“And if someone got him to do this?”
“Might give us an opportunity. I’m sure you thought of that already.”
“Will you let me know what you decide with Leopold?”
“You’re no longer on the force. I wish you were, but you’re not.”
“It was the choice I had to make at the time.”
Miller rubbed his nose and buttoned his jacket. “Well, different times call for different choices.”
He started to leave but turned back. He held up one finger. “Today was your freebie, Amos. You only get one, so you have none left. Don’t forget that. And forget Sebastian Leopold is even on the same planet as you. We’ll take it from here. You screw me over on that, I’m no longer your ally. I will crucify you. Have a good one.”
Amos Decker sat there for a minute and then rushed back to his room, locked the door, closed all the curtains, lay on the bed with the pillow over his face to block out all the remaining light, and succumbed to the beast devouring his vastly altered mind.
Chapter
11
THE HEAVY CLOUDS ate away at the fragile sky until there was no significant light left, although the sun was up there somewhere, diminished and vacant. It was akin to staring at a forty-watt light bulb while wearing a gauzy blindfold. For Decker, who was deeply influenced by color in everything, it seemed the only one left in the world right now was gray.
He had his hands in his pockets as the chilly wind bit into him. He had recovered from the migraine, gone to a local Wendy’s, and gulped down a Coke, letting the sugar drain the last vestiges of the discomfort away—an acid wash on dreary, stained metal—and allowing the sweat to dry off his pores. He had then bused back downtown and retrieved his gun and clothes from the trash can. Fortunately, they had not been discovered. He could not afford to lose his only other set of work clothes any more than he could his only weapon.
Now he was standing there in his old clothes, braced against a stiff wind and staring over at Mansfield High. It had been built, along with thousands of other schools across the country, in a postwar construction boom. The birth rate had spiked in 1946 and those kids would need to go to high school at some point. That’s what being away from home fighting a war for four years did to a man. It made him horny as hell. The wives of America’s returning veterans probably hadn’t slept for an entire year.
Mansfield was three stories high, all brick, and time had not been kind to it. Windows were boarded up or broken. Mortar had leached out from the neat lines around the rectangular bricks and mottled the school’s façade like meaningless graffiti. The grounds were full of chickweed and dirt patches, the asphalt cracked and the chain-link fences mangled, with gates hanging off twisted, rusted hinges. The place now looked more like an abandoned state mental asylum than a high school.
It had been built principally as a school for children of the military personnel who worked at the Army base right next door. The base had been one of the biggest employers in Burlington, and servicing all those soldiers was an economic boost to the area. And then the Pentagon downsized and the base in Burlington was one of the first to go. Now the defunct Army base just sat there a hundred yards from Mansfield High behind high chain-link fences and walls of vegetation that had partially reclaimed the land it was on. Burlington had never recovered from the soldiers pulling out, and the later economic downturn was the last nail in the town’s coffin.
Today, like many other schools, Mansfield was underfunded, beaten down, discipline was hard to find, teachers didn’t stay long, and drug and alcohol abuse was rampant. The student population was less than half of what it had once been, and graduation rates were heading south as fast as snowbirds fleeing to Florida before winter set in.
Burlington, even without the military base, had once been a prosperous manufacturing town, like thousands of other communities dotted across the middle of the country building what America and the rest of the world needed. Now, with all the manufacturing outsourced overseas, the only thing one could build here was misery. There were two grocery store chains here. From what Decker had seen, the two most popular food items purchased there were Hamburger Helper by the kilo and sugary orange pop by the barrel. And the fast-food places also did brisk business, fattening both the young and old to impossible degrees and foretelling diabetes, cancer, stroke, and heart disease stats blowing right through the roof.
And didn’t he know that firsthand?
In Burlington, the few rich lived in gated communities on the west side of town and pretty much never strayed from there. Everybody else lived on the three other compass points. The homeless lived on the streets in ratty sleeping bags, old blankets, and cardboard condos.
Just like I did.
Decker had attended school at Mansfield over twenty-five years ago. Some of the trophies bearing his name were still in the gym’s locked glass cabinet. He had been an outstanding high school athlete, lettering in three different sports. He was simply bigger, faster, and stronger than anybody else. He had been popular, dated all the hot girls, slept with a number of them, done okay in the classroom, and everyone had thought him a lock for a pro career.
How wrong they had been.
He had been a good, but far from great, college player. And then the funnel narrowed even more. He had gone undrafted on pro draft day because there were hundreds of prospects far better than he was. He had taken that as a personal attack. Decker had worked his way onto the Cleveland Browns by busting his ass on the practice field, sacrificing his body in idiotic ways that had come back to haunt him in his forties, and being the last to leave the film room. For all that effort his career had lasted one regular-season play and had left him with a brain permanently changed.
Something good had come out of it, at least. He had met Cassie while he was rehabbing his “other” injuries. Because, as it turned out, the hit had not only addled his brain. Both cleats had stuck in the turf as Dwayne LeCroix leveled him. The result was a broken right femur, a blown-out ACL on his left knee, and a torn MCL on his right. Pretty much the whole package, the surgeon had told him. Well, in for a dime, in for a dollar.
Cassie had been a newly minted physical therapist attending him. He had worked his butt off to get back right. His leg and knees eventually healed. His brain was what it was. But she had been with him every step of the way, encouraging when necessary and bullying her patient when encouragement failed to motivate.
During that time he and Cassie had fallen as deeply in love as he imagined anyone could. After his stint at the institute outside Chicago where they studied people who had extraordinary mental abilities, he and Cassie had gotten engaged and then married and moved back to his hometown. He had previously given a lot of thought to what he would do in the future, and had come back here with the express purpose of enrolling in the police academy. The classwork was a cakewalk with his new and improved and utterly infallible memory. His physical skills, though somewhat diminished by his injuries, were still far superior to almost all in his academy class. He had sailed through the process, was sworn in, and got his badge and gun. Nine years later he was promoted to detective. For nearly ten years he had investigated major crimes against the good citizens of Burlington—although most of the crimes had also been committed by the not so good citizens of Burlington, with the occasional outsider thrown into the mix.
They had wanted a large family but had struggled to conceive a child. They spent money they didn’t have on specialists, and at long last Cassie had become pregnant. And they had Molly. She would be their only child. The pregnancy had nearly killed Cassie, and a complication had required surgery that had rendered her incapable of conceiving again.
They had named her after Decker’s mother. His parents had both perished in a car crash while Decker was in college, so Molly didn’t have paternal grandparents. But she had carried her grandma’s name. Carried it all the way to her premature death at the hands of, perhaps, Sebastian Leopold.
He stared up at the bri
ck fortress that Mansfield had become. Crazy-angled police tape was everywhere, like a spider’s yellow web looking venomous and terrifying. There were cop cars and forensic trucks, and black trucks with no windows standing ready for the body bags. For Decker was certain the corpses were still in the school. Except for those injured and needing medical attention, you didn’t subtract anything from a crime scene until it was thoroughly gone over, photographed, measured, and adequately poked, prodded, and analyzed. It wouldn’t matter to the dead how long they lay on the floor in pools of their own blood, their lives ripped away by some psycho with unfettered firepower. Forever was forever, after all.
If Decker had still been on the force he would be in there right now. From where he was standing, he had already seen Mary Lancaster come and go twice. She looked haggard and repulsed and depressed. She glanced his way once but it didn’t seem to register. He knew she had other things on her mind. She probably had forgotten that a man named Sebastian Leopold was sitting in a holding cell. That he had confessed to murdering three people, two of whom had meant everything to Decker. Lancaster had a pile of fresh bodies to work on right now. And with it a criminal out there walking free to possibly kill again, as opposed to one sitting placidly in a holding cell.
The school story had of course hit the national pipeline. The town was the number one headline on every media platform. The names of the dead had still not been released. Decker had been checking on his phone. “Pending notification of next of kin” was the standard catchphrase. He had heard from a friend on the force that Pete Rourke’s grandson was okay. But a son of a beat cop had not been so lucky. And a police dispatcher’s husband, Andy Jackson, an English teacher at Mansfield, was in the hospital in critical condition with multiple gunshot wounds.