“Sit on the bed.”
He looked at Decker and then Jamison, as though wondering when they were going to put a stop to this nonsense. Neither said anything.
Mars looked back at Davenport.
“Sit on the bed,” she said. “This won’t hurt. I promise.”
He sat. She stood in front of him and took a pen out of her pocket. She held it up in front of him at an angle that made him lift his gaze a bit.
“Can you keep your eyes on this pen?”
“This is silly.”
Decker said, “Melvin, just do it, okay? It’s worth a shot.”
Mars sighed and focused on the pen. “Okay, now what?”
“Just follow the pen.”
Davenport started to move the pen slowly up and down and then from side to side. She spoke in a low, conversational voice the entire time.
Mars did as she asked and his gaze went wherever the pen did. The movements were slow, rhythmic, and her voice began to modulate, matching the movements of the pen.
Then Mars shook his head. “This is stupid.”
Davenport kept the pen raised and said, “I know many athletes get into a zone before they play a game. Did you?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Pretend you’re getting ready to play a football game. Get your head right. Relax. But focus.” She glanced sideways at Decker. “You’re about to play Ohio State and run over Decker again.” She then pointed to the pen. “This is the zone, Melvin. You can get there. The big game. For all the marbles. Just concentrate. This pen is the goal line. Go get it.”
Mars settled back and stared at the pen, his gaze still slightly elevated due to the angle at which Davenport was holding it.
In a whisper to Decker she said, “Give him some football direction, low even tones.”
Decker looked wildly uncertain about this.
Davenport said in a soothing voice, “You can do it, Amos. Just like when you were talking to Tommy Montgomery.”
Decker nodded and began speaking in a halting low voice as he gave Mars the scenario on the field: The ball was snapped. Mars took the handoff. The A-gap was clogged, the B-gap a possibility. Mars had to read the linebacker’s eyes, strong safety coming up on the left, right guard just had to maintain his block for another second, a glimpse of daylight.
Davenport motioned for Decker to stop talking.
As Decker had been speaking, Davenport had slowed the movements of the pen and Mars had matched this with his gaze. Finally, she held the pen steady in the air and Mars stared at it, his eyes glassy and fixed, his features relaxed.
“Melvin, can you hear me?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered, his voice unlike his usual one.
Davenport slowly lowered the pen, but Mars’s gaze remained fixed on the same spot.
She said, “You’re in college at the University of Texas. Do you remember that?”
He nodded.
“You’re home now with your parents, though. Okay?”
“Yes.”
“This is after ESPN showed your parents on TV. They found out, right?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Somebody at the pawnshop told my dad. He was pissed.”
“They’re acting strange now, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell us how?”
“Nervous. And angry. My dad was really upset.”
“Because it showed him on TV?”
“Yes.”
“Did he say why that had upset him?”
“No.”
“What about your mother? Did she talk about it?”
“She said to just leave Dad alone and he’d be okay. She…she didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Did you see your father doing anything unusual during that time?”
“He worked late a lot. And he didn’t eat. And he drank a lot.”
“Did he and your mother argue?”
“I could hear them yelling, but I couldn’t really hear what they said.”
“Could you hear anything?”
Mars’s brow furrowed. “Some Spanish word. Funny one. My mom said it.”
“What was it?”
The brow furrowed more deeply. “Ch-chocha.”
“Chocha, you’re sure?”
Mars nodded. “Chocha. I looked it up. It actually has a couple of meanings in Spanish. It could refer to a prostitute, or”—here he squirmed a bit—“or the private parts of the female anatomy. I didn’t know what they were talking about. It made no sense.”
“Can you remember anything else about that time?”
Mars was silent for a few moments and Davenport waited patiently.
“I came home one night and he was sitting in his chair. Mom wasn’t there.”
“Okay, go on.”
“I asked him how he was doing. And he looked at me in a way…”
“Yes.”
Tears had appeared in Mars’s eyes. “In a way that scared me. Like…like he hated me.”
“Okay. Did you talk to him?”
Mars shook his head. “I was scared. I was going to go up to my room, but then he said something.”
“What did he say?”
“He said…he said he was sorry.”
Davenport glanced at Decker and Jamison. By her expression, she had evidently not been expecting this answer. But Decker didn’t look surprised.
She turned back to Mars. “Did he say what he was sorry about?”
Mars shook his head. “Then he just got up and walked out.”
“Do you have any idea what he was referring to?”
Mars shook his head again. “I asked my mother about it the next day.”
“And what did she say?”
“She just started to cry, and then she ran out of the room.”
“Did you tell the police about this?”
“No. I didn’t think to. I mean, I didn’t know what was wrong. I never thought that was connected to whoever killed them.”
Davenport looked at Decker. “Anything else?” she whispered.
Decker stepped forward but kept out of Mars’s line of sight. In Davenport’s ear he said something. She started, looked at him strangely, and then turned to Mars.
“Melvin, did your father…did your father ever tell you that he loved you?”
Jamison shot Decker a surprised look.
Mars kept staring straight ahead. “No. He never did.”
“Okay. When I count to three you’re going to wake up. You’re not going to remember anything that we discussed. Okay?”
Mars nodded.
She counted to three and his eyes slowly refocused. He looked up at them.
“I told you that you couldn’t hypnotize me,” he said.
“Chocha,” said Decker.
Mars shot him a glance. “What?”
“You were hypnotized. Do you remember your mom saying the word chocha while she and your dad were arguing?”
Mars looked surprised and then slowly nodded. “Yeah, now that you mention it, I do. Do you think that’s important?”
“It could be.”
Decker looked over at a corner of the room. “Those scratches on the floor? What was there?”
“A bookshelf.”
“What sort of books were on it?”
“Different kinds. From when I was little to when I got older. I didn’t read as much as a teenager.” He suddenly smiled.
“What?” said Decker quickly.
“It’s nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s just that my dad would read a book to me when I was little. It was funny, you know, this big, tough guy reading a book to a little boy.”
“What sort of books?” asked Decker.
“It was just the one book.” Mars smiled again. “He would even act it out, you know, all goofy like. Never did that any other time.”
“What book was it?” asked Decker in a very serious tone.
Mars l
aughed. “The Three Little Pigs. He told me he was the Big Bad Wolf, gonna eat those little pigs up. Sometimes he got into it so much it kinda scared me.”
Decker stared at him for a long moment while Jamison and Davenport glanced at him.
“Decker, what is it?” asked Jamison.
Mars added, “It was just a picture book, Decker. A fairy tale.”
“Yeah,” said Decker, evidently lost in thought.
His phone buzzed. He looked down at the screen. “It’s Bogart.” He answered, listened, and asked a couple of questions. “Thanks, Agent Bogart, I really appreciate this.” He clicked off and looked at the others.
“Well?” said Jamison. “Don’t keep us in suspense.”
“Bogart got an answer from the U.S. Marshals.”
“So my parents were in Witness Protection,” said Mars numbly.
“No,” said Decker. “They weren’t.”
CHAPTER
35
THE TWO WOMEN stared back at him. One grown, one still a child and who would forever remain so, while the other would not grow a minute older.
Because both were now dead.
Decker sat in a chair in his motel room and stared down at the photo of his wife and daughter.
He took out the picture whenever he was feeling sad or hopeless and simply needed to see their faces. He would never have to worry about forgetting them. About their memories fading into the dim recesses of his mind.
His mind had no dim recesses.
It was like Times Square all the time.
He was feeling claustrophobic, as though a compression of his entire being was taking place and he had no power to stop it.
The news that neither Roy nor Lucinda Mars had ever been in Witness Protection had been a staggering blow. He had been so certain that he was right about that. Yet Bogart had checked and then double-checked. And the U.S. Marshals would have had no reason or basis to lie. If they had lost a protectee they would have documented it seven ways from Sunday.
He had leads, he had developments, but that was all. Yet none of these things appeared likely to give him what he so desperately wanted.
The truth.
At times it seemed the most elusive thing in all of creation.
He had notched another belt hole as his appetite seemed to weaken along with the prospects of solving the case. Given a choice, he would gladly have packed the pounds back on to find out who had killed the Marses.
Even if they hadn’t been in the U.S. Marshals’ care, they could still be running from a dark past. In all likelihood they were. He just had to find out what that past was. And to do that he needed information.
That was the first part.
The second part was figuring out who had paid off the Montgomerys and why.
He rose and went to the window. The rain had started again, pushing the heat away. The day was overcast, chilly and miserable. Matching his feelings perfectly. It wasn’t supposed to rain much in this part of Texas, but the current weather was certainly bucking that trend.
Because of his perfect memory it seemed that some people regarded him as a machine. And while his social skills were not close to what they had once been, and in some ways he did appear to be unfeeling, even robotic, Decker did still feel things. He grew sad and depressed. And there was nothing his perfect memory could do about that. If anything, it made it worse.
He was surprised by the knock on the door.
“Yeah?”
“It’s me.”
He slipped the photo into his pocket and opened the door to see Mars standing there.
“Got a minute?”
“Yeah.”
Mars came in and they sat a foot apart from each other. Before Decker could ask him what he wanted, Mars took out something and handed it across.
Decker looked down at the photo.
The man was very tall. His hair was brown with a bit of white and curled around his head. The face was rugged but good-looking. The nose had been broken and not reset very well. The eyes were flat, appeared lifeless. The mouth was small and drawn as a slash across the lower part of the face.
The woman could not have created a greater contrast. She was tall and lean and her luxuriant hair cascaded down around her broad shoulders. Her skin was dark brown and flawless. The face held no imperfections that Decker could see. The eyes danced with life. The mouth swept up into a beaming smile that was infectious. Indeed, Decker felt his own mouth tug upward as he looked at her image.
He glanced up at Mars. “Your parents, obviously. This was the picture you mentioned before, the one you had taken?”
Mars nodded.
“Where’d you get it?”
“Always had it. Took it to prison with me.”
“You could have shown it to me before.”
Mars wiped at his eyes. “Yeah, I could’ve.”
“So why now?”
“Because I wanted you to see them as real people, not just little puzzle pieces, Decker. And I wanted you to see my mom’s smile. And my dad’s eyes. I just wanted you to know that…that they existed.”
Decker looked back down at the photo, his features a bit strained by the other man’s frank admission.