Memory Man

“I saw the control panel. When does the security system get turned on here?”

“Normally ten p.m. But there was an event that night. A school play that ran late. Lots of people. So the system wasn’t turned on until midnight so everyone could get out of the building.”

“And no activity on the alarm log?”

She shook her head. “None. First thing we did was check with the monitoring company. The log is clear.”

“So the shooter has to get in before midnight. Did this play involve refreshments in the cafeteria?”

“No. A friend of mine went because her kid was in it. She told me everyone left right after the play was over.”

“So he comes in during the gap before the alarm system was set and takes up his hidey-hole.”

“Why put his guns in the ceiling, then, Amos? Why not just have them in the freezer with him?”

“You’re assuming he came in with them and then took up his hiding spot. What if he brought the weapons in at another time and hid them? Then the freezer wouldn’t work. Someone would spot them. The ceiling would work just fine. If he did hide them up there.”

She shook her head stubbornly. “Why not do it all at once? It was pretty risky to get the guns in and hidden. And then sneak in again and hide in the freezer? Another risk that someone might have seen him.”

“Agreed. But if that’s the way it happened, then there must be an explanation for it. This guy strikes me as being methodical and thoughtful.”

“I can see that,” said Lancaster.

Decker continued to ruminate, seemingly talking to himself. “Guns and gear first. Then the shooter. He might have come in for the school play along with everyone else. Or appeared to do so. The auditorium is across the main hall from the cafeteria. Entering the main entrance, you turn left for the auditorium. Maybe this guy hung a right and went to the cafeteria. Or if folks came in the back entrance too from the parking lot out there, the right and left are reversed. He stays all night and starts his rampage the next morning. So you need to check if anyone saw someone they didn’t recognize at the school last night.” He paused. “But there’s the same old hitch.”

“What?” asked Lancaster as she popped another stick of gum in her mouth after wadding up the old one in a tissue and throwing it into the trash can.

“If your theory holds that Debbie Watson was the first vic, she was on the hall next to the rear entrance. That would mean that if our guy was hiding in the freezer overnight he would have had to walk down the hall between the cafeteria and the library, turn right down the main hall, pass two more corridors on both sides, past classrooms and presumably people, to take out first Watson and then, at the other end of the hall, the gym teacher Kramer. Then he reverses his path and starts mowing folks down as he moves back to the front of the school.” Decker looked at her skeptically. “That doesn’t seem plausible. Why not just start shooting on the front half of the school and work your way to the back? Which would mean Watson would be one of the last vics, not the first.”

“But the time stamp on the video?”

“That’s the real hitch in all this. That tells us he did begin his shooting at the rear part of the school. And he wanted us to see him on that camera for some reason. Now that we know he might have been hiding in the cafeteria, the video image looks like misdirection. So that means we have one proven point — the video camera time stamp, and one almost proven point — the shooter was hiding in the cafeteria. If they’re both true, neither makes sense as a whole. One plus one does not equal three.”

“You’re starting to lose me, Amos.”

“You have the school interior laid out with your prelim shot register?”

She nodded.

“Let’s take a look. Because it might just be this guy did the reverse of what we think he did.”

“But if you’re right about what you found, and he did go front to back to front, he would have made his escape out through the storage area off the cafeteria and then through the path to the woods. That’s the easiest egress. It would all fit.”

Decker took a breath, let it out, and stared at the ceiling.

“And maybe that’s exactly what the son of a bitch wants us to think.”

Chapter 16

His confidence in his ability to perform as a detective growing, Decker spent another hour going over and over the preliminary shot registry. It was based on witness accounts, which Decker knew were unreliable; forensic evidence, which he knew was not nearly as flawless as TV made it seem; hunches, which were just that and nothing more; and, lastly, common sense, which might just be the most accurate and helpful of the bunch.

Lancaster looked away from her laptop screen and studied him.

“So what do you think?”

Decker absently stroked his shortened beard, his belly rumbling. It was now light outside. And it had been a long time in between meals for him. But he could stand to miss a few meals. A few hundred of them, in fact. He was like a polar bear. He could live off his accumulated fat all winter.