David Baldacci - Memory Man

“If he’s only been here a few years he’s worn his accent away relatively fast. He only had the one slip when I was talking with him. Can I see anything you have on him?”

“I’ll arrange it. Where will you be?”

“Back at the library at Mansfield.”

“You want a ride over there?”

“I need to make one stop first.”

“Where?”

“To pick up my partner.”

“Your partner? You don’t mean Lancaster? After what almost happened to her family I don’t think she’s up to it.”

“Mary is up to it.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I know Lancaster. She’s tougher than you and me combined.”

Lancaster and Jamison were sitting across from Decker in the school library. They were awaiting Leopold’s files. Decker had filled Lancaster in on everything they had learned.

He said, “Bogart thinks that Belinda might not have filed a police report. He believes her parents might have discouraged her from doing so.”

“Talk about scum,” replied Lancaster fiercely.

“The thing is, her trauma left her with perfect recall. She would have remembered her attackers.”

“If she knew them in the first place,” said Jamison.

Decker replied, “Small-town Utah. Everybody probably knew everybody.”

“At the institute did she ever talk?” asked Lancaster.

“Almost never. In the group sessions she never talked about what had happened to her. I didn’t know until Dr. Marshall told me. And she was probably attacked because her assailants knew of her intersex condition,” added Decker.

Lancaster shook her head. “I never heard the term until you told me. I can’t imagine what that must have been like. You said Marshall told you she had one testis and one ovary?”

“Yes.”

“The absolute shit she must have taken in school. In gym class, one of the other girls spots her private parts? Word spreads. It really must have been horrible.”

Decker was staring down at the document in front of him. He had just seen one fact that did not align with another.

Lancaster was well used to this look. “What?”

He glanced at her. “Dr. Marshall said the address he had in the file for Belinda’s parents was fifteen years old. But she was at the institute twenty years ago.”

“Well, maybe they kept in touch for some reason. I doubt Belinda stayed there for five years. It must be a more recent address.”

“But Marshall also said that the Wyatts never visited her at the institute. So why would he have had the later address in the first place? Were they corresponding?”

He pulled out his phone and made a call. Dr. Marshall was in a meeting but called back five minutes later.

“Yes, Amos, you’re correct,” he said. “The Wyatts did move, but we kept in touch, for about seven years after. And they sent me their new address so I could write to them from time to time.”

“You didn’t mention that when we questioned you.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But I take patient confidentiality very seriously. I tried to be as helpful as I could while still respecting that professional duty.”

“You said they never visited her at the institute. I assumed that meant they weren’t interested in her care. In fact, you said you believed them to be ignorant people in regard to Belinda’s condition.”

“That’s right.”

“How did you come by that opinion? And how did she even come to be at the institute if her parents didn’t care what had happened to her?”

“I don’t think they initiated it.”

“Who did, then?”

“I’m not sure. It might have been one of the doctors there who made the referral after it became clearer that her cognitive condition might be one that we should look into at the institute. Even twenty years ago we had a national reputation,” he added proudly. “And we had enough funding to have paid for all of her expenses.”

“Okay, but if the Wyatts had no involvement in sending her to you, why would they correspond with you?”

Decker thought he knew the answer but he wanted to hear it from Marshall.

“Well, because they were scared, Amos. They were scared of Belinda. At least that’s what they told me. When she came back home to Utah she was a different person to them. And I don’t mean for the better. Our work with her at the institute apparently did not help her. And she left home soon thereafter. But they would apparently get messages from her. Pretty frightening ones. And so they were scared.”

“That she would, what, hurt them?”

“I don’t like to speculate about that.”

“Just give me your educated guess.”

He could hear Marshall let out a long breath. “All right. I think they were terrified that she was going to murder them.”

Well, they were spot on about that , thought Decker.

“Can I have their old address? The one in Utah? Do you have it?”

Marshall gave it to him from the file. Decker thanked him and clicked off.

He got on the computer and did a satellite search of the old address.

He spun the laptop around so that Lancaster and Jamison could see.

“Okay, ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood,” Lancaster said. “Looks like mine.”

“And like mine,” said Decker. “But the point is, the Wyatts’ new house was five times the size with a pool and a separate four-car garage filled with luxury vehicles.”

Lancaster’s brows knitted together. “What did the Wyatts do for a living?”

“The info Bogart dug up says he was an assistant manager at the DMV. Mrs. Wyatt worked as a waitress in a diner.”

Jamison said, “They were definitely not pulling down big bucks. So how did they afford a house like that?”

“Well, you follow the money to answer that.” Decker got on his phone again. He asked Bogart this question.

When he clicked off he looked at Lancaster. “He’s going to check and get back to us.”

“What do you think is going on, Amos?” asked Lancaster.

“I think we’re getting close to finding out the motive behind all this, Mary. And once we do, it will all start to make sense.”

“Good. Because up to this point nothing has made sense. Nothing.”

“No, it’s always made sense, to Wyatt and Leopold. It only doesn’t make sense to us because we don’t know enough.”

“How can killing so many people ever make sense?” she said hotly.

“It doesn’t have to make sense to us. Just to the ones who did it.”

“I hate the world,” said Lancaster, looking miserable.

“I don’t hate the world,” said Decker. “I only hate some of the people who unfortunately live in it.”

They later grabbed dinner at a fast-food restaurant and brought it back with them to the library. After Decker finished eating he left Lancaster and Jamison and entered the cafeteria. From there he went through the door leading down into the tunnel and walked down the hall using a flashlight to illuminate the way.

They had been over and over this ground and the adjacent Army base but had found no new clues. The Army had gotten back to them with some information about the base and the tunnel connecting to the school, but it had shed no new light on the case.

Decker emerged on the other side and walked up into the bowels of the military facility. He sat on an old oil drum and let his mind wander back over past events.

Belinda Wyatt had been gang-raped, beaten, and left for dead. The motive was probably that her attackers had found out about her intersex condition. The trauma had changed her brain, turning her into what Decker also was.

I wonder if she remembers the rape and beating? Or if she’s forgotten it like I did the hit on me? I wonder if she can never forget all the things she wants to forget?