David Baldacci - Memory Man

Decker nodded slowly. Again, his chitchat component was at an end. “Do you have completed witness statements yet?”

“I’ve been putting some of them on the computer. There’s not much there. But I haven’t talked to the wounded teacher yet. Odds are he won’t make it. And if he dies that’ll make nine vics total.”

“Andy Jackson. How was he shot?”

“Students in the class said he tried to stop the shooter.”

“How?” asked Decker.

“Ran at him. Put himself between the shooter and the students.”

“Before or after he shot one of them?”

“After.”

Decker settled back and thought about this as Lancaster watched him.

“Pretty brave of the guy,” said Lancaster.

Decker didn’t respond to the statement.

“I need to see the witness statements.” His tone was now brisk, confident.

Lancaster noted this and allowed a tiny smile to escape her lips as she pulled them out for him.

He went through each page of the statements. When he was done he flipped back to page two and then over to page ten of the witness statements before putting aside the notebook.

“See anything?” asked Lancaster, who had been watching him off and on as she worked away.

He rose. “I’ll be back.”

“Decker!”

But for a large man carrying a lot of extra weight, he could move faster than one would have expected. Perhaps a little of the freewheeling football player was left inside him. He closed the library door behind him and set off down the hall.

Lancaster hadn’t followed him. Being his partner for ten years, she was well used to his doing this. Some bee would get in his bonnet and off he would go without a word to her or anyone else. She went back to her work.

Decker had gone ten paces when he stopped and glanced out a window overlooking the front parking area. It was starting to rain, he could see. He could also see a large group of candles seemingly floating in midair. They weren’t candles, of course. The rain would have doused them. They were cell phone lights. It was a vigil group out front. It seemed like the whole town of Burlington was out there, and maybe it was. And after what had happened here, maybe it should be.

There had been a vigil outside his house the night after the murders. They had been real candles then. Plus a pile of flowers, signs, and stuffed animals. It had been meant as signs of support, love, solidarity, caring. That was all good. But the sight of that pile had left him sickened and disoriented. And mad with something even beyond grief.

He turned away from the window and kept walking as the rain started to hammer down on the school’s roof.

He could imagine the cell phones winking off as the group hastily put them away. Or maybe they would keep them out in the rain. Let them die too, as a sign of solidarity to those who had been lost inside this place.

Decker passed a detective he knew in the hall. He was talking to someone in a suit whom Decker had seen before in the library; the man was FBI. The detective nodded at Decker.

“Hear you’re consulting on the case, Amos. Good to see you.”

Decker nodded hesitantly as he glanced at the FBI agent. The man was giving Decker the once-over, and the appraisal, Decker could tell from the man’s expression, did not turn out favorably.

“Yeah,” was all Decker could manage in a gruff voice, before he hurried on.

But then he put aside the awkward encounter, which his mind allowed him to do quite easily. He could compartmentalize at an astonishing level. It came from not giving a shit.

And something did not make sense. That was the reason for his abrupt departure from the library.

Page two of the witness statements.

Melissa Dalton, aged seventeen and a junior, had been putting books away in her locker. The time had been early, 7:28, more than an hour before school officially began. She was here to take a makeup test she had missed due to an illness.

Dalton had known the exact time because she had glanced at the clock on the wall above her locker, afraid that she would be late. She had perfect attendance throughout high school, with not even a tardy to mar her record. This was important to her, since her parents had said four years of such perfection would merit a hand-me-down car all her own when Dalton graduated.

So 7:28.

That’s when Melissa Dalton had heard something. And she had told Lancaster when Mary interviewed her.

She had heard something one hour and two minutes before the bell would ring. Maybe twelve minutes after the bell rang, or at approximately 8:42, Debbie Watson would lose her face and her life when the shooter turned the corner and raised his shotgun. All because she had an upset stomach.

But how could Melissa Dalton have heard what she did?

Small observations can lead to large breakthroughs.

He kept going.

Decker stopped and looked around. The gym was to the far left on the last hall on the first floor. Then classrooms, then the rear entrance. On the other side of the main corridor were more classrooms, the custodial space, and the rear loading dock off that. The main corridor ran front to back, splitting the first floor exactly in half, with three corridors running off that to the left and right, like straight branches off a tree trunk.

Since only the middle hallway had exits on either end, that meant there were four sets of entry and exit doors, situated at all four points of the compass.

He headed to the rear entrance and peered up at the camera. Then he walked to different spots along the rear doorway and checked the camera each time he did so.

Interesting.

He reversed course and walked down the main hall until he neared the front entrance. Then he veered to the left, down the hall where the cafeteria was located on his left and the library on the right.

This was where Melissa Dalton’s locker was located, directly across from the cafeteria. He looked at the locker. Just behind it was the library where Lancaster was toiling away. On the opposite side, next to the sprinkling of classrooms, was the large cafeteria.

Decker recalled from his school days that there was a storage and prep area at the end of the cafeteria with an exterior door leading to a small concrete porch area where shipments of food would be stacked. So that actually made six doors. Four main ones off the halls, one off the rear loading dock, and one here off the cafeteria.

At 7:28 Melissa Dalton had heard a door open and close. It was not an interior classroom door, because there had been a whooshing sound associated with it, she had said. Like a vacuum closing.

Like a vacuum closing . Those had been Dalton’s words. Lancaster had noted in the statement that Dalton had told her she loved science and the class had just gone over vacuums, which was no doubt why that term was fresh in her mind. Lancaster had put multiple question marks next to this statement, plus a large asterisk. She was no doubt planning to check that out later. Decker couldn’t blame her for marking the statement so. It didn’t seem to make sense.

So that was page two of the statements.

On page ten of the witness statements was a little nugget. It was the counterpart information that had really caused Decker to come here.

The cafeteria workers came in at 8:45 sharp. Not before, not after. That had been verified from multiple sources as being the case yesterday as well. All the cafeteria workers were female. There was simply not a six-two, two-hundred-plus-pound, broad-shouldered male among them.

And since the shooting had started at 8:42, none of the cafeteria workers had actually made it into the school. Four of them were getting out of their cars in the parking lot and another was waiting to turn into the lot when all hell had broken loose.