I chose symbolism over literalness.”
Decker felt his face flush at these cruel words. His wife and daughter had been reduced to symbols of a warped mind seeking revenge?
Decker felt Leopold’s breath on his cheek. He could smell garlic and stomach bile, but no alcohol. That was good. He didn’t want a drunk holding a gun against his head. But the guy took drugs too. And you couldn’t smell drugs on someone’s breath.
He couldn’t see the tattoo of the twin dolphins, because Leopold’s sleeve covered it. But the tat was there; he knew that. It was real. It had all been in Leopold’s file. All of it. Decker had memorized every word of that file. The crime against his family. Every detail. And the file on Evers and Mr. and Mrs. Wyatt. And the payoff from Evers. And the money that was there now. And the “Justice Denied” website. It had been interesting stuff. All very interesting.
“I guess I can see you taking that position. I mean, the victims at Mansfield were innocent, but to you, who is innocent, really, right? Nobody.”
“I know you don’t feel pity or sympathy or empathy anymore,” said Wyatt. “Because I don’t either. So don’t even bother. I’m not stupid. I’m just like you.”
The hell you are, Decker thought.
He said, “We found your mom and dad. They’ll get a proper burial now. Not sure how you feel about that. But you made your point with them. ME said they’d been there a long time. So they’ll be buried.”
The muzzle pressed harder against Decker’s skin.
Decker continued, “My daughter never lived to your age when you were raped. About six years shy.”
“Six years, one month, and eighteen days,” corrected Wyatt. “She died before her tenth birthday. Or, more accurately, I killed her three days before her tenth birthday.”
Decker felt his anger edge up, which was the last thing he needed.
“Actually, three days, four hours, and eleven minutes,” he corrected.
He locked gazes with Wyatt in the mirror. Without taking his eyes off her he said, “Are you a hyper too, Sebastian?”
“No, he’s not,” said Wyatt. “Just you and me are the freaks.”
“You’re not a freak. Neither am I.”
“Oh, excuse me, I wasn’t aware that you had ovaries. My mistake.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Dear Mom and Dad saw my rape as a way to get rich. You know what my father told me?”
“What?” asked Decker. He had not expected this outpouring from Wyatt. Especially not after her first terse words. But now he realized that she needed to talk. She needed to say things, get things out. Before she killed him. It was all part of a process. Her process.
And mine too.
“He said it was high time that I brought something positive into their lives. As though my rape was something positive in their lives. That’s what he meant. And they took Clyde Evers’s money and built themselves this castle in the sky. And they never let me step inside it. That was my home, you know. I bought it, not them.”
“I can see that.”
“They never even told me they had moved. They sent me away to a mental rehab facility. When I came home a week later they were gone. I was on my own. They just abandoned me.”
“They were cruel, ignorant, and wrong, Belinda.”
She looked away from the mirror. “Who cares? Now they’re just dead.”
“I died too. Not once but twice.”
He saw the eyes flash at him in the mirror once more.
“On the football field. After the hit. They brought me back twice, maybe they shouldn’t have bothered. Then I wouldn’t have said what I did to you and all of those people would still be alive. One life to save all those others. Sounds like a good deal to me.”
“Maybe it would have been,” said Wyatt. “But you didn’t die. Just like I didn’t die. I climbed out of that Dumpster. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe I should have just died.”
Her voice trailed off with this last part and Decker wasn’t sure, but he wondered if that constituted remorse, or at least as close as Wyatt would ever get to it now.
“I see my family’s murders in blue,” said Decker, drawing another stare from Wyatt. “I know you don’t suffer from synesthesia. It’s odd seeing things in color that should have none. It’s one of the things that scared the crap out of me when I woke up in the hospital and found out I was a different person.”
“Well, I was two people to begin with,” Wyatt shot back. “And after they raped and beat me nearly to death I became someone else entirely. So that makes three. A little crowded in someone my size.” There was not a trace of mirth in her tone. She was being deadly serious. Decker would have expected nothing less.
“You chose male over female? Why?”
“Men are predators. Women are their prey. I chose never to be the prey again. I chose to be the predator. For that I needed a full set of balls and a tankful of testosterone. Now I’ve got them and all is right with my world.”
Decker had figured that Leopold was calling the shots, but maybe he was wrong. If so, things were not going to work out so well for him. “Where are we going?”
“Somewhere.”
This was Leopold. Decker had wondered when the man was going to assert himself. Maybe he wanted Decker to know that Wyatt was not running this.
Good, Sebastian, keep it up. I need you in my corner. Until I don’t.
“Somewhere is good. Better than nowhere.”
“Why are you here?” asked Leopold. “Why did you come?”
“Figured I’d save everyone the trouble. I knew you were targeting anyone associated with me. I didn’t want anyone else to have to die because of me. I was surprised that you gave us a warning with the Lancaster family.”
He glanced at the mirror to find Wyatt watching him again.
“You sure you have no empathy?” asked Decker. “You could have killed them.”
“They weren’t worth the trouble.”
“Sandy has Down syndrome, but you knew that. Do you draw the line at killing kids like that?”
Wyatt focused back on the road.
Leopold said, “So you come so readily to the end of your life?”
The gent was downright talkative now. And his formal and somewhat clunky speech was another indicator that English was not his first language.
“We all have to die someday.”
“And today is your day,” said Leopold.
Chapter
63
THEY DROVE FOR two more hours. Decker had no idea where he was, and it really didn’t matter to him. Help was not coming.
The van finally pulled off the road and Decker was bumped up and down as the vehicle hit a rough patch but then kept going.
The van hung a sharp left and a few moments later skidded to a stop. Wyatt got out and Leopold motioned for Decker to do the same. His bare feet hit cold gravel and he winced as a sharp rock cut the bottom of his right foot.
There was an old outdoor light in a rusted metal cage over the door they were heading to. Decker could make out the faded, peeling remnants of a sign that had been painted in red on the white brick wall.
Ace Plumbing. Est. 1947.
It looked like flakes of blood resting on the pale skin of a corpse.
He looked to the right and left and saw nothing but trees. A leaning chain-link fence enclosed the abandoned property.
Leopold gave him a shove in the back and he staggered into the building behind Wyatt. Leopold closed and bolted the door after them.
Wyatt was dressed in jeans and a hooded windbreaker. With the wig gone the hair was short, blond, and receding. As Billy, Wyatt had been wearing another wig that had drastically changed his appearance; the same with the waitress gig. Decker figured Wyatt might go bald in a few more years.
If he had a few more years left to live. If any of them did.
A light dimly illuminated the space. It was all concrete, mostly bare, the floor and walls splotched with grease and
other dirt. An old, leaning metal shelf at the far end held a couple of joint pipes. A wooden desk with a chair in the kneehole was set near the doorway to another room. A file cabinet sat behind the desk. Some wooden crates were stacked against one wall. The windows were barred and blacked out.
Wyatt pulled out the chair and rolled it across the room. It bumped crazily over the chipped concrete floor.
Leopold motioned with the gun for Decker to sit.
He did. Wyatt took duct tape and wound it around both Decker and the chair until the two were as one. Then Wyatt pulled a large box out from behind the desk, carried it over, and turned it upside down. Tumbling out of it and clattering to the floor were all of the trophies taken from Mansfield. All the ones with Amos Decker’s name on them.
Wyatt picked one up and looked at it. “Football players and cops, my favorite people.” He dropped the trophy.
The pair pulled up two of the old crates and sat on them staring at Decker.
Decker stared back, taking them both in, detail by detail. He could tell that Wyatt was doing the same to him.
Wyatt looked nothing like the teenage girl Decker had seen back at the institute. The twenty-year march of time had hollowed out her features, giving her a perpetually hungry, emaciated look. The mouth was jagged and cruel. There were no smile lines around the edges of the lips. What did Wyatt have to smile about? Ever? The long brow had worry lines that already had been forming back at the institute.
Decker glanced at Leopold. He had cleaned up some since their last meeting at the bar. His hair was combed and his clothes looked clean.
“Can you answer a couple of questions that have been bugging me?” Decker asked. When neither of them responded, he said, “The old man and old woman that were seen out and about in my neighborhood and then Lancaster’s neighborhood. Was that you?”
Wyatt stood, pulled her hood over her head, bent over, mimicked gripping a cane, and walked slowly across the room. In a pitch-perfect impersonation of an elderly man’s voice Wyatt said, “Can you help me find my little dog, Jasper? He’s all I have left.”
She pulled her hood back down and straightened.
“I can fool anyone,” said Wyatt, staring dead at him. “Become anyone I want.”
“Yes, you can,” said Decker.
He wondered if Wyatt had always been able to transform like that. Stuck between two genders, a foot in each with an identity in neither, entrenched in limbo. When she had played the role of Billy, it had been a remarkable transformation. Happy-go-lucky, superficial, innocuous. As she had said, she could play any role.
Well, except for one. Herself.
He imagined Wyatt walking through the halls of Mansfield in the getup that made him look taller and far broader. This slip of a man—formerly a woman—transformed into a giant with guns, massacring people like they were bugs in the grass. Man as predator. Man that could never be hurt by another man. Like a woman could.
“Why did you stay in the freezer overnight? Why not just come in through the base side and meet Debbie in the shop class?”
“Because Debbie was with me in the freezer that night,” said Wyatt. “She snuck out of her house. We did it right then and there. The first time.” He grinned, though it didn’t reach the eyes. “She thought it was so amazing! Sex in the freezer. In the dark. It brought back memories for me, you see. I was gang-raped in the school cafeteria. But now I was the guy doing the girl. Then she left. And in the morning I used the passageway to get to the other end of the school.”
“And how much did she know about the plan?” said Decker. “We found the picture of you in cammies.”
“I wore them sometimes when we were together. I told her I was former military. And now I was in military intelligence. She thought that was so cool. I told her I was here investigating a possible terrorist cell, and that she could help me. And of course I ended up seducing her. It wasn’t hard. She knew nothing of the real plan. She just thought we were going to do it in the shop classroom smack in the middle of everybody. I suggested it, of course. It had to happen that way.”
“And how did you find out that she might know something about the passageway?”
“I read an article years ago about bombproof shelters being put under schools. I figured with an Army base right next door there might be such a thing, and possibly more. So I searched the old Army base. It was easy to get inside. In a drawer in one of the rooms I found a duty roster with employee names on it. Simon Watson was on there. It said he was in engineering. Sebastian and I did some more digging and found out that the old man had lived with the Watsons and that Debbie went to Mansfield. I ‘ran’ into Debbie one day. It took time and I let my ‘undercover’ story out slowly, but it finally got around to her great-grandfather and things he had told her about the base. She knew about a passage and generally how it ran. She also knew that it connected to the base, she just didn’t know exactly where. But that gave us what we needed. We started from the base end and worked our way toward the school. It all came together. And since she believed I was here on a secret mission she understood why no one could know about ‘us.’ She kept the secret. She was actually very useful.”
“She called you Jesus, you know. You were the only positive in her life. She loved you very much, apparently. Right up to the second you blew her head off. Jesus.”
Wyatt said nothing to this.
Decker glanced at Leopold. “Did you build the outfit that he wore in the school?”
“We did it together. We do everything together.”
“And you found out the players on the football team and what classes they were in?”
“Debbie again. I told her I might have to recruit some of them in case I needed local muscle. It was stupid but she’d believe anything.”
“And ‘Justice Denied’? You left that paper at Evers’s dump in Utah. So I guess you wanted us to know about it. It was how I was able to contact you.”
“I’m not alone,” said Wyatt. Decker glanced at her.
“Not alone?”
“There are lots of others like me. People like me can get justice too.”
Decker nodded. “What name do you go by now? Or do you want me to just call you Wyatt?”
“You can call me Belinda. You’re from that time. Not from this time. Not much longer, anyway.”
“Okay, Belinda. And Leopold here introduced you to ‘Justice Denied’?”
Wyatt now looked surprised. “How could you know that?”
“Well, for starters it’s a foreign-based site. And Leopold is Austrian. His family was murdered. He actually started the site. Some of the word choices on there show that English was not the creator’s first language.”
Wyatt and Leopold exchanged a glance.
Decker shifted a bit in his seat. “You know, it would have been easier for you to just kill me,” he said. “And leave my family alone.”
“No one left me alone,” said Wyatt. “No one.” He drew a knife from his pocket and held it up. “I used this to kill Giles Evers. His father should be getting a package in the mail any day.”
“He disappeared a long time ago. What have you been doing with him all this time?”
“Things,” said Wyatt. “Just things.” He looked like he wanted to smile, but it didn’t seem that he could manage it.
“I don’t think Clyde liked his son all that much. Giles sort of ruined his life.”
Wyatt stood, walked across the room, and jammed the knife into Decker’s thigh.
Decker screamed. When Wyatt worked the blade around he cried out more, cursing and twisting in the chair trying to free himself. Wyatt finally withdrew it and Decker slumped over and threw up from the shock of it.
“I didn’t hit the femoral,” Wyatt said calmly, retaking a seat on the crate. “I know where it is. Trust me. I read lots of medical books. And books on embalming,” Wyatt added. He tapped his temple.