died. But now they were back.
Wonderful.
And the threes had added a new dimension. A trio of knives was coming off each of the digits’ stems. No, not funny at all.
“Let me know if they crack the code,” he said as the threes charged forward, knives at the ready.
Then he turned left and headed down the street.
“Don’t you want a ride home?” asked Lancaster.
Decker kept walking, his hands shoved deeply into his coat pockets.
He didn’t need a ride. He needed to think.
He looked at his feet to avoid staring into the faces of the legions of numbers coming at him from out of the gloom.
What did Debbie Watson have that their shooter needed? Guns? No. Cammie gear? Maybe. But why couldn’t he have brought that on his own? He didn’t need her for that.
The heart and the picture. She was in love. She had a crush on the guy. Would do anything for him. But would she sacrifice her classmates? The picture of the cammie man had not included any weapons. Had Debbie not known what the actual plan was to be? So why had she come out of her classroom to meet the guy?
He lifted his eyes, saw the threes flying head-on at him, and lowered his gaze once more. When he had done stakeouts or pulled shifts at night he had worn special glasses that tinted the darkness into a golden color. Gold for him was a sky full of geese. No threes to bother him. He had lost the glasses a long time ago. Now the threes were back and they were armed. He would need to get new glasses.
He stopped walking, leaned against a tree, closed his eyes, dialed up his mental DVR, and replayed everything he had seen in the Watsons’ house. The spool unwound in his head and then he slowed the pace of the mental frames. And then he stopped his DVR and a row of images stared at him like figurines on a fireplace mantel. Actually, the image was quite literal.
They were on the fireplace mantel.
Decker turned around and walked quickly back to the Watsons’ house. He knocked and George answered.
“Did you forget something?” George asked, sounding a little annoyed.
“Pictures on your mantel. I saw them earlier. Can you walk me through them?”
“Pictures on the mantel?” said George with a perplexed look. “Walk you through them?”
Decker stepped inside the house, forcing the much smaller man to step back quickly.
“I’m assuming they’re family members?”
“Yes. But what does that have to do with anything?”
“I’ve worked cases long enough to know that it’s the one thing you let pass that ends up holding the answer you need. We can’t afford any lapses here, Mr. Watson, I’m sure you can understand that. If we’re going to find whoever killed Debbie and the others.”
What can the man say to that other than agree?
Watson slowly nodded, though he still looked unconvinced. “Okay, sure, follow me.”
He led Decker into the small living room and over to the mantel that topped an old brick fireplace that had mortar leaching from the seams.
“Where do you want to start?”
Decker pointed to the picture on the far left. “With him.”
“Okay, that was my wife’s father, Ted Knolls. He died about two years ago. Heart attack.”
“What did he do for a living?”
“What the hell does that have to—”
Decker cut him off. “Just tell me what he did for a living.”
Decker looked menacingly down at the smaller man. He was a grizzly against a chipmunk, which was exactly how he wanted Watson to see it.
Watson took a step back, changed color, and looked at the photo. “He was a long-haul trucker. Bad diet, no exercise. He was as big as a house when he collapsed on his front lawn picking up the newspaper. He was dead before he hit the grass.” He eyed Decker’s massive frame when he said this. “But that’s all he did, he drove a truck back and forth across the Midwest and down to Texas and back.”
“Was he close to Debbie?”
Watson self-consciously rubbed at his malformed arm. “No, not really. I mean, we saw them at holidays. But, to tell the truth, things weren’t good between us and them. My mother-in-law never warmed to me.”
“And the man next to him? That picture looks pretty old.”
“That’s my grandfather, Simon Watson. He’s been gone, oh, a good six years. He was a young man in that picture.”
“So Debbie’s great-grandfather,” said Decker, and Watson nodded.
“He lived to over ninety years old. Smoked and drank and didn’t give a damn, as he liked to say.”
“But Debbie knew him if he’s only been gone six years?”
“Oh, yes. In fact he lived with us the last five years of his life.”
“So she would have spent time with him?”
“I’m sure she did. Debbie was still a kid then and Gramps had had a pretty interesting life. Fought in World War II and then the Korean War. Then he left the service and went to work for the civilian side of the Defense Department.”
“Doing what?”
“Well, he worked at the military base here when it was open.”
“The one next to Mansfield High School? McDonald Army Base?”
“That’s right.”
“What did he do there?”
“He had a series of jobs. His training was in engineering and construction. So he worked on the facilities and plant side.”
“Do you know the dates?”
“Come on, what does this have to do with anything?”
“I’m just looking for leads, Mr. Watson. The dates?”
“I can’t tell you for certain.” He paused and thought about it. “He left the regular Army in the sixties. Then he went to McDonald probably around 1968 or ’69. It must have been ’69. I remember associating it with the astronauts walking on the moon. Then he worked there until he retired. About twenty years later.”
“And the base closed eight years ago.”
“That sounds about right.”
“That wasn’t a question, Mr. Watson, it did close eight years ago, on a Monday. There was sleet that day.”
Watson looked at him strangely and then coughed. “If you say so. I can’t remember what I was doing last week. Anyway, it was part of a Pentagon base realignment and Burlington lost out. I heard tell most of the operations moved east, maybe to Virginia. Closer to Uncle Sam and his dollars in D.C.”
“So, presumably Simon talked about his work at the base with you, with Debbie?”
“Oh, yes, I mean the parts he could talk about. Some of it was classified, I guess you’d call it.”
“Classified?”
George’s features eased to a grin. “Well, I don’t think they did nukes or anything there. But the military always has its share of secrets.”
“So what did Simon talk to you about? I mean with the base?”
“Some of the history of it. People he met. Some of the work he did. They kept adding on to the base for years. Building, building, building. All the people who worked there sent their kids to Mansfield for high school. His son—my father—went there. So did I. So did my wife for that matter.”
“Did Debbie ever mention to you some of the things she and her great-grandfather talked about?”
“Nothing that I really recall. As Debbie got older she didn’t spend as much time with him. Old people, young kids, oil and water. Gramps wasn’t as much fun, I guess.” He looked down. “And I guess neither was I.”
“Okay, take me through the other pictures.”
A half hour later Decker was on his way through the dark streets once more.
Cammie man had gone to the Watsons’ house and written on that wall in code disguised as a musical score. That he was sure of. He didn’t know what the message said, and he didn’t know what the man had needed from Debbie. Yet out of all the students at Mansfield, why ally himself with her? There must be a reason. A good one.
His phone buzzed. It was Lancaster.
“The Bureau thinks they broke the code. It was some sort of substitution cipher. Pretty simple actually. Well, actually, they’re certain they did crack it.”
“How can they be certain they did?”
“Because of what the message said.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense, Mary. What did it say?”
He heard her release a long breath that seemed filled with apprehension.
“It said, ‘Good job, Amos. But in the end it won’t get you where you want to go, bro.’”
Chapter
23
I’M AN “ACQUIRED savant.”
More precisely, I’m a high-functioning acquired savant.
Decker was lying in his bed in his one-room home at the Residence Inn. He was not sleeping. He could not sleep.
Orlando Serrell.
Orlando Serrell was also an acquired savant, having been hit on the head by a baseball when he was ten. Ever since, he had come to possess extraordinary abilities in calendrical calculations, precise memories of weather on any particular day, as well as the near-total recall of where he was and what he was doing on any given day.
Daniel Tammet.
Daniel Tammet had suffered a series of epileptic seizures as a small child. He came out of that nearly fatal experience with one of the greatest minds of the century, able to recite pi out to over twenty-two thousand places and learn entire languages in a week. He had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and also saw numbers and other things in color, as Decker did.
Decker had studied everything he could find about savants who had not been born with their abilities but had acquired them after some event, whether an injury in Serrell’s case or a prior medical condition in Tammet’s.
There weren’t many savants in the world, and Decker had been totally unprepared to join their ranks. When LeCroix leveled him on that football field, the doctors who had extensively examined him later came away with the conclusion that the injury had done two things to his brain.
First, it had opened up channels in his mind, like unclogging a drain, which allowed information to flow far more efficiently. Second, it had caused other circuitry in his mind to intersect, providing him the ability to see numbers in color.
But this was only speculation. Decker had come to believe that doctors today knew only a bit more about how the brain really worked than doctors a hundred years ago.
Decker had woken up in the hospital after the hit and looked over at his vitals monitor with all the numbers skipping across it. He had seen his heart rate, 95—the same number on his football jersey—represented as violet for the nine and brown for the 5. Before his injury he didn’t even know what the color violet was. And the numbers had swelled huge in his head, tall and massive. He could see every detail of them. They were like living things.
He remembered sitting up in bed, the sweat pouring off him. He thought he was going insane. He had rung the nurse’s bell. A doctor was called and Decker had stammered out what he was experiencing. Specialists were called in. Many months later, and after his lengthy stint at the research facility outside Chicago, the consensus was that he was now officially an acquired savant with hyperthymesia and synesthesia abilities. The injury on the field had ended forever his football career, but had given him one of the most exceptional brains in the world. All these years later he recalled the names and backgrounds of every doctor, nurse, scientist, technician, and other practitioner who had seen him, and there were over a hundred of them.
He could have been written up in scholarly journals and there could have been a great deal of media attention surrounding what had happened to him, the odds being somewhere around one in a billion. But he had not allowed any of that to happen. He had not seen himself as a prodigy. He had seen himself as a freak. For twenty-two years of his life he had been one sort of person. He had been ill-prepared in the span of a few minutes to involuntarily become someone else entirely. To become the person he would one day die as. It was like a stranger had stepped into his body and taken it over, and he could do nothing to get him out.
A squatter for life is inhabiting my mind. And he happens to be me.
For every action, there was an equal and opposite reaction. Well, in his case the outgoing, gregarious, prankish but driven young football player had become reserved, withdrawn, and socially awkward. He no longer related to the great many things that human beings spent a good deal of time over: small talk, little white lies, emotionally nuanced venting, gossip. He could not understand sympathy or empathy. He was not concerned with others’ feelings. Their pain and their grief. It was like these things bounced off his new and improved brain, never making a dent. By making him much smarter, the hit had robbed him of the things that made everyone human. It was as though that was the payment demanded. He’d had no choice in accepting or not.
He did not even care to watch sports anymore. He had not seen a football game since his injury.
Marrying Cassie had really saved him. She knew his secret. She shared his anxieties. Without her, Decker doubted he could have turned his life around, found a new career as a policeman, and then thrived as a detective, turning to the pursuit of justice his new and vastly improved mind. And though he had never been able to be as affectionate with Cassie as he would have before the hit, he cared for her, deeply. He would have done anything for her. They even laughed about his inability to connect more as a human than as a machine. But Decker knew that both of them wished he could.
Whenever he held his daughter, Decker could think of nothing but her, as though his monster of a mind was mesmerized by this little person who liked to cuddle with her huge father—a bear and its cub. He would stroke her hair and rub her cheek, and though the recollection was fuzzy, like watching an old TV with a coat hanger for an antenna, it was like he could remember being what he used to be more vividly than at any other time.
It was as though his new mind had allowed an exception for these two people, enabling him to be a bit closer to what he once was.
But only for those two.
Now he was alone.
And just a machine forevermore.
And he had some prick taunting him. Some sick monster who had killed his family and then turned his sights on Mansfield High School. And if the graffiti on the wall of his house had not convinced him, the coded message had put all doubt to rest.
The shooters were one and the same.
And his family had died because of him. He had known all along that this was possible, even probable. But that little bit of uncertainty had actually been a good thing, allowing him to believe there was a chance that he had not been the motive in their slaughter.
Now the uncertainty was gone. And with absolute clarity came terrible, demoralizing resignation. And a sense of guilt that had hit him harder than even Dwayne LeCroix had.
At 5 a.m. he rose, showered, dressed in his suit, and stood in front of the small mirror in a bathroom that was about the same size as he was. In the reflection he saw pops of light and colors, numbers soaring across the glass. He closed his eyes and the picture did not change. It was not on the glass, it was all inside his head. It was said that savants, particularly those diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, were drawn to very narrow slices of interest: numbers, history, a certain field of science, or languages. Decker did not know what his narrow slice was supposed to be. He didn’t know if the hit by LeCroix had given him Asperger’s. He didn’t know if that was even possible, and he had never been officially diagnosed with the condition.
All he knew was that he could never forget anything. His mind attached colors to things that were not supposed to have them. He could remember what day of the week a particular date in the last hundred years fell on. His mind was a puzzle all put together, but somehow still jumbled, because he understood none of it. It was just who he was now. And it had scared the hell out of him from day one.
Yet with Cassie next to him, he had managed it. Without her, without Molly who had given him something to think about beyond his own lifetime, Amos Decker had become once more a freak. A Jekyll and Hyde. Only Jekyll was gone and would not be coming back.