David Baldacci - Memory Man

He looked down at Lancaster, who was staring up at him, a sympathetic expression on her face.

“It’s like riding a bike, Amos,” she said, apparently reading the self-doubt on his face.

“Maybe not, Mary. I guess I’ll find out. But if I can’t carry my weight, I shouldn’t be here.”

She looked back at the screen. “Okay, the camera doesn’t have audio, so you can’t hear it. And there was no camera on the next hall.”

“Why not?”

“Why else? No money in the budget. We’re lucky to have any functioning cameras at all.”

He thought for a moment. “But they keep them up as a deterrent?”

“Right. Because people didn’t know they weren’t operational.”

“But our guy was able to avoid all of them except this one.”

“It really didn’t matter whether he did or not. He was completely covered, Amos. No way to recognize any feature.”

Decker slowly nodded, feeling once more slow and reactive in his mental process.

He looked back at the image on the screen. Hood and face shield. And the camera shot was reflecting off the glare from the shield. He edged closer to the screen, like a scent hound ferreting prey.

“There’s no direct hit even on his hooded face. He knew where the camera was and avoided it, even though he’s covered.”

“You think that’s important?” she asked.

“At this point in the investigation, there isn’t anything that’s not important.”

Lancaster nodded. “I think that was the second rule you ever taught me.”

“The first being to suspect everybody,” Decker added absently, his gaze still squarely on the shooter.

She said nothing to this and he finally looked at her.

“Like riding a bike, Amos. You were the best I’ve ever seen. I think you still can be.”

He looked away, not really feeling better from her praise, because his altered mind didn’t respond to that anymore either. “Can you run the feed all the way until he turns the corner?”

Lancaster did so, and then, at Decker’s request, did it three more times.

He finally sat back, lost in thought, his gaze still on the screen, though.

She stared over at him. “You see anything that hits you?”

“I see lots of things that hit me. But none more than a guy dressed like that, carrying weapons, who can apparently vanish into thin air.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts or magic.”

“I don’t either, Mary. But I do know one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“That this guy is not going to get away.”

She kept her gaze on him, her expression becoming concerned. “You sure you’re not talking about Leopold?”

He shrugged, his eyes seeming to stare at somewhere a million miles from here. “In a way, they’re all fucking Leopolds.”

With Captain Miller’s blessing, Lancaster had arranged temporary credentials and an access badge for Decker. He had worked enough crime scenes to watch where he walked and not disturb or corrupt potential evidence. He looked over reports, studied the video some more, chatted briefly with department folks he knew, nodded to some he didn’t. While he was a long way from feeling comfortable working a crime scene again, he was starting to feel certain things coming back to him. His chief strength had always been observation. Looking around and seeing things, but not the way most people did. He had built convictions from small details that most overlooked, including, most significantly, the ones who had committed the crimes.

And he had observed a lot here so far, and not all of it connected to the shootings.

Principally he noted that the FBI was playing the usual peacock game. Strutting around and overwhelming everyone with their resources. But then again, he knew the police wouldn’t mind the help. The goal was the same. Get the guy who did this.

He fell back into the routine that he had employed in countless other investigations. He walked and observed and asked questions and read more reports. His travels took him around the entire perimeter of the school several times. He looked at it from every possible vantage point. Then he went back inside the school and looked out of every window in the place. It was the darkest moments before dawn broke. He had been here for hours. It felt like ten minutes, because he really hadn’t come up with anything. But that was okay. Miracles and epiphanies rarely happened in the middle of criminal investigations. If you wanted something like that you needed to turn on the TV. Results in the real world came from slow, dogged work, compiling facts and building conclusions and deductions based on those facts. And a little luck never hurt either.

A few minutes before dawn broke the transports were called up to start taking the bodies to the morgue. There was a loading dock in the rear of the school. The police had shielded it from view with a tarp and steel support poles. The vehicles drove one by one through a gap in this wall. Behind the tarp Decker knew the bodies were coming out, housed in black sturdy bags. The bodies had names but also numbers. They weren’t human beings anymore. They were pieces in a criminal investigation. Debbie Watson would be Vic-1. Her body had been the starting point in numbering everybody else who had fallen. Joe Kramer, the gym teacher, had been labeled Vic-2. And on the numbering went, down the list of dead.

Decker leaned against the outside wall of the school near the loading dock and studied the blue tarp. And then he closed his eyes, because he equated the color blue with the slaughter of his family. He didn’t need to see color in the outside world. He had enough of it going on inside his head.

Get back to basics, Amos. Slow and easy. You know how to do this. This was all you did for so many years. Mary is right. You can do this.

Motive.

It always began with that, because motive was just another way of saying, Why would you do something like this? Greed, jealousy, kicks, personal vendetta, perceived slight, insanity? The last was always tough to decipher, because how did you read a mind that was deranged?

But this guy had method. This guy had some inside knowledge of the school. This guy had taken great care to not allow even a piece of his skin to be observed. They didn’t even know if he was black or white. Although most mass murderers were white. And male. And with this shooter’s size and shape, he was most definitely a male.

The face shield was an unusual step. It was not for defense. It couldn’t have stopped a bullet. It was for concealment.

He watched as the last of the transport vehicles pulled away, rack lights on but no sirens engaged. The dead were in no hurry. Each body would be cut up as the medical examiner looked for clues. But the best they could hope for here would be ballistics. What type of bullet had killed them? He doubted the shooter had laid a finger on any of his victims. If you didn’t touch, you didn’t leave any usable trace behind. With the bullets they could at least, one day, match them to the guns that had ben used. And if the guns had an owner, the chain of title to this horrific event possibly could be traced.

He walked back to the library, where Lancaster was sitting and going over case notes. She looked up as he approached.

“I’m surprised you’re still here,” she said, stifling a yawn.

“I have nowhere else I have to be,” said Decker.

He sat next to her.

“Did you do your normal walk-around?” she asked.

He nodded. “But I didn’t really see anything.”

“You will, Amos. Give it time.”

“Earl with Sandy?”

She nodded. “He’s used to it. Been a lot of long nights lately.” She glanced around the room. “But nothing like this.”