Memory Man

He went into Room 144 and sat down at the teacher’s desk. He surveyed the classroom. Twenty-one empty seats arranged in three rows front to back. One of them had been occupied by Debbie Watson. The last moments of her life were clear enough: an upset stomach; a trip to the nurse’s office authorized; a detour to her locker. And she was dead minutes later.

She’d been in the third row, fourth seat. He imagined her raising her hand, looking and feeling ill, getting permission to leave, walking out the door, never to walk in it again.

He rose and walked out the door, stopped, and turned. He was facing Debbie’s open locker. The mirror on the inside of the door reflected his image back. For some reason Decker didn’t recognize himself. This big fat bearded dude, drenched with rain, looking like hell.

But then he looked past the reflection and to something else in Debbie’s locker: a stack of textbooks and notebooks.

Decker looked back at Classroom 144 and then at the locker.

Life had coincidences. Serendipity abounded. Wrong place, wrong time. It came as the result of seven billion people jostling each other within the span of a single planet.

But there was an unwritten rule in police work: There are no coincidences. All you needed was more in-depth investigation to show that there are no coincidences.

He phoned Lancaster. She was in the library.

“Did you talk to Debbie Watson’s parents?”

“Yes.”

“Did they mention that she felt ill when she came to school?”

“No. I asked her that. The mom said she seemed fine. Might’ve been a bug that came on fast, though.”

“And what about the teacher? When Watson asked to leave?”

Decker could hear the woman flipping through her notebook.

“She said Debbie had looked fine but then raised her hand, said she felt nauseous, and asked to be excused.”

“Did she make out a note or—”

“They have them preprinted. The teacher filled in Debbie’s name and gave it to her.”

“So just thirty seconds from start to finish before Debbie left the room?”

“I guess about that.”

“What time did she actually leave the classroom?”

“The teacher thought maybe a few minutes before. Maybe five before the shot was heard.”

“That’s a big gap. Her locker is seconds away from her class. And I walked from the front of the school to the back in less than two minutes.”

“Maybe she lingered there for a few minutes. Maybe she thought she was going to throw up and was trying to collect herself. Look, why are—”

“I’ll explain later. It may be nothing.”

Decker clicked off and put his phone away. He was just about to have a very radical thought that might potentially crush certain people. He didn’t do this lightly. He did this only to get to the truth. The truth was worth everything to him. But he needed something concrete to go on before he could move forward on this.

Fate for Debbie was 8:42 outside this door. After that she would be no more, her life over. How would it run? Debbie raises her hand, gets permission to leave. She exits the class, but doesn’t go to the nurse directly. She heads to her locker and opens it. Another minute burned. But Lancaster had said the teacher thought it was several minutes, maybe as many as five. What had Debbie been doing all that time? Maybe she had been lingering or trying to steady herself, like Lancaster had said. But maybe there was something else.

He stared once more at the locker’s contents.

The bloody notebook and other items that had been on the floor next to Watson’s body had been taken by the police along with her remains. But not the stuff in the locker. No, not that. That was all still there. And it was in decent shape because her body had mostly shielded the contents from the shotgun blast.

He grabbed the stack of items, went back to Classroom 144, and sat down. He opened the first book and went through it page by page. He went through all the textbooks, looking for marginalia, notes, sketches, anything.

He had gone through three of her lined notebooks and had reached the nineteenth page of the fourth when he stopped looking.

Debbie had drawn a picture on this page. It was a good sketch, actually. The girl had possessed talent.

But Decker was far more focused on the subject of the drawing.

It was a man in full camouflage gear.

With a big heart drawn right next to it.

Chapter 21

Decker had showered, changed his clothes, carefully combed his hair, and put on his most professional expression. He believed that the folks sitting opposite him deserved nothing less than that.

Debbie Watson’s mother and father stared back at him. The dad was a small, mousy man in his midforties, with a little scrap of mustache above his thin top lip. He had a stunted right arm, the malformed hand hanging from the elbow.

He looked like a freight train was bearing down on him.