Memory Man

Decker had gotten in the van and driven to a shopping mall about thirty miles away, using the GPS on Leopold’s phone to direct him. He had called Bogart and given his location to the FBI agent. Bogart had ordered up a local medevac chopper, which had arrived surprisingly fast. They’d triaged him on the spot and then flown him to the nearest hospital. Before driving off in the van he’d done a tourniquet on his leg, but he’d still lost over two pints of blood by the time help arrived.

He had given Bogart the location of Leopold and Wyatt’s hideout. The crime scene had been processed, but by far the two most important pieces of forensic evidence were the two bodies that lay barely six feet apart.

One shot by a .45 with a murderous trail attached to it.

The other literally suffocated to death by a fat guy.

Both deserved what they got. And only one of the people they’d killed had really deserved to die. They had never found Giles Evers’s body. But, as Belinda Wyatt had promised, a package had arrived at his father’s house.

Clyde Evers reportedly had dropped dead when he opened it.

Getting a severed head in the mail will do that.

Decker corrected himself: So maybe two people who deserved to die had.

And maybe four if you included Belinda’s parents, who out of naked greed had turned against their fragile daughter when she needed them most.

He did not want to think about death on Christmas Eve. But he seemed so surrounded by it that it tended to crowd out all other things.

He had visited the graves of his wife and daughter. Lancaster had surprised him by showing up too and laying flowers on their graves. They had talked quietly for a few minutes, snatching some normalcy from what was undeniably abnormal.

Decker was sitting here because the Residence Inn had thrown a Christmas party for the guests staying there over the holidays. He had no impulse whatsoever to participate in that. Hence he had opted for a bench in the snow over unspiked eggnog and people seeking him out for lively but mindless conversation, which he could neither process nor appreciate.

The decision had been made to reopen Mansfield the following school year. All the blood would be scrubbed away by then, but all other stains would remain there, forever. The governor was planning to come and give a speech on the occasion of the school’s reopening.

Decker did not plan to attend the ceremony.

The town had bricked over the entrance to the underground walkway leading from the cafeteria to the shop class. And the Army was officially cementing shut the connecting tunnel. Bulldozers were scheduled to arrive on January 2 to level the entire abandoned base and haul away the remnants to wherever old military bases went to die.

The national press had descended on the place when the news had broken about the identity of the killers and their deaths. Bogart had managed to keep Decker’s name out of everything. The FBI agent had turned out to be a good man who actually cared about things worth caring about.

Most folks would have wanted to be recognized as the one who stopped two killers in their tracks, risking his life to do so. These days money would have flowed from that: book and movie deals, endorsements, offers to join high-level investigative firms, opportunities to be wined and dined by the movers and shakers. Decker could have had millions of followers online riveted on his every tweet or Instagram posting.

Again, he would have opted for a bullet to the head over all that.

Yet he had allowed Bogart to buy him clothes and shoes to replace the ones he’d lost to Leopold and Wyatt. For a poor man any loss is a heavy one.

Bogart had pleaded with Decker to accept payment from the federal government for his work. Captain Miller had done the same on behalf of the Burlington Police Department.

“You were a hired consultant, Amos,” he had said over and over until he just didn’t have the strength to say it again.

Decker had refused it all.

He had not done so for noble reasons. He needed money to live. He wasn’t shy about taking what was due him.

He had refused it out of guilt.

I stood up in front of Belinda Wyatt and said I wanted to be a cop. I said I wanted to be a cop because cops protect people. She never forgot that and twisted something innocuous into something sinister. And when Leopold came along to add fuel to that fire, building it into an inferno, the result was I unwittingly caused the deaths of so many people, including the two I can’t really live without.