David Baldacci - Memory Man

With that remembrance, Decker turned back to face the army of numbers, his initial fear receding, but it was replaced with a fresh one.

What new stuff will tomorrow bring?

He had gotten off duty, gone home, dropped into bed, and wept quietly so that he wouldn’t awaken Cassie. In the morning he told her what had happened. She was predictably supportive and encouraging. And Decker was predictably upbeat, blowing it off as something that was actually funny. But it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny at all. The threes had been gone for a while. In fact, he hadn’t seen them coming out of the darkness since Cassie and Molly died. But now they were back.

Wonderful.

And the threes had added a new dimension. A trio of knives was coming off each of the digits’ stems. No, not funny at all.

“Let me know if they crack the code,” he said as the threes charged forward, knives at the ready.

Then he turned left and headed down the street.

“Don’t you want a ride home?” asked Lancaster.

Decker kept walking, his hands shoved deeply into his coat pockets.

He didn’t need a ride. He needed to think.

He looked at his feet to avoid staring into the faces of the legions of numbers coming at him from out of the gloom.

What did Debbie Watson have that their shooter needed? Guns? No. Cammie gear? Maybe. But why couldn’t he have brought that on his own? He didn’t need her for that.

The heart and the picture. She was in love. She had a crush on the guy. Would do anything for him. But would she sacrifice her classmates? The picture of the cammie man had not included any weapons. Had Debbie not known what the actual plan was to be? So why had she come out of her classroom to meet the guy?

He lifted his eyes, saw the threes flying head-on at him, and lowered his gaze once more. When he had done stakeouts or pulled shifts at night he had worn special glasses that tinted the darkness into a golden color. Gold for him was a sky full of geese. No threes to bother him. He had lost the glasses a long time ago. Now the threes were back and they were armed. He would need to get new glasses.

He stopped walking, leaned against a tree, closed his eyes, dialed up his mental DVR, and replayed everything he had seen in the Watsons’ house. The spool unwound in his head and then he slowed the pace of the mental frames. And then he stopped his DVR and a row of images stared at him like figurines on a fireplace mantel. Actually, the image was quite literal.

They were on the fireplace mantel.

Decker turned around and walked quickly back to the Watsons’ house. He knocked and George answered.

“Did you forget something?” George asked, sounding a little annoyed.

“Pictures on your mantel. I saw them earlier. Can you walk me through them?”

“Pictures on the mantel?” said George with a perplexed look. “Walk you through them?”

Decker stepped inside the house, forcing the much smaller man to step back quickly.

“I’m assuming they’re family members?”

“Yes. But what does that have to do with anything?”

“I’ve worked cases long enough to know that it’s the one thing you let pass that ends up holding the answer you need. We can’t afford any lapses here, Mr. Watson, I’m sure you can understand that. If we’re going to find whoever killed Debbie and the others.”

What can the man say to that other than agree?

Watson slowly nodded, though he still looked unconvinced. “Okay, sure, follow me.”

He led Decker into the small living room and over to the mantel that topped an old brick fireplace that had mortar leaching from the seams.

“Where do you want to start?”

Decker pointed to the picture on the far left. “With him.”

“Okay, that was my wife’s father, Ted Knolls. He died about two years ago. Heart attack.”

“What did he do for a living?”

“What the hell does that have to—”

Decker cut him off. “Just tell me what he did for a living.”

Decker looked menacingly down at the smaller man. He was a grizzly against a chipmunk, which was exactly how he wanted Watson to see it.

Watson took a step back, changed color, and looked at the photo. “He was a long-haul trucker. Bad diet, no exercise. He was as big as a house when he collapsed on his front lawn picking up the newspaper. He was dead before he hit the grass.” He eyed Decker’s massive frame when he said this. “But that’s all he did, he drove a truck back and forth across the Midwest and down to Texas and back.”

“Was he close to Debbie?”

Watson self-consciously rubbed at his malformed arm. “No, not really. I mean, we saw them at holidays. But, to tell the truth, things weren’t good between us and them. My mother-in-law never warmed to me.”

“And the man next to him? That picture looks pretty old.”

“That’s my grandfather, Simon Watson. He’s been gone, oh, a good six years. He was a young man in that picture.”

“So Debbie’s great-grandfather,” said Decker, and Watson nodded.

“He lived to over ninety years old. Smoked and drank and didn’t give a damn, as he liked to say.”

“But Debbie knew him if he’s only been gone six years?”

“Oh, yes. In fact he lived with us the last five years of his life.”

“So she would have spent time with him?”

“I’m sure she did. Debbie was still a kid then and Gramps had had a pretty interesting life. Fought in World War II and then the Korean War. Then he left the service and went to work for the civilian side of the Defense Department.”

“Doing what?”

“Well, he worked at the military base here when it was open.”

“The one next to Mansfield High School? McDonald Army Base?”

“That’s right.”

“What did he do there?”

“He had a series of jobs. His training was in engineering and construction. So he worked on the facilities and plant side.”

“Do you know the dates?”

“Come on, what does this have to do with anything?”

“I’m just looking for leads, Mr. Watson. The dates?”

“I can’t tell you for certain.” He paused and thought about it. “He left the regular Army in the sixties. Then he went to McDonald probably around 1968 or ’69. It must have been ’69. I remember associating it with the astronauts walking on the moon. Then he worked there until he retired. About twenty years later.”

“And the base closed eight years ago.”

“That sounds about right.”

“That wasn’t a question, Mr. Watson, it did close eight years ago, on a Monday. There was sleet that day.”

Watson looked at him strangely and then coughed. “If you say so. I can’t remember what I was doing last week. Anyway, it was part of a Pentagon base realignment and Burlington lost out. I heard tell most of the operations moved east, maybe to Virginia. Closer to Uncle Sam and his dollars in D.C.”

“So, presumably Simon talked about his work at the base with you, with Debbie?”

“Oh, yes, I mean the parts he could talk about. Some of it was classified, I guess you’d call it.”

“Classified?”

George’s features eased to a grin. “Well, I don’t think they did nukes or anything there. But the military always has its share of secrets.”

“So what did Simon talk to you about? I mean with the base?”

“Some of the history of it. People he met. Some of the work he did. They kept adding on to the base for years. Building, building, building. All the people who worked there sent their kids to Mansfield for high school. His son — my father — went there. So did I. So did my wife for that matter.”

“Did Debbie ever mention to you some of the things she and her great-grandfather talked about?”