Memory Man

He heard the footsteps coming. One would have made him open his eyes. This was about a dozen. So he kept his eyes closed. A killer came alone, not with an army.

He opened his eyes and saw Special Agent Bogart standing there.

“Another educated guess?” asked the man.

“Another educated guess,” replied Decker.

Behind Bogart was a group of FBI agents and members of the Burlington Police Department. Lancaster stepped forward.

“I called Mac, he’s on his way,” she reported, and Decker nodded slowly.

“How did you figure this?” Bogart asked Decker.

Decker gave him the two-minute drill on his deductions.

“If you had briefed us on your meeting with Beth Watson, we might have been able to help you on this,” Bogart pointed out. “We might have gotten here sooner.”

“We might have,” agreed Decker.

Bogart ordered a search of the place and the perimeter and then pulled up an old wooden bench and sat down next to Decker while Lancaster hovered nearby.

“So the shooter befriended Debbie Watson, found out about this link with the school, and used it to get away?” said Bogart.

“He used it to both get in and get away. With the passage he could come and go as he pleased. He seduced her. He’s a grown man. She’s an impressionable teenager with not the best of home lives. They must’ve had a bunch of trysts here that no one else knew about. She must have felt really special. Right up until he discharged a shotgun in her face.”

“We’ll contact the Army and get all we can on the base.”

“Yeah. Good luck with that.”

“I’m surprised no one knew about this passage,” said Bogart. “Other than the Watsons.”

“Well, if it was originally built in 1946 or close to it, most of those folks would be dead. I doubt they would have told the kids about it, so only the school officials would have known. Maybe it was never used. Maybe they never even had a practice drill. I don’t know. Even if they did, the students from back then would be fairly elderly now. Maybe they forgot about it.”

“But you said Simon Watson had added to the passageway?”

“He came to McDonald in the late sixties, and sometime after that the passage from the base was put in. But when the base was closed everybody left. Lots of people who worked here in uniform were probably transferred to other places.”

Lancaster interjected, “And even if there were folks left here who knew about the passage, I doubt they’d think about a killer using it to move around the school. They’d assume it was sealed up after all this time. The public probably believes he shot up the place and made a run for it and got away.”

Bogart nodded. “But he could have gotten into the school more easily from this way, meaning the Army base end. But he apparently was in the cafeteria and traversed the school that way. Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Decker. “We thought it might be to allow him time to cut through the wall sealing off the door behind the sign in the cafeteria. But now since I believe he’s been in and out of here a lot, he could have done that any time. And he probably wouldn’t have waited until the night before the planned attack, in case something went wrong.” He paused. “So, bottom line, I don’t know.”

“I thought you had all the answers.”

“Then you thought wrong.”

Bogart considered him thoughtfully. “You really don’t forget anything, do you?” Decker didn’t look at him. Bogart drew closer and said in a low voice that only Decker could hear, “What makes you tick, Decker? What do you have up in your head that allows you to do what you do?”

Decker didn’t acknowledge that he had heard the comment.

“You always tune out like this when someone is trying to have a conversation?” Bogart asked.

“My social skills aren’t the best,” said Decker. “I told you that already.”

“But you can walk and chew gum at the same time. So if you have some special mental ability, it hasn’t affected your capacity to function out in the world.”

Now Decker looked at him. “Why do you say that?”

Bogart said, “My older brother has a form of autism. Brilliant in his field. Positively clueless in interacting with another human being. He can’t carry on a conversation beyond a few mumbled words. And he’s actually considered high-functioning because he can work at a job.”

“What’s his field?”

“Physics. Subatomic particles more specifically. He can expound all day about quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons. But he forgets to eat and has no idea how to book a plane ticket or pay the electric bill.”

Decker nodded. “I get that.”

“You seem to do okay, though.”

“It’s all degrees, Special Agent Bogart.”

“You been this way since birth?”

“Later,” Decker said tersely. “Which might be why I can walk and chew gum at the same time,” he added in a tight voice before looking away.

Bogart nodded. “You don’t want to talk about this, do you?”

“Would you?”

Bogart rubbed his hands along his thighs. “We need to get this guy. And we have one thing that we haven’t really broached yet.”

Decker looked at him. “His thing with me.”