David Baldacci - Memory Man

“You said he was cunning.”

Decker nodded. “He is. He obviously wants to destroy me professionally before he kills me.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

Decker looked up at her. “Go ahead.”

“Who the hell did you piss off so badly that he’s doing all this to you?”

Decker didn’t answer, because he had no answer to give. He wrote down his email address on the back of a napkin and slid it across to her.

Jamison pocketed it, turned, and left.

Decker continued to sit there.

A few moments later his phone buzzed. He looked at the screen and allowed himself a brief smile.

Jamison had just forwarded to him the email trail from her anonymous source. Decker knew that the trail would not lead them back to the sender. That was too obvious. But he wanted to study what the man had written.

He pushed his plate aside and stared down at the message. The sender’s name was Mallard2000. That meant nothing to him. He read the message. It basically mirrored what Decker had already deduced. The sender wanted Jamison to write a story raising suspicion about Decker and his family’s murder. The word choices were simple and direct. In his mind Decker imagined Sebastian Leopold uttering each of those words out loud, trying to match the cadence of his stilted speech to the components of the message. But it was off, at least in his mind. They didn’t seem to match.

There were two of them. In this together. One person can’t be in two places at the same time. Leopold in jail during both sets of murders. So if he is involved, and I believe he is, there’s someone else. Yet there is a problem with that theory.

One man with such a vendetta against him, okay. But two of them?

He forwarded the email to Lancaster and asked her to try to track it down. He doubted she or the FBI could, but they had to try. He had no computer, so he walked to the public library and used one there.

He was not very much of a techie, and his ability to track someone from an email address was limited. He soon exhausted his possibilities on that and got up from the computer. He wandered the shelves, arriving at the nonfiction section.

Something had occurred to him on the way over, and a library was a perfect place to check out a theory forming in his mind.

The Clutter family.

He worked his way to the authors whose last name ended in C. Not for Clutter, but for the author of their tragic story.

He found the book and slipped it out.

In Cold Blood , by Truman Capote.

The story was both simple and complex. Decker had read it years ago and, as with everything else, had every page of the book neatly stored in his mind.

A guy in prison gets a tip from another inmate that a farmer named Clutter in rural Kansas keeps a lot of money in a safe. The guy gets out of prison, hooks up with a former cellmate, and they head to the farmer’s home. They break into the house, only to find there is no safe and no money; the tip was bullshit. It should have ended there, but unfortunately for the Clutter family, it didn’t. The more timid, though unstable, of the two crooks decides that they must kill the family. His partner, who had been the leader of the pack and the one who had gotten the tip, reluctantly goes along. One by one the family is murdered. The killers are not smart. They are pursued and caught. After their respective trials and lengthy appeals they are both hanged at the Kansas death house.

Tragic all around. Both killers had issues in their backgrounds, problems, troubles, bad stuff. But nothing to justify what they had done, not that anything could.

That part of the story did not interest Decker very much at the moment. What did interest him was the possibility of two men from very different backgrounds coming together at just the right moment and forming a partnership that would lead to the slaughter of so many people. He didn’t know Leopold. He had never met the man until he sat in that prison cell. So it wasn’t Leopold who had the vendetta against him. It had to be the person whom Leopold had hooked up with. But who was he?

He put the book back on the shelf and left the library.

As he was walking his phone buzzed again. It was Lancaster.

“Nothing yet on the email,” she said. “You really think it was the guy?”

“I do.”

“The FBI is checking it out too.”

“Anything on Lafferty yet?”

“That was the real reason I was calling. Can you meet me at the morgue?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Just meet me there. You can see for yourself.”

Decker took a bus over to the morgue, which was on the outskirts of Burlington in an area that, like much of the city, had seen better days. He had pondered Lancaster’s words on the ride over but could not make much of them. What did she want him to see for himself?

When he arrived at the morgue’s front entrance she was waiting for him. Her expression was tight, edgy, her hand tremor even worse.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Come on, Bogart is already back there.”

They walked down halls reeking with the smell of antiseptic. And death. The dead had their own aroma that invaded one’s eyes, nose, and throat. Morgues were not clean places. In fact, they were extraordinarily dirty. No one had to worry about their patrons dying from infections.

Lancaster led the way and finally pushed through a pair of swinging doors. Decker followed her in. The space was large and filled with shelves and stainless steel autopsy tables, three of which were occupied by corpses draped with sheets. Water wands hung down from the ceiling, and there were cabinets filled with both bottles of liquids and the instruments necessary to cut up bodies. The whir of a Stryker saw sounded from another room. Decker had heard that one before. Someone’s skull was being opened up. He wondered if it was a victim from Mansfield about to have his or her brain plucked out for measuring, weighing, and probing.

A group of people was clustered around a table in the far back, Bogart among them. He was once more dressed in a suit, the tie and tie clip just so, the collar tab perfectly horizontal, not a hair out of place, the very picture of professionalism. But in the puffy face, reddened eyes, and slump in posture, Decker read a very different man. There were two other agents with him and a man Decker knew to be the chief medical examiner. They weren’t going to put anyone junior on cutting up an FBI agent. Indeed, Decker was surprised the Bureau hadn’t flown in its own guy.

Bogart looked up when he heard them approach. He nodded briefly, gave Decker a stiff hello with his eyes, and then looked back down at the body under the sheet.

Lancaster said to the ME, “What do we know so far?”

“As was noted preliminarily at the crime scene, cause of death, stab wound to the heart. The body was moved after death. Livor mortis showed that. Blood pooled into the interstitial tissues in her back, but she was found hanging from a light fixture.” He uncovered one of Lafferty’s arms. With difficulty he lifted it up because it was still stiff. “She’s starting to come out of rigor now, extremities backward to the jaw and neck, which more or less confirms the TOD preliminary at midnight.”

“But the ambient temp?” asked Decker. “It was cold.”

“My colleague on site made allowances for that. And the deceased was injected with a very powerful sedative. We found traces of it. It would have rendered her unconscious and incapable of defending herself.”

“And there was mutilation of the genitals,” said Decker.

The ME nodded. But when he started to lower the sheet to reveal this area, Decker stopped him. “We’ve already seen it.”

He looked at Lancaster expectantly. She in turn glanced at Bogart and said, “I haven’t told him. Thought he should just see it for himself.”