David Baldacci - Memory Man

Well, that changed.

Some knew of Decker’s past, of his trauma, his near death on the playing field. He had not known of Belinda’s plight, though perhaps she didn’t know that. She might have thought that if she knew about him, he knew about her. But what did that matter, really?

He opened his eyes, his brow creasing with the failure of his mind — his extraordinary brain-traumatized, bastardized mind that had been born to him after his death and resurrection — to solve the one conundrum that would make all the other pieces fall into place.

He left because he could not stay here.

Thirty minutes later he walked into the Burlington police station. Captain Miller was there. Bogart had already briefed him on the trip to Utah, Miller informed him.

“You don’t look so good, Amos,” Miller said.

“Should I?” Decker said back.

Miller tapped his head. “It’s not coming?”

“It’s there. I just can’t make it tell me what I need to know.”

“You have an exceptional mind, but it’s still a lot to figure out.”

“Well, someone has to. And if it’s not me, it has to be someone else.”

“You think they might pull up their tent and leave?”

“Not yet.”

“What are they waiting for?” asked Miller.

“Me.”

He went down to the evidence locker and filled out the necessary paperwork with Miller’s authorization to step inside the locker and look through the evidence gathered thus far. Since he was no longer with the police, someone had to accompany him.

That person was Sally Brimmer, who explained, “It’s not like I have a higher priority than this case, Decker.”

They sat at a table as Decker went over every evidence bag, many of them twice. He finally came to his uniform the second time around.

“Technically, you should have turned in your badge,” admonished Brimmer. “It’s no good anymore anyway. The way they defaced it.”

Decker picked up the bag and looked through the plastic at the badge with the X cut through it.

X-ing me out , he thought. Like you did Giles Evers. He was wearing a uniform when he took you under false pretenses, Belinda . In a sense they were all in uniform. The cop, the football players, the coach, even the assistant principal, cloaked in the authority of the school. You were surrounded by people who should have protected you, but they didn’t. Instead, they destroyed you. Starting with a cop. With a badge. Just like mine .

He rubbed the metal through the plastic. Then he stopped. It was like rubbing a genie’s lamp. He had made a silly wish, never thinking it would come true. But it just had.

The last piece had just fallen into place.

And Amos Decker finally understood what he had done to deserve all this.

He walked into the library at Mansfield High with the certain knowledge that he had to do this.

There were about a half dozen people working here, but Lancaster, Jamison, and Bogart were not among them. It was late. Perhaps they were catching some sleep. His phone buzzed. Surprisingly, it was Bogart. He had some information on the “Justice Denied” matter. And he also told Decker that the Wyatts had nearly $10 million in liquid assets but that monies had been funneled out of the accounts at the rate of $1 million per month for the last nine months. Decker listened to it all.

Bogart said, “What do you make of that?”

“That it all makes sense.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Exactly what I said.”

“Where are you?”

“In my room getting ready to go to sleep.”

“I’ll check back in the morning,” said Bogart.

“Right,” said Decker.

He sat down at one of the laptops and logged in using the password he had previously been given. He went to the “Justice Denied” website. There was a program there to set up personal messaging accounts so that people could correspond privately with the organizers of the site. He set up a username and password, filled out a form, and made a request.

They had to monitor it, he thought. There was no way they could not. That might be why they had left the information about the site with Clyde Evers, just in case Decker made the connection and went to visit the old man. This was all a puzzle, and every piece fit in somewhere.

Thirty minutes went by. Then an hour. Then two hours. Decker just sat there, the color gray chief in his mind. Though he’d lived with this new mind for twenty years now, it still felt like he was existing in someone else’s body. And that any minute, or after an odd synaptic fire, he would be back to his old self and his quite ordinary brain.

His phone buzzed again. It was Jamison. He didn’t answer it.

At the three-hour mark the message popped up in his new account.

You finally got there, bro. Congratulations.

Decker also knew what the “bro” reference was to now. It was simple, really. They were all brothers, weren’t they? All lumped together by Wyatt. By Leopold. It was unfair, of course. It was unjust, but still, he could understand it.

He typed in a request and sent it off. And waited.

Finally, the response came. Why should we?

He had not expected them to simply agree to what he had proposed. He typed in his answer. He hoped it was good enough. He doubted he would get another chance like this.

This needs to end sometime. Why not now? I’m the only one left.

Unless he was missing something really big, he was the only one left. And he didn’t think he was missing anything. Not anymore. In fact, he might have discovered something that everyone else had missed. And he meant everyone, the two people on the other end of this digital line included.

They would suspect a trap, of course. They couldn’t even know it was him. He was expecting a test. And it came with the next missive.

The number of Dwayne LeCroix’s jersey.

They had definitely done their homework, or maybe Wyatt had heard something about him at the institute and dug that up.

The query said he had five seconds to answer. No looking up anything online. Google or YouTube was not going to be an option here. But he didn’t need it. Even without his special talent he would forevermore remember those two digits, even if he hadn’t seen them before the hit occurred.

He instantly typed in the answer and sent it off: 24.

The response was immediate.

Instructions to follow in five minutes. Stand by.

He waited, his internal clock ticking away in his head. When three hundred and six seconds had passed, it came. He studied it.

It was smart, calculated. They were taking no chances. It was like traveling by stagecoach with way stations along the journey, allowing them ample opportunity to see if Decker was truly alone. He would get to one station and there would be a communication telling him where to go next.

They had obviously planned this out previously, as though they knew exactly how all of this was going to play out. And that, Decker had to concede, was more than a little unnerving.

He rose and left. He was back at his room in thirty minutes. It took him all of three minutes to pack up pretty much all he had.

It fit into a bag two feet square with room to spare.

As he hit the doorway he looked back. His home. The only one he had now, a rental, one room. Not really much of a home. So he felt absolutely nothing at leaving it.

If this turned out badly for him he would miss Lancaster, Miller, and Jamison. And maybe even Agent Bogart. But that was about it.

He closed the door and dropped the key off in the office slot.

He knew he would not be coming back.