David Baldacci - Memory Man

“But you said the door was locked?”

“Jesus would have unlocked it from the inside for her.”

“Right.” She eyed him suspiciously. “Exactly how long have you thought all this?”

“Not that long.” Decker closed his eyes and touched the back of his head about halfway down. “And the autopsy revealed that there was a subacute subdural hematoma on the back of her head, right about here. Left side of the occipital bone was cracked, and that’s a tough bone to damage like that. That might have killed her if the shotgun hadn’t, just from internal bleeding and resulting pressure on the brain. The ME speculated the injury occurred when she fell backward to the floor after being shot.” He opened his eyes and looked at his partner. “Left side.”

“Meaning the blow came from the left side and behind? A left-handed person? Like you said the guy who wrote the musical score was, left-handed.”

“The probabilities lie there, yes.”

“So he meets her in here and knocks her out, but why?”

“He needed her out of the way. And he needed to kill her first, before anyone else. He couldn’t risk the possibility that she would survive. She could identify him. So he arranges to meet with her, uses the passageway to get across the school unseen. I would imagine this is not the first time they’ve done this. They might have had sex in shop class during or after school on other occasions. I wonder how often Debbie got permission to go to the nurse’s office?”

“Have sex? Are you serious?”

“Their own private space in the middle of the school? What could be cooler for a teenager in love with her mature man who doesn’t even go here? And the killer would have wanted to know the passage by heart when he was planning this whole thing. He could bring stuff in and store it here. It was perfect.”

“So how do you see it playing out from there?”

“He meets in the shop class with her, she thinks to make out, hence the breath mints. He knocks her out, gets his gear, slips out of the room, walks around the corner to the camera, and gets his picture taken.” He glanced at Lancaster. “You saw the shoeprints in the passage?”

“You know I did.”

“I estimate they’re a size nine or maybe nine and a half, but no larger.”

Lancaster looked confused. “That’s not very big for a large guy,” she said slowly. “Earl’s six feet and he wears an eleven.”

“I’m six-five and wear a fourteen shoe, which is not unusual for a man my size. A guy six-two weighing in at two-hundred-plus pounds with a size nine shoe? Not likely. And I couldn’t get past the gap in the door with the AC units in the way. I had to push them out farther. And the lack of marks on the floor showed I was the only one who had. You got through easily enough, but you’re short and skinny. The guy in the video had a lot smaller waist than I do, but his shoulders and chest were just as broad as mine. So how did he manage to get through that gap without moving the AC units?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“I’ve got some ideas.”

Lancaster looked around nervously and chewed her gum so ferociously that her teeth were clacking together. “We need to get a forensics team in here. I hope to God we haven’t already tainted evidence. The Bureau will rip us a new one, after Mac finishes with us.” She looked around and then something seemed to strike her.

“Wait a minute. If the guy knocked Debbie out and then dragged her out of here, how did he shoot her standing up out in the hall? The ballistics was clear on that. She was upright. Blood spatters don’t lie. And there was only a minute gap between his picture being captured on the video and him killing Debbie.”

“There was a hole in the back of her jacket right where it would sit behind her neck,” Decker said. “He probably hooked the jacket on her locker door. It could keep her upright for a short time. He slips around the corner, gets his image captured on the video, comes back around the corner, and shoots her. The blast would have knocked her down. That’s when the jacket tore, when it was jerked off the locker door when she fell.”

Decker shone his light around the room and picked up more shoeprints, including a set leading back into the storage room and then back down to the passageway. There were also footprints in the shop class, belonging to Debbie Watson. She had worn clunky boots. They had been on her body. In the prints on the floor Decker could see a picture of activity forming. The two sets of footprints had gotten very close together. Probably when they had been kissing. She had been anticipating sex with the man she called Jesus, and instead she’d been thrown right into an early grave.

Decker leaned against the wall and rewound his DVR until he stopped at the point he wanted. “Did you notice something else down in the passageway, Mary?”

“Something else? Like what?”

He opened his eyes. “There were two sets of shoeprints going up the stairs to the storage room off the shop class.”

“Right.”

“And there was a set coming back down the stairs.”

“Right, again. So?”

“And while there were scuffed prints all over the place showing that he had used this passage before, there were no clear sets of shoeprints going back down the passage to the cafeteria to match the two sets coming from the front of the school to the back.”

Lancaster’s eyes widened. “Damn, that’s right. So how did our guy escape from the school?”

“Now, that’s a really good question.”

While Lancaster hurried off to alert her colleagues to this new development, Decker slipped back down into the passageway and reached the bottom of the stairs.

So if the shooter hadn’t gone back down this passage and escaped via the cafeteria or gone out the front or rear doors, where someone surely would have seen him, then where did he go? The school had been searched, including the unused upper floors, and nothing had been discovered. The police hadn’t known about this passageway, of course, and thus it had not been searched. But the guy was not down here now. He had walked down the stairs from the shop class storage area and gone... where?

Decker hit the area all around the bottom of the stairs with his flashlight.

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.