David Baldacci - Memory Man

The shooter.

He pulled his gun, touched the wood of the door, and eased it open. He shone his light ahead. He could hear water dripping, the scurry of what he assumed were rats, and the beating of his own heart.

Decker was a brave man, because you did not go into his line of work without being braver than average. But he was also scared, because you did not go into his line of work, or at least survive very long in it, without a commonsensical understanding of your own mortality.

He moved ahead. The floor sloped upward after a hundred feet. Then he reached a set of steps. He took them up, trying to keep as quiet as possible. There was another door at the top. It was locked. He tried his lock pick. It didn’t work.

He tried his shoulder with over three hundred and fifty pounds of bulk behind it.

That did work.

He came out into semidarkness and looked around. The room he was in was large, with windows set up high. There was the smell of grease and oil, and as he looked around he saw the skeletons of vehicles scattered here and there.

They were old abandoned Army vehicles. Because he was now standing in one of the buildings of the long-closed McDonald Army Base.

A passage connecting a school with an Army base?

But the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Lots of kids who went to Mansfield back then had parents who worked at the base. In the event of an emergency, what better place for the kids than either in the “bombproof” shelter underneath the school or at the base with their parents? Or maybe the underground shelter was designed to hold both base personnel and the school kids. Whatever the truth, it was also a fact that it had long since been forgotten about. And it was probably never even used.

But he corrected himself. It had been used recently, so it was not forgotten.

The shooter had exited this way; of that he was now certain. The base was a large place to search, and it had been abandoned for years. No witnesses to see anything. Everything was in disrepair and only a chain-link fence overgrown with vines and bushes and trees around the perimeter. Easy to make one’s escape completely unseen.

As Decker shone his light around he could see discarded beer cans and liquor bottles, empty condom packs, and cigarette butts littering the floor. The place was a forensic nightmare. There were probably hundreds of DNA samples down there, most of them from bored teens looking for sex, booze, nicotine — his light hit on a discarded syringe and a rubber hose to pop blood vessels — or something stronger.

But he doubted any of them knew that there was a passage connecting the base to the school. Even if they had explored the place, they would have encountered a locked door. If they had managed to get through that, they would run into a blank wall. End of exploring. And this would be a summer hangout place. Now that it was nearing winter, the unheated space was freezing. Their shooter would not have needed to worry about running into teenagers screwing and boozing here while he planned his massacre.

He walked around the place and found nothing and no one.

He pulled his phone and called the Watsons’ house. George answered. Decker wondered if Beth was already gone for good.

“Hello, who is this?” Watson wasn’t slurring his words. Maybe he’d slept it off.

“Mr. Watson, Detective Decker again.”

“What do you want?” he asked, clearly annoyed.

“Just a quick question. Had Debbie been spending a lot of time after hours at school, or maybe in the morning before classes started?”

“How the hell did you know that? How the hell do you know so much about my family?”

“Just a guess. But I am a detective. It’s what I do. And your wife mentioned that she was home a lot more than Debbie. So I assumed she was doing something after school. So what exactly was she doing?”

“She belonged to some clubs. They had meetings. Sometimes they ran late. She wouldn’t get home until well past dark. Why, is that important?”

“It might be. Thanks.”

Decker clicked off. He knew Debbie Watson was not going to club meetings. She was hooking up with “Jesus” in their private space.

He next called Lancaster and told her what he’d found.

He put his phone away, sat down on an oil drum, and waited with his eyes closed. He figured he would not have to wait long. He had left the door in the wall open.

He heard the footsteps coming. One would have made him open his eyes. This was about a dozen. So he kept his eyes closed. A killer came alone, not with an army.

He opened his eyes and saw Special Agent Bogart standing there.

“Another educated guess?” asked the man.

“Another educated guess,” replied Decker.

Behind Bogart was a group of FBI agents and members of the Burlington Police Department. Lancaster stepped forward.

“I called Mac, he’s on his way,” she reported, and Decker nodded slowly.

“How did you figure this?” Bogart asked Decker.

Decker gave him the two-minute drill on his deductions.

“If you had briefed us on your meeting with Beth Watson, we might have been able to help you on this,” Bogart pointed out. “We might have gotten here sooner.”

“We might have,” agreed Decker.

Bogart ordered a search of the place and the perimeter and then pulled up an old wooden bench and sat down next to Decker while Lancaster hovered nearby.

“So the shooter befriended Debbie Watson, found out about this link with the school, and used it to get away?” said Bogart.

“He used it to both get in and get away. With the passage he could come and go as he pleased. He seduced her. He’s a grown man. She’s an impressionable teenager with not the best of home lives. They must’ve had a bunch of trysts here that no one else knew about. She must have felt really special. Right up until he discharged a shotgun in her face.”

“We’ll contact the Army and get all we can on the base.”

“Yeah. Good luck with that.”

“I’m surprised no one knew about this passage,” said Bogart. “Other than the Watsons.”

“Well, if it was originally built in 1946 or close to it, most of those folks would be dead. I doubt they would have told the kids about it, so only the school officials would have known. Maybe it was never used. Maybe they never even had a practice drill. I don’t know. Even if they did, the students from back then would be fairly elderly now. Maybe they forgot about it.”

“But you said Simon Watson had added to the passageway?”

“He came to McDonald in the late sixties, and sometime after that the passage from the base was put in. But when the base was closed everybody left. Lots of people who worked here in uniform were probably transferred to other places.”

Lancaster interjected, “And even if there were folks left here who knew about the passage, I doubt they’d think about a killer using it to move around the school. They’d assume it was sealed up after all this time. The public probably believes he shot up the place and made a run for it and got away.”

Bogart nodded. “But he could have gotten into the school more easily from this way, meaning the Army base end. But he apparently was in the cafeteria and traversed the school that way. Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Decker. “We thought it might be to allow him time to cut through the wall sealing off the door behind the sign in the cafeteria. But now since I believe he’s been in and out of here a lot, he could have done that any time. And he probably wouldn’t have waited until the night before the planned attack, in case something went wrong.” He paused. “So, bottom line, I don’t know.”

“I thought you had all the answers.”