He doubted that the shooter could have brought this equipment in with him on the night of the school play, stashed it in the cafeteria, and then taken it with him along the passageway. But he didn’t have to. He could have snuck all this in anytime he wanted and left it right here.
He found a trash bag and piled all of the items into it.
Okay, that solved the size, and also how the man had gotten through the door from the passageway without moving the AC units. He had been a much thinner man then, perhaps as lean as Lancaster, who’d had no trouble getting through the narrow opening. Lean like the waitress; she could have managed it.
Decker’s mind flashed to the camera at the rear entrance to the school. Only from the waist up. The shooter didn’t want any possibility that the platform boots would be videotaped.
The shooter wouldn’t have worried about eyewitnesses observing his feet. Those who weren’t dead surely wouldn’t have bothered to notice the footwear, not when someone was shooting at them.
He called Lancaster and told her what he’d found.
Several “holy shits” later she said she would be there in ten minutes to pick up the evidence in the trash bag.
Decker perched on a counter in the middle of the shop class and looked around. He wanted to order this all in his head, putting the puzzle pieces together, if only to see how many empty spots he still had.
Shooter comes into the school the night of the play, holes up in the freezer in the cafeteria. He comes out the next morning, uses the passageway from the cafeteria to get to the back of the school unseen. He’d arranged to meet Debbie Watson in the shop class. He knocks her out, changes into his gear, guns up, walks in front of the camera after dragging Debbie out of the shop class and positioning her next to her locker, and then turns the corner and shoots her. Then he goes on his killing spree. From the back to the front of the school. Then he flees through the passage in the cafeteria that connected to McDonald Army Base, the existence of which he found out from Debbie Watson. He stashes the elements of his disguise in the junk pile, which would account for the second set of shoeprints going up those stairs. After that, he makes his escape through the old Army base after accessing the passageway revealed through the supposedly solid wall Decker had discovered.
Okay, if that’s how it went down, Decker had one very important question.
Why Mansfield? Why shoot this place up?
He had one idea.
He had attended school here. But if this really was personal to him, there were things here that were very personal to Amos Decker. They literally had his name on them.
He lowered himself off the counter and strode down the hall.
School had not resumed and there was talk that students would be transported to other high schools in the area to finish out at least the first semester. Then over the holidays the town would figure out what to do about the rest of the year.
Decker was torn about students ever returning here.
Part of him wanted this place demolished and turned into some sort of memorial for the dead.
The other part of him didn’t want to give the bastards the satisfaction of having forced the town to take such a drastic step. It would be like giving in to terrorists.
He entered the gymnasium and walked quickly over to a large display cabinet set against one wall. In here were all the trophies and other awards won by Mansfield over the years. They were arranged in chronological order, so it was easy enough for Decker to find what he was looking for.
Only they weren’t there.
Every award that he had won, every trophy that had held his name—and there were about a dozen—was gone. He checked and rechecked. They were not there.
He leaned against the case and put his hand up to his mouth.
Someone had come in here and shot up Mansfield High. And the mass murderer had done it because of him. Amos Decker.
Same motivation for his family’s being murdered.
Me, Amos Decker.
He suddenly felt like Dwayne LeCroix had leveled him again.
His phone buzzed. He thought it was Lancaster.
It wasn’t. It was Bogart.
“Decker, we found something in a Dumpster in the alley where Nora Lafferty was taken. You were right. It was a policeman’s uniform.”
Decker sensed something else coming, though, from the man’s unnerved tone.
“What else?”
“The uniform was authentic. It was a Burlington Police Department standard issue.”
“And?”
“And the uniform had a name stitched on it.”
“They all do. Whose name was it?”
But somehow Decker already knew the answer.
“It was your name,” replied Bogart.
Chapter
36
DECKER ARRIVED BREATHLESS outside the building. He rushed over to the gate and input the code in the security box. It was not a very secure code. It was Molly’s birthday.
The gate clicked open and he walked through. The storage units all had exterior doors, and he hustled over to the one at the very end. He pulled the key from his pocket, but then saw that the lock was gone from his unit.
They had done that intentionally. They had wanted him to know.
He lifted the roll-up door, his gun in hand just in case. But the place was empty. Empty of living things.
In here were the possessions he had taken from his old home, because where he had moved to after that didn’t have the room. But he couldn’t get rid of them. In here were also his tangible memories of a life spent with the two people he was closest to in the world: Cassie and Molly.
They were all neatly boxed and labeled and placed on sturdy metal shelving. This place was an expense he couldn’t really afford, but he had never missed one payment, going cold and hungry, to afford keeping this place, these memories, intact. This mirrored his mind—full of things but neatly organized, with everything capable of retrieval with minimal effort.
There was one box in here that he needed to look at. Only one.
It was in the rear, to the left, second shelf, fourth box from the right.
He reached that spot and stopped. The box was there but the top was open. He lifted it off the shelf and set it down on the concrete floor. This box contained the remaining items from his career in law enforcement. And part of that was his old police uniform that he had kept when moving up to detective. He had done so because there were times at the department when even plainclothes were expected to don their uniform. When he had left the department, technically he should have turned the uniform in, but it wasn’t like it could have been recycled. There was no one near his size in the Burlington Police Department.
The uniform was not in the box. Someone had used it to fool Nora Lafferty into letting down her guard for a few precious—and ultimately lethal—seconds in that alley.
They know where I live. They know I have this storage unit.
They had desecrated it.
He clicked back in his mind to the last time he had come here.
Twenty-seven days ago, 1:35 in the afternoon. Had they observed him then? Or was it before that last time?
Then he hurried to the gate, where there was a security camera.
He didn’t think it would provide a likely lead and he turned out to be right.
The camera lens had been spray-painted black. Obviously no one had been monitoring this camera if they hadn’t noticed it could no longer record anything for at least nearly a month.
He called Bogart.
Fifteen minutes later several SUVs pulled up to the gate. Decker let them in and then led the team back to the storage locker.
He explained as he went along. When they arrived at the locker, Bogart’s team went into action, searching for prints or other traces and any leave-behinds.
Bogart and Decker stood side by side and watched.
“Why didn’t you turn your uniform back in when you left the force?” the FBI agent asked.
Decker knew exactly where this conversation was going, but there was nothing he could do about it. And, in some ways, Bogart was right.
“I should have,” conceded Decker. “But I didn’t.”
Bogart nodded slowly.
Decker wasn’t sure if the guy was going to lose it again, but he figured probably not, not with his team all around.
“Well,” said Bogart, “it would have taken a real police uniform to fool Lafferty anyway. These guys probably understood that.”
This made Decker feel even guiltier, which was obviously the other man’s intent. A staggering body blow without one physical punch thrown.
“Do you have the uniform?” asked Decker.
“Evidence bag in the truck.”
“Can I see it?”
They pulled the bag.
Bogart said, “The uniform and cap have already been examined for traces. There was nothing usable.”
But Decker wasn’t checking for that. He was probing the pants near the cuff. About six inches from the bottom of the pants he found what he was looking for.
He pointed it out to Bogart.
“Holes?” said the FBI agent.
“From pins. Hemming pins.”
“Hemming pins?”
“I’m six-five with exceptionally long legs,” explained Decker. “The guy who wore this had to take the pant legs up about half a foot. Otherwise Lafferty would have noticed the uniform was not his. I was slimmer back then, but I’m sure the guy had to cinch the waist tight and maybe pin it in the back. The shirt the same.”
He examined the shirt and found two pinholes in the fabric near the center of the back panel. “Here and here. And the guy could have rolled the cuffs over and buttoned them to account for the difference in arm length. And a strip of padding in the cap makes a large cap fit a medium head.”
“So a much smaller man?”
“About five-eleven. And thin.”
“Lancaster told me what you found at the school. Platform boots for height and some sort of contraption to make the shooter look big in the upper body.”
“Like football shoulder pads and padding for the thighs. Made a five-eleven and lean man look much bigger.”
“We found nothing on the email trail. IP went nowhere,” Bogart said.
“Not surprised.”
Decker looked down at the name on the uniform’s chest.
Decker.
The man in blue. The man he used to be.
Then he saw something else. It was faint, but he also knew it was fresh.
“Look at the badge,” he said.
Bogart did so. “Is that an…?”
“It’s an X. Someone has marked an X on the badge.”
“What might that represent? To signify Lafferty’s murder?”
“I don’t know.”
He handed the uniform back to Bogart. The FBI agent took it and then gazed at the activity going on inside the storage unit.
“How come you kept all this stuff?”
Decker looked up and said slowly, far more to himself than Bogart, “It’s all I had left.”
Bogart glanced at him, sympathy flitting across his features.
Decker must have noticed this, because he said, “No reason to feel that way. You make choices. And you live with them.”
“You didn’t choose to have your family murdered, Decker.”
“I think the man who did it believed the choice was all mine.”
“That’s truly sick.”
“Yes, he is.”
Chapter
37
WHEN DECKER GOT back to the Residence Inn after the search at the storage unit turned up nothing, he found that others had visited him and left very telltale signs behind.
A hatchet was stuck in the wood of the door. Slurs had been spray-painted across the window and brick front. Headless baby dolls lay on the concrete. Copies of the news story that Alex Jamison had written were strewn across the catwalk or else taped to the wall, with venomous words scribbled across them. The photo of Decker had been doctored in several of them to make him look like the devil.
Under it was written, “Child Killer.”
Decker pulled the hatchet free, kicked the other items aside, opened his door, and went in, locking the door behind him.
He dropped the hatchet on the bureau, went over to the bed, and lay down. He closed his eyes and tried to think of what he was missing. Because it was there. He knew it was. For the hundredth time he started to go through all the known facts of the case in chronological order.
The knock on his door interrupted these thoughts. He struggled up, crossed the room, and said, “Who is it?”
“Somebody who owes you an apology.”
He recognized the voice and opened the door.
Alex Jamison was standing there holding one of the headless dolls.
“I’m really sorry,” she said, and she actually looked it.
“What do you have to be sorry for?”
“Shit, Decker, you’re making me feel worse than I already do.”
She was dressed all in black, tights, long sweater that covered her butt, low boots with chunky heels, and a short jean jacket. A large bag was slung over one shoulder.
“You have time for a cup of coffee?” she asked.
“Why?”
“I’m not here to interview you.”
“Why, then?”
“Brimmer told me you’ve done all the heavy lifting on this case. Found all the leads, even though she wouldn’t tell me what they were.”
“She’s learning, then.”
“Coffee? I have some things I want to talk to you about. I’ll buy. Please, it’s important.”
He closed the door behind him and they walked down the steps, across the street, and over a few blocks to a coffee shop that occupied a small niche between two larger stores, one of which was boarded up and the other one not far from that fate.
“Whole town is going down the tubes,” observed Jamison as they passed the shuttered store. “Before long I’ll have nothing to write about except bankruptcies and foreclosures.”
They got their coffees and sat at a small table near the back. Decker watched as she spooned sugar into her cup.
“What do you want to talk about?” he asked bluntly.
“I am sorry about the story, Decker. In retrospect you didn’t