Memory Man

Billy grinned. “I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout this place. Just drawing a paycheck, man. Beer money on the weekends. Looking to have a good time with the ladies. Need cash for all that.”

He went back to his mopping.

“I’m sorry we can’t help you,” said the woman.

“Part of the job,” said Decker. “Thanks.”

He turned and left.

His phone buzzed. He looked at it.

Lancaster.

He put it away without answering.

It rang again.

He looked at it again.

Lancaster.

He sighed, hit the answer button.

“Yeah?”

“Amos?”

Decker immediately went rigid. Lancaster sounded nearly hysterical. And she wasn’t the type ever to do so.

“Mary, what is it? Not another shooting?” Decker had been worried about this from the start. Things about the attack at Mansfield had made him believe that the guy was—

“No,” she said breathlessly. “But, but there’s some-something—”

“Where are you?” he interrupted.

“At Mansfield.”

“So it has to do with Mansfield? You found some—”

“Amos!” she shrieked. “Just let me finish.”

Decker fell silent, waited. It was as though he could hear her heart beating from across the digital ether.

“We ran ballistics on the pistol used at Mansfield.”

“And what did—”

Interrupting, she said, “And we found a match.”

His grip tightened around the phone. “A match? To what?”

“To the gun that killed your wife.”

Chapter 20

A .45 round.

Semi-jacketed. Hollow-point.

An SJH, in ballistics shorthand.

It was a brutally efficient piece of ordnance. Not exactly a dum-dum, named after Dum-Dum, India, where a British army officer had invented a bullet that mushroomed out on impact and acted as a miniature wrecking ball inside the body.

Innovation wasn’t always good for you.

The .45 SJH had blown right through the front of Cassie Decker’s skull and ended up lodged deep in her brain. It had been dug out of her during the autopsy and the slug preserved as evidence in her murder investigation. It had retained enough of its shape and lands and grooves to one day be matched to the weapon that had fired it. Well, they didn’t have the weapon, but they had something else.

Now they knew that the very same pistol that had fired the bullet ending Cassie Decker’s life had also terminated the lives of half the victims at Mansfield. The other half had endured the blunt force of the shotgun. The medical examiner had removed the matched round from Kramer, the gym teacher and, per normal protocol, run it through the department’s database. The hit had been immediate.

Because of the magnitude of the finding, the FBI had run its own tests on the slug and came back with the same conclusion.

Same gun. Ballistics didn’t lie. The grooves and lands on the bullets’ respective hides had matched like a fingerprint. And that wasn’t all. They had recovered the single bullet casing from the Deckers’ bedroom. They had compared it with several of the casings found at the school. The pinprick on the bottom of the casing where the firing pin strikes was nearly as good as a fingerprint. And it too had matched on all salient points.

The murders of Decker’s family and the massacre at Mansfield were now inextricably connected.

* * *

Decker huddled in his coat as he stood outside the darkened façade of the school, enduring the driving rain pinging off his hair and burly shoulders. The case had mushroomed from Mansfield High to his home on a quiet street with symbolically an ocean’s distance in between. He had never given any thought to a connection between the two crimes. Now that fact dominated him.

There was a chance that there were different killers. Since the shooting at his house, the gun could have been lost by, taken from, or sold by the original killer. The same gun was often used in different crimes by different perps. But Decker believed it was the same shooter in both instances. And if that was the case, it let Leopold out. So Leopold was lying. Yet it was possible he had been told facts of the Decker case by the real killer. And if that were so, then Leopold was the best hope he had to find the person who had murdered his family. And all these others.

Despite the recent writing on the bedroom wall, the case was cold on the Decker family end. Conversely, it was red hot on the Mansfield High School end. So the Mansfield end was where he would focus — that and on Sebastian Leopold. If Leopold knew who the Decker killer was, then he knew who was behind the Mansfield crimes too.

He flashed his credentials at the perimeter security and walked through the front entrance. Yesterday had been disjointed and confusing for him in all respects. He didn’t know if he belonged in the middle of all this. He felt cut off from everyone and everything going on around him. But with the possible connection to the murders of his family, Decker knew that he did belong. He would be on this case for as long as it took. They would have to dynamite him out of here.

He didn’t head to the command center in the library. He went to the cafeteria and stared at the freezer. Then he looked at the ceiling tiles.