Memory Man

Cammie fiber, possible gun oil. Maybe all bullshit. Maybe.

He looked at the exit door. False lead too, or so he now believed.

He left the cafeteria, walked down the hall fronting the library, turned right onto the main corridor that bisected the first floor, and counted his steps off as he made his way to the rear of the school.

At each intersection with another hall he studied the lay of the land, first left, then right. Classrooms on both sides. The last corridor was where Debbie Watson had died. And where, to the left, so had Kramer the gym teacher over his breakfast sandwich and coffee. The rear entrance with the camera faced him. The angle of the camera still intrigued him. That had been deliberate. And deliberate action always had a deliberate motivation.

Then he looked at the classroom to the right of where Debbie had perished. ROOM 141 was stenciled on the glass.

He tried the door but it was locked. He pulled a pick set from his pocket and unlocked it. He stepped inside and turned on the light. He was surprised to see that it was set up as a shop class. They had had shop class back when Decker attended here. But he had thought it now a thing of the past. He looked around at the work places, table and miter saws, planers, drills, buckets of tools, vises clamped to wood, shelves on the walls holding metal tubing, nuts, bolts, wood, more power tools, extension cords, work lights, pretty much anything someone would need to build something. There were three doors at the back of this room. He opened two of them. Storage. He saw stacks of what looked to be old school projects: jumbles of half-finished furniture, metal twisted into various shapes, wire cages, part of a roof section, sawhorses, plywood sheets, stacks of wood, lots of dust, and lots of nothing.

The last door would not open. He took out his lock-pick set again and used it to open the door. He peered in. There was an old boiler in the far corner, now connected to nothing. Some window air-conditioning units were stacked on the floor against one wall up to about ten feet.

Again, a lot of nothing. He closed the door, walked back through the shop class, snapped off the light, and shut the door behind him. Down the hall from the shop class was Classroom 144, the one Debbie Watson had been coming from when she had been shot.

Decker looked over at the open locker on the wall. That was Debbie’s. She had been at her locker when she’d been murdered. Probably getting something to take with her to the nurse’s office. That might explain the detour here. Or it might not. Teenagers were unpredictable. They could be sick as dogs and stop at their locker to look for some gum. Or examine her face for zits in the mirror that hung on the inside of Debbie’s locker. He noted the tube of pimple cream standing up on her locker shelf next to a small opened pack of breath mints.

Blood splatters showed that she had been standing in front of her locker when she’d been shot. She had turned around to face her assailant, because she’d taken the blast from the shotgun directly to her face.

She had died at 8:42.

Decker had concluded that Watson was indeed the first victim. Which made him wonder what the shooter was doing between the whooshing sound at 7:28 on the front hall that Melissa Dalton had heard and Debbie losing her face on the rear hall one hour and fourteen minutes later.

Decker closed his eyes and thought this through.

It took me sixty-four steps and not even two minutes to go from front to back. The shooter appeared on the video at 8:41. But when did he leave the cafeteria? There is no way to be sure. And the biggest question of all: How did he go sight unseen from front to rear? I answer that, I answer everything. I don’t answer it, the case goes nowhere.

At least six-two, thick broad shoulders, over two hundred pounds. Decker had looked at the video footage of the shooter and did not dispute those physical estimates. Yet there was no male of that size and height at the school, other than the dead gym teacher and assistant principal, or a bunch of football-playing students hunkered in classrooms with a hundred alibis attached to them. And two of the players who were that size had been killed during the shootings.

It was as though the guy had appeared, done his killing, and then vanished into thin air. Since that was not a possibility, Decker had to be looking at this wrong somehow.