She’d been in the third row, fourth seat. He imagined her raising her hand, looking and feeling ill, getting permission to leave, walking out the door, never to walk in it again.
He rose and walked out the door, stopped, and turned. He was facing Debbie’s open locker. The mirror on the inside of the door reflected his image back. For some reason Decker didn’t recognize himself. This big fat bearded dude, drenched with rain, looking like hell.
But then he looked past the reflection and to something else in Debbie’s locker: a stack of textbooks and notebooks.
Decker looked back at Classroom 144 and then at the locker.
Life had coincidences. Serendipity abounded. Wrong place, wrong time. It came as the result of seven billion people jostling each other within the span of a single planet.
But there was an unwritten rule in police work: There are no coincidences. All you needed was more in-depth investigation to show that there are no coincidences.
He phoned Lancaster. She was in the library.
“Did you talk to Debbie Watson’s parents?”
“Yes.”
“Did they mention that she felt ill when she came to school?”
“No. I asked her that. The mom said she seemed fine. Might’ve been a bug that came on fast, though.”
“And what about the teacher? When Watson asked to leave?”
Decker could hear the woman flipping through her notebook.
“She said Debbie had looked fine but then raised her hand, said she felt nauseous, and asked to be excused.”
“Did she make out a note or—”
“They have them preprinted. The teacher filled in Debbie’s name and gave it to her.”
“So just thirty seconds from start to finish before Debbie left the room?”
“I guess about that.”
“What time did she actually leave the classroom?”
“The teacher thought maybe a few minutes before. Maybe five before the shot was heard.”
“That’s a big gap. Her locker is seconds away from her class. And I walked from the front of the school to the back in less than two minutes.”
“Maybe she lingered there for a few minutes. Maybe she thought she was going to throw up and was trying to collect herself. Look, why are—”
“I’ll explain later. It may be nothing.”
Decker clicked off and put his phone away. He was just about to have a very radical thought that might potentially crush certain people. He didn’t do this lightly. He did this only to get to the truth. The truth was worth everything to him. But he needed something concrete to go on before he could move forward on this.
Fate for Debbie was 8:42 outside this door. After that she would be no more, her life over. How would it run? Debbie raises her hand, gets permission to leave. She exits the class, but doesn’t go to the nurse directly. She heads to her locker and opens it. Another minute burned. But Lancaster had said the teacher thought it was several minutes, maybe as many as five. What had Debbie been doing all that time? Maybe she had been lingering or trying to steady herself, like Lancaster had said. But maybe there was something else.
He stared once more at the locker’s contents.
The bloody notebook and other items that had been on the floor next to Watson’s body had been taken by the police along with her remains. But not the stuff in the locker. No, not that. That was all still there. And it was in decent shape because her body had mostly shielded the contents from the shotgun blast.
He grabbed the stack of items, went back to Classroom 144, and sat down. He opened the first book and went through it page by page. He went through all the textbooks, looking for marginalia, notes, sketches, anything.
He had gone through three of her lined notebooks and had reached the nineteenth page of the fourth when he stopped looking.
Debbie had drawn a picture on this page. It was a good sketch, actually. The girl had possessed talent.
But Decker was far more focused on the subject of the drawing.
It was a man in full camouflage gear.
With a big heart drawn right next to it.
Chapter 21
Decker had showered, changed his clothes, carefully combed his hair, and put on his most professional expression. He believed that the folks sitting opposite him deserved nothing less than that.
Debbie Watson’s mother and father stared back at him. The dad was a small, mousy man in his midforties, with a little scrap of mustache above his thin top lip. He had a stunted right arm, the malformed hand hanging from the elbow.
He looked like a freight train was bearing down on him.
Debbie’s mom was chain-smoking. The ashtray in front of her was filled with butts. Nicotine’s ability to rob the blood of oxygen had whittled fine lines prematurely around her mouth and deeply and unflatteringly chiseled a face that had probably not been pretty even in youth. Her forearms were veiny and darkened and spotted, probably from lying out during the summer in the hammock Decker had seen strung between two trees in the small side yard. The mom didn’t look like she’d seen a freight train. She looked as though someone had sucked her soul out. And the smell of the liquor easily crossed the width of the scarred coffee table set between them.
On Decker’s right, Lancaster was perched on the couch like a cat on a ledge. Her features were tight and serious and hunkered down and had been ever since Decker had showed her the drawing of cammie man in Debbie’s notebook. She occasionally looked lustfully at Beth’s cigarette, as if waiting for an invitation to pull out her own smokes.
They had not shown the sketch to the FBI or anyone else. They had decided to keep it to themselves for now. Decker had said, and Lancaster had agreed, that before anything was released publicly they needed to talk to the parents. If the sketch was unconnected to the murders, then they didn’t want Debbie’s family to suffer unnecessarily. In the world of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the Watson family would be sliced and diced to such a degree that no matter what exculpatory facts were revealed later, the truth would never be able to rise above the earlier electronic tsunami.
Decker had prefaced his questions with a lot of disclaimers. He had waited until the Watsons were fully prepped before showing them the sketch. When their gazes had held on the image, both had recoiled and then stiffened like they’d been electrocuted.
Decker saw them both outlined in a creamy white. For him death was blue, while white represented despair. When he looked at himself in the mirror for a full year after his family’s murders, he had figured he was the whitest white man in the whole world.
“Can you think of a reason why Debbie would have drawn these images?” asked Decker quietly. He pointed first to the cammie figure and then the heart. “Was she seeing anyone?” he added. The heart seemed to indicate this was a possibility. Even in the twenty-first century a heart drawn by a young woman next to the image of a man probably meant exactly what it had always meant throughout time.
George Watson shook his head, his mustache trembling along with the rest of him. His stunted arm swung next to his torso. Decker wondered how many jibes the man had endured over his life for his unusual appendage. That abnormality had probably defined everything about him, not because it should but because sometimes the world and the people in it could be so cruel.
Beth Watson didn’t shake her head. She nodded slightly and both Decker and Lancaster immediately focused on her.
“Who was he?” asked Lancaster.
“Never knew,” said Beth haltingly. “I mean, she never brought anyone home that we didn’t know.”
“We’re interested in anyone she might have brought home,” said Decker.