Memory Man

  There were two blank walls on either side of the stairs. There was no dust here and thus the shoeprints had ended at the bottom of the stairs.

  He looked at this spot again. But why was there no dust here when it was everywhere else? Had someone cleaned it away? If so, why? He could think of at least one reason.

  It was something someone had said to him.

  It had been a very recent statement.

  Beth Watson.

  She was packing up to leave her husband. Her husband’s grandfather had told her about the passageway. But she also said something else that Simon had told her.

  He didn’t build it originally. He just added to it.

  Decker stepped closer to the wall on the right and hit the surface from all angles with his light.

  Nothing.

  He did the same on the left.

  Something.

  A slight seam where the wall met the stairs. He dug his fingers into this gap and pulled. And the wall opened on hinges, smoothly and without noise, just like the fake wall back in the cafeteria. It had been recently used.

  Decker was peering down a long, dark hall.

  The air in here was stale and musty as well. But not overly so, which meant fresh air was getting in somehow, somewhere. He moved down the passage, his light hitting the dirty concrete floor. There were the shoeprints, again size nine or so. He took pictures of them with his cell phone camera.

  He stopped when he saw the door. Leaning next to this door and against the wall were sections of plywood with bent nails protruding from them. Like back in the cafeteria. They had been used to seal off this end of the passage, but someone had unsealed it.

  The shooter.

  He pulled his gun, touched the wood of the door, and eased it open. He shone his light ahead. He could hear water dripping, the scurry of what he assumed were rats, and the beating of his own heart.

  Decker was a brave man, because you did not go into his line of work without being braver than average. But he was also scared, because you did not go into his line of work, or at least survive very long in it, without a commonsensical understanding of your own mortality.

  He moved ahead. The floor sloped upward after a hundred feet. Then he reached a set of steps. He took them up, trying to keep as quiet as possible. There was another door at the top. It was locked. He tried his lock pick. It didn’t work.

  He tried his shoulder with over three hundred and fifty pounds of bulk behind it.

  That did work.

  He came out into semidarkness and looked around. The room he was in was large, with windows set up high. There was the smell of grease and oil, and as he looked around he saw the skeletons of vehicles scattered here and there.

  They were old abandoned Army vehicles. Because he was now standing in one of the buildings of the long-closed McDonald Army Base.

  A passage connecting a school with an Army base?

  But the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Lots of kids who went to Mansfield back then had parents who worked at the base. In the event of an emergency, what better place for the kids than either in the “bombproof” shelter underneath the school or at the base with their parents? Or maybe the underground shelter was designed to hold both base personnel and the school kids. Whatever the truth, it was also a fact that it had long since been forgotten about. And it was probably never even used.

  But he corrected himself. It had been used recently, so it was not forgotten.

  The shooter had exited this way; of that he was now certain. The base was a large place to search, and it had been abandoned for years. No witnesses to see anything. Everything was in disrepair and only a chain-link fence overgrown with vines and bushes and trees around the perimeter. Easy to make one’s escape completely unseen.

  As Decker shone his light around he could see discarded beer cans and liquor bottles, empty condom packs, and cigarette butts littering the floor. The place was a forensic nightmare. There were probably hundreds of DNA samples down there, most of them from bored teens looking for sex, booze, nicotine—his light hit on a discarded syringe and a rubber hose to pop blood vessels—or something stronger.

  But he doubted any of them knew that there was a passage connecting the base to the school. Even if they had explored the place, they would have encountered a locked door. If they had managed to get through that, they would run into a blank wall. End of exploring. And this would be a summer hangout place. Now that it was nearing winter, the unheated space was freezing. Their shooter would not have needed to worry about running into teenagers screwing and boozing here while he planned his massacre.

  He walked around the place and found nothing and no one.

  He pulled his phone and called the Watsons’ house. George answered. Decker wondered if Beth was already gone for good.

  “Hello, who is this?” Watson wasn’t slurring his words. Maybe he’d slept it off.

  “Mr. Watson, Detective Decker again.”

  “What do you want?” he asked, clearly annoyed.

  “Just a quick question. Had Debbie been spending a lot of time after hours at school, or maybe in the morning before classes started?”

  “How the hell did you know that? How the hell do you know so much about my family?”

  “Just a guess. But I am a detective. It’s what I do. And your wife mentioned that she was home a lot more than Debbie. So I assumed she was doing something after school. So what exactly was she doing?”

  “She belonged to some clubs. They had meetings. Sometimes they ran late. She wouldn’t get home until well past dark. Why, is that important?”

  “It might be. Thanks.”

  Decker clicked off. He knew Debbie Watson was not going to club meetings. She was hooking up with “Jesus” in their private space.

  He next called Lancaster and told her what he’d found.

  He put his phone away, sat down on an oil drum, and waited with his eyes closed. He figured he would not have to wait long. He had left the door in the wall open.

  He heard the footsteps coming. One would have made him open his eyes. This was about a dozen. So he kept his eyes closed. A killer came alone, not with an army.

  He opened his eyes and saw Special Agent Bogart standing there.

  “Another educated guess?” asked the man.

  “Another educated guess,” replied Decker.

  Behind Bogart was a group of FBI agents and members of the Burlington Police Department. Lancaster stepped forward.

  “I called Mac, he’s on his way,” she reported, and Decker nodded slowly.

  “How did you figure this?” Bogart asked Decker.

  Decker gave him the two-minute drill on his deductions.

  “If you had briefed us on your meeting with Beth Watson, we might have been able to help you on this,” Bogart pointed out. “We might have gotten here sooner.”

  “We might have,” agreed Decker.

  Bogart ordered a search of the place and the perimeter and then pulled up an old wooden bench and sat down next to Decker while Lancaster hovered nearby.

  “So the shooter befriended Debbie Watson, found out about this link with the school, and used it to get away?” said Bogart.

  “He used it to both get in and get away. With the passage he could come and go as he pleased. He seduced her. He’s a grown man. She’s an impressionable teenager with not the best of home lives. They must’ve had a bunch of trysts here that no one else knew about. She must have felt really special. Right up until he discharged a shotgun in her face.”

  “We’ll contact the Army and get all we can on the base.”

  “Yeah. Good luck with that.”

  “I’m surprised no one knew about this passage,” said Bogart. “Other than the Watsons.”

  “Well, if it was originally built in 1946 or close to it, most of those folks would be dead. I doubt they would have told the kids about it, so only the school officials would have known. Maybe it was never used. Maybe they never even had a prac
tice drill. I don’t know. Even if they did, the students from back then would be fairly elderly now. Maybe they forgot about it.”

  “But you said Simon Watson had added to the passageway?”

  “He came to McDonald in the late sixties, and sometime after that the passage from the base was put in. But when the base was closed everybody left. Lots of people who worked here in uniform were probably transferred to other places.”

  Lancaster interjected, “And even if there were folks left here who knew about the passage, I doubt they’d think about a killer using it to move around the school. They’d assume it was sealed up after all this time. The public probably believes he shot up the place and made a run for it and got away.”

  Bogart nodded. “But he could have gotten into the school more easily from this way, meaning the Army base end. But he apparently was in the cafeteria and traversed the school that way. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” said Decker. “We thought it might be to allow him time to cut through the wall sealing off the door behind the sign in the cafeteria. But now since I believe he’s been in and out of here a lot, he could have done that any time. And he probably wouldn’t have waited until the night before the planned attack, in case something went wrong.” He paused. “So, bottom line, I don’t know.”

  “I thought you had all the answers.”

  “Then you thought wrong.”

  Bogart considered him thoughtfully. “You really don’t forget anything, do you?” Decker didn’t look at him. Bogart drew closer and said in a low voice that only Decker could hear, “What makes you tick, Decker? What do you have up in your head that allows you to do what you do?”

  Decker didn’t acknowledge that he had heard the comment.

  “You always tune out like this when someone is trying to have a conversation?” Bogart asked.

  “My social skills aren’t the best,” said Decker. “I told you that already.”

  “But you can walk and chew gum at the same time. So if you have some special mental ability, it hasn’t affected your capacity to function out in the world.”

  Now Decker looked at him. “Why do you say that?”

  Bogart said, “My older brother has a form of autism. Brilliant in his field. Positively clueless in interacting with another human being. He can’t carry on a conversation beyond a few mumbled words. And he’s actually considered high-functioning because he can work at a job.”

  “What’s his field?”

  “Physics. Subatomic particles more specifically. He can expound all day about quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons. But he forgets to eat and has no idea how to book a plane ticket or pay the electric bill.”

  Decker nodded. “I get that.”

  “You seem to do okay, though.”

  “It’s all degrees, Special Agent Bogart.”

  “You been this way since birth?”

  “Later,” Decker said tersely. “Which might be why I can walk and chew gum at the same time,” he added in a tight voice before looking away.

  Bogart nodded. “You don’t want to talk about this, do you?”

  “Would you?”

  Bogart rubbed his hands along his thighs. “We need to get this guy. And we have one thing that we haven’t really broached yet.”

  Decker looked at him. “His thing with me.”

  Bogart nodded. “He’s sent you two messages. One coded, one not. That was a risk for him. He had to go back to the house where he committed the murders of your family to write one of the messages. Someone could have seen him. And he went to Debbie’s house. Again, with the risk of being seen. Now, anyone who kills is a risk-taker, by definition. But like you said, it’s a matter of degrees. A killer like this may not want to be caught. So he will minimize his risk. But that was outweighed by his desire to communicate with you. That’s important. Because it makes me believe that he feels he has a connection with you somehow that is very strong, very deep.”

  Decker fixed his gaze on the other man. “You were at Quantico? BAU?”

  “Behavioral Analysis Unit, yes. I was what the movie and TV folks would call a profiler. And I was pretty good at it.”

  “There are no profilers in the FBI.”

  “You’re right. Technically, we’re referred to as analysts. And sometimes we’re right and sometimes we’re wrong. Some say psychological profiling lacks empirical validation, and they may be right. But I don’t really care. All I care about is catching the bad guys before they can hurt someone else, and I’ll use whatever tools I have at my disposal to do so.” He peered more closely at Decker. “And I’m considering you to be one of those tools.”

  “Meaning what exactly?”

  “Meaning that I’d like you to work more closely with us. Together we may be able to make headway.”

  Decker looked over at Lancaster, who had clearly heard this last exchange.

  Decker rose. “I’ve already got a partner. But we break anything we’ll let you know.”

  He walked off. Lancaster waited for a moment, flicked Bogart a tight smile, and scurried after Decker.

  Special Agent Bogart remained sitting, staring after them both.

  Chapter

  30

  DECKER OPENED HIS eyes. He was lying in bed, but sleep was elusive. It was raining outside his room at the Residence Inn. This time of year—as fall hunkered down before giving way fully to winter—was always loaded with rain, usually with strong winds that beat the moisture right into your brain.

  A size nine shoe. They had confirmed the size. On a guy six-two, two hundred or more pounds, with shoulders as wide as his. He closed his eyes and his mind whirred back to the image on the camera. But it only showed the man from the waist up. Decker now was sure that was intentional. Waist up. He had also walked in front of the camera in a way that was designed to hide how he had actually come into the school. Not from the rear doors, but from the cafeteria via an underground passage.

  Yet Decker had seen something that didn’t make sense; he just wasn’t sure what or where. He never forgot anything, but that didn’t mean everything was always placed in the proper context opposite either a complementary or conflicting fact.

  He was just starting to do that when he heard the noise outside his door.

  The Residence Inn was set up so that each room opened directly to the outdoors. Decker was on the second story. A catwalk with a wrought iron railing formed the exterior of this floor, with stairs down at each end to the parking lot.

  The noise came again. A scraping, it seemed, against the wall outside his door. The rooms on either side of his were empty. The first floor of the inn was mostly full. He sat up in bed and looked at the door. He reached out and his fingers closed around his gun, which he kept on the nightstand.

  He chambered a round, moving the slide slowly so the sound of it moving back and forth was diminished. He threw off the covers, pulled on his pants, slipped his phone into his pocket, and skittered over to the door in his bare feet.

  He stood to the right of the door, his gun held down with both hands. He listened. There it was again. The scrape.

  Something was out there. Maybe someone was out there.

  He would do this as he had many busts as a cop. Except in reverse. Going out the door instead of in. He slipped off the security chain, stood to the side, gripped the knob, counted to three in his head, and threw the door open. He catapulted through the opening, swinging his gun first left then right.

  He stopped and stared up at her. She had been hung on the bracket supporting the exterior light. Her feet hitting against the side of the wall were the source of the scraping he’d heard.

  He checked her pulse at the carotid, but did so only mechanically. She was dead, her eyes open, glassed over and fixed in a way the living could never achieve.

  FBI Special Agent Lafferty had written down her last note.