Memory Man

“I know it absolutely. And I would assume that the email said that you should write this story because things smelled bad on this. That here I was meeting with the man accused of killing my family. There must be more to it, right?”

As he had spoken, Jamison’s eyes had continued to widen. “Did you send the email to me?” she hissed.

“You mean so I could see a story plastered in the newspaper basically accusing me of conspiring to murder my own family?”

She bit her lip. “I’m sorry, that was stupid.” She swallowed with difficulty. “Do you really think it was him?”

“He was there. He was within ten feet of me and I never saw him. And I’m just not sure how that’s possible.”

“You said he was cunning.”

Decker nodded. “He is. He obviously wants to destroy me professionally before he kills me.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

Decker looked up at her. “Go ahead.”

“Who the hell did you piss off so badly that he’s doing all this to you?”

Decker didn’t answer, because he had no answer to give. He wrote down his email address on the back of a napkin and slid it across to her.

Jamison pocketed it, turned, and left.

Decker continued to sit there.

A few moments later his phone buzzed. He looked at the screen and allowed himself a brief smile.

Jamison had just forwarded to him the email trail from her anonymous source. Decker knew that the trail would not lead them back to the sender. That was too obvious. But he wanted to study what the man had written.

He pushed his plate aside and stared down at the message. The sender’s name was Mallard2000. That meant nothing to him. He read the message. It basically mirrored what Decker had already deduced. The sender wanted Jamison to write a story raising suspicion about Decker and his family’s murder. The word choices were simple and direct. In his mind Decker imagined Sebastian Leopold uttering each of those words out loud, trying to match the cadence of his stilted speech to the components of the message. But it was off, at least in his mind. They didn’t seem to match.

There were two of them. In this together. One person can’t be in two places at the same time. Leopold in jail during both sets of murders. So if he is involved, and I believe he is, there’s someone else. Yet there is a problem with that theory.

One man with such a vendetta against him, okay. But two of them?

He forwarded the email to Lancaster and asked her to try to track it down. He doubted she or the FBI could, but they had to try. He had no computer, so he walked to the public library and used one there.

He was not very much of a techie, and his ability to track someone from an email address was limited. He soon exhausted his possibilities on that and got up from the computer. He wandered the shelves, arriving at the nonfiction section.

Something had occurred to him on the way over, and a library was a perfect place to check out a theory forming in his mind.

The Clutter family.

He worked his way to the authors whose last name ended in C. Not for Clutter, but for the author of their tragic story.

He found the book and slipped it out.

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote.

The story was both simple and complex. Decker had read it years ago and, as with everything else, had every page of the book neatly stored in his mind.

A guy in prison gets a tip from another inmate that a farmer named Clutter in rural Kansas keeps a lot of money in a safe. The guy gets out of prison, hooks up with a former cellmate, and they head to the farmer’s home. They break into the house, only to find there is no safe and no money; the tip was bullshit. It should have ended there, but unfortunately for the Clutter family, it didn’t. The more timid, though unstable, of the two crooks decides that they must kill the family. His partner, who had been the leader of the pack and the one who had gotten the tip, reluctantly goes along. One by one the family is murdered. The killers are not smart. They are pursued and caught. After their respective trials and lengthy appeals they are both hanged at the Kansas death house.

Tragic all around. Both killers had issues in their backgrounds, problems, troubles, bad stuff. But nothing to justify what they had done, not that anything could.

That part of the story did not interest Decker very much at the moment. What did interest him was the possibility of two men from very different backgrounds coming together at just the right moment and forming a partnership that would lead to the slaughter of so many people. He didn’t know Leopold. He had never met the man until he sat in that prison cell. So it wasn’t Leopold who had the vendetta against him. It had to be the person whom Leopold had hooked up with. But who was he?