been given the opportunity, but had not volunteered any information about her future plans. She apparently didn’t have any future plans, at least not then.

  Well, that changed.

  Some knew of Decker’s past, of his trauma, his near death on the playing field. He had not known of Belinda’s plight, though perhaps she didn’t know that. She might have thought that if she knew about him, he knew about her. But what did that matter, really?

  He opened his eyes, his brow creasing with the failure of his mind—his extraordinary brain-traumatized, bastardized mind that had been born to him after his death and resurrection—to solve the one conundrum that would make all the other pieces fall into place.

  He left because he could not stay here.

  Thirty minutes later he walked into the Burlington police station. Captain Miller was there. Bogart had already briefed him on the trip to Utah, Miller informed him.

  “You don’t look so good, Amos,” Miller said.

  “Should I?” Decker said back.

  Miller tapped his head. “It’s not coming?”

  “It’s there. I just can’t make it tell me what I need to know.”

  “You have an exceptional mind, but it’s still a lot to figure out.”

  “Well, someone has to. And if it’s not me, it has to be someone else.”

  “You think they might pull up their tent and leave?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What are they waiting for?” asked Miller.

  “Me.”

  He went down to the evidence locker and filled out the necessary paperwork with Miller’s authorization to step inside the locker and look through the evidence gathered thus far. Since he was no longer with the police, someone had to accompany him.

  That person was Sally Brimmer, who explained, “It’s not like I have a higher priority than this case, Decker.”

  They sat at a table as Decker went over every evidence bag, many of them twice. He finally came to his uniform the second time around.

  “Technically, you should have turned in your badge,” admonished Brimmer. “It’s no good anymore anyway. The way they defaced it.”

  Decker picked up the bag and looked through the plastic at the badge with the X cut through it.

  X-ing me out, he thought. Like you did Giles Evers. He was wearing a uniform when he took you under false pretenses, Belinda. In a sense they were all in uniform. The cop, the football players, the coach, even the assistant principal, cloaked in the authority of the school. You were surrounded by people who should have protected you, but they didn’t. Instead, they destroyed you. Starting with a cop. With a badge. Just like mine.

  He rubbed the metal through the plastic. Then he stopped. It was like rubbing a genie’s lamp. He had made a silly wish, never thinking it would come true. But it just had.

  The last piece had just fallen into place.

  And Amos Decker finally understood what he had done to deserve all this.

  Chapter

  61

  HE WALKED INTO the library at Mansfield High with the certain knowledge that he had to do this.

  There were about a half dozen people working here, but Lancaster, Jamison, and Bogart were not among them. It was late. Perhaps they were catching some sleep. His phone buzzed. Surprisingly, it was Bogart. He had some information on the “Justice Denied” matter. And he also told Decker that the Wyatts had nearly $10 million in liquid assets but that monies had been funneled out of the accounts at the rate of $1 million per month for the last nine months. Decker listened to it all.

  Bogart said, “What do you make of that?”

  “That it all makes sense.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Exactly what I said.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In my room getting ready to go to sleep.”

  “I’ll check back in the morning,” said Bogart.

  “Right,” said Decker.

  He sat down at one of the laptops and logged in using the password he had previously been given. He went to the “Justice Denied” website. There was a program there to set up personal messaging accounts so that people could correspond privately with the organizers of the site. He set up a username and password, filled out a form, and made a request.

  They had to monitor it, he thought. There was no way they could -->