Memory Man

He ran a furtive, mostly embarrassed glance down at his jeans. His gut hung over the waistband because he’d been far thinner back then. He had washed them, but the bloodstains had not come out. Why should they be different from his brain? The pants could have, should have been evidence. Let the cops take them, but they hadn’t, and he hadn’t offered. He kept them, wore them still. Stupid way of remembering. Asinine, really. Horribly macabre way of keeping Cassie with him. Like toting her ashes in a Scooby-Doo lunchbox. But then again, he wasn’t really okay. Even though he had a place to live, held a job, and was functioning, for the most part. He really wasn’t okay. He would never be okay in any way.

He technically had been a suspect in the case, because husbands always were. But not for long. The timing of the deaths cleared him. He had an alibi. He didn’t care about alibis. He knew he hadn’t touched one hair on their heads, and didn’t give a damn if no one else thought the same.

The real issue was that no one had ever been arrested for the murders. There hadn’t even been any suspects, not a lead to come by. Nothing.

The working-class neighborhood they had lived in was quiet and the folks friendly, always offering a helping hand to others because nobody had much and everybody needed some assistance from time to time. Fixing a car or a furnace, or hammering a nail into a board, or cooking a meal because a mom was sick, or shepherding kids in a communal transportation system based on trust and need.

There were some tough nuts who lived there, for sure, but he hadn’t spotted a homicidal one in the bunch. Mostly bikers and potheads. He had looked. He had done nothing else except investigate the crimes, even though officially they had told him to stay away from it all. But no clues presented themselves, even with his obsessively running everything down.

There were opportunities and obstacles for a crime such as this. Doors were left unlocked; folks came and went. So access was clearly there. But the houses were close together, so something should have been heard. But no sounds were ever heard from 4305 Boston Avenue that night. How could three people have died so quietly? Didn’t violent death provoke outrage? Screams? A struggle? Something? Apparently not. The gunshot? Like a ghost whispering. Or else the whole neighborhood had gone deaf that night. And blind. And mute.

And months later there was still nothing, long after the trail had grown cold and the odds of solving the case and catching the killer had dropped to near zero. He had left the police force then because he could no longer push paper and run down other cases and bother with precinct drama. The upper management said they were sorry to see him go, but no one asked him to stay either. The truth was, he was becoming disruptive, unmanageable. And he was all of those things. Because he no longer cared about anything.

Well, except for one thing.

He had visited their graves all the time. They were buried in plots he had hastily purchased, because who would buy a plot for a man and a woman in their early forties and a grave for a ten-year-old? But then he had stopped going because he could not face them lying there in the dirt. He had not avenged them. He had done nothing except identify their bodies. A pitiful penance for letting his family die. God would hardly be impressed.

Their deaths had to be connected with what he did. He had put lots of people away over the years. Some were out now. Others had friends. Just before the murders at 4305 Boston Avenue, he had helped break up a local meth ring that was doing its best to make everybody in the metro area an addict and thus a good customer, young, old, and every demographic in between. These dudes were bad, evil, kill you to look at you. They could’ve found out where he lived. Easy enough. He wasn’t undercover. And they might’ve taken out their revenge on his wife and child, and her brother who had picked the wrong time to visit from out of town. But there was not a scrap of evidence against this group. And without that, no arrests. No trial. No judgment. No execution.

His fault. His guilt. Maybe led them right to his family, and now he had no family.

The community had held a fund-raiser for him. Collected a few thousand bucks. It was all sitting in a bank account untouched. Taking the money would have seemed to him to be an act of betrayal for those he had lost, so the money sat, though he certainly could have used it. He was getting by, barely. But barely was all he needed. Because barely was all he was now.

He settled back against the wood of the bench and shrugged his coat closer around him. He was not here by accident.

He was here on a job.

And as he looked to his left, he saw that it was time to get to work.

He rose and headed after the two people he’d been waiting for.

Chapter 3

The bar was much like every other bar Decker had ever been in.