“Where do you want to start?”
Decker pointed to the picture on the far left. “With him.”
“Okay, that was my wife’s father, Ted Knolls. He died about two years ago. Heart attack.”
“What did he do for a living?”
“What the hell does that have to—”
Decker cut him off. “Just tell me what he did for a living.”
Decker looked menacingly down at the smaller man. He was a grizzly against a chipmunk, which was exactly how he wanted Watson to see it.
Watson took a step back, changed color, and looked at the photo. “He was a long-haul trucker. Bad diet, no exercise. He was as big as a house when he collapsed on his front lawn picking up the newspaper. He was dead before he hit the grass.” He eyed Decker’s massive frame when he said this. “But that’s all he did, he drove a truck back and forth across the Midwest and down to Texas and back.”
“Was he close to Debbie?”
Watson self-consciously rubbed at his malformed arm. “No, not really. I mean, we saw them at holidays. But, to tell the truth, things weren’t good between us and them. My mother-in-law never warmed to me.”
“And the man next to him? That picture looks pretty old.”
“That’s my grandfather, Simon Watson. He’s been gone, oh, a good six years. He was a young man in that picture.”
“So Debbie’s great-grandfather,” said Decker, and Watson nodded.
“He lived to over ninety years old. Smoked and drank and didn’t give a damn, as he liked to say.”
“But Debbie knew him if he’s only been gone six years?”
“Oh, yes. In fact he lived with us the last five years of his life.”
“So she would have spent time with him?”
“I’m sure she did. Debbie was still a kid then and Gramps had had a pretty interesting life. Fought in World War II and then the Korean War. Then he left the service and went to work for the civilian side of the Defense Department.”
“Doing what?”
“Well, he worked at the military base here when it was open.”
“The one next to Mansfield High School? McDonald Army Base?”
“That’s right.”
“What did he do there?”
“He had a series of jobs. His training was in engineering and construction. So he worked on the facilities and plant side.”
“Do you know the dates?”
“Come on, what does this have to do with anything?”
“I’m just looking for leads, Mr. Watson. The dates?”
“I can’t tell you for certain.” He paused and thought about it. “He left the regular Army in the sixties. Then he went to McDonald probably around 1968 or ’69. It must have been ’69. I remember associating it with the astronauts walking on the moon. Then he worked there until he retired. About twenty years later.”
“And the base closed eight years ago.”
“That sounds about right.”
“That wasn’t a question, Mr. Watson, it did close eight years ago, on a Monday. There was sleet that day.”
Watson looked at him strangely and then coughed. “If you say so. I can’t remember what I was doing last week. Anyway, it was part of a Pentagon base realignment and Burlington lost out. I heard tell most of the operations moved east, maybe to Virginia. Closer to Uncle Sam and his dollars in D.C.”
“So, presumably Simon talked about his work at the base with you, with Debbie?”
“Oh, yes, I mean the parts he could talk about. Some of it was classified, I guess you’d call it.”
“Classified?”
George’s features eased to a grin. “Well, I don’t think they did nukes or anything there. But the military always has its share of secrets.”
“So what did Simon talk to you about? I mean with the base?”
“Some of the history of it. People he met. Some of the work he did. They kept adding on to the base for years. Building, building, building. All the people who worked there sent their kids to Mansfield for high school. His son — my father — went there. So did I. So did my wife for that matter.”
“Did Debbie ever mention to you some of the things she and her great-grandfather talked about?”
“Nothing that I really recall. As Debbie got older she didn’t spend as much time with him. Old people, young kids, oil and water. Gramps wasn’t as much fun, I guess.” He looked down. “And I guess neither was I.”
“Okay, take me through the other pictures.”
A half hour later Decker was on his way through the dark streets once more.
Cammie man had gone to the Watsons’ house and written on that wall in code disguised as a musical score. That he was sure of. He didn’t know what the message said, and he didn’t know what the man had needed from Debbie. Yet out of all the students at Mansfield, why ally himself with her? There must be a reason. A good one.
His phone buzzed. It was Lancaster.
“The Bureau thinks they broke the code. It was some sort of substitution cipher. Pretty simple actually. Well, actually, they’re certain they did crack it.”
“How can they be certain they did?”
“Because of what the message said.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense, Mary. What did it say?”
He heard her release a long breath that seemed filled with apprehension.
“It said, ‘Good job, Amos. But in the end it won’t get you where you want to go, bro.’”
Chapter 23
I’m an “Acquired savant.”
More precisely, I’m a high-functioning acquired savant.
Decker was lying in his bed in his one-room home at the Residence Inn. He was not sleeping. He could not sleep.
Orlando Serrell.
Orlando Serrell was also an acquired savant, having been hit on the head by a baseball when he was ten. Ever since, he had come to possess extraordinary abilities in calendrical calculations, precise memories of weather on any particular day, as well as the near-total recall of where he was and what he was doing on any given day.
Daniel Tammet.
Daniel Tammet had suffered a series of epileptic seizures as a small child. He came out of that nearly fatal experience with one of the greatest minds of the century, able to recite pi out to over twenty-two thousand places and learn entire languages in a week. He had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and also saw numbers and other things in color, as Decker did.
Decker had studied everything he could find about savants who had not been born with their abilities but had acquired them after some event, whether an injury in Serrell’s case or a prior medical condition in Tammet’s.
There weren’t many savants in the world, and Decker had been totally unprepared to join their ranks. When LeCroix leveled him on that football field, the doctors who had extensively examined him later came away with the conclusion that the injury had done two things to his brain.
First, it had opened up channels in his mind, like unclogging a drain, which allowed information to flow far more efficiently. Second, it had caused other circuitry in his mind to intersect, providing him the ability to see numbers in color.
But this was only speculation. Decker had come to believe that doctors today knew only a bit more about how the brain really worked than doctors a hundred years ago.
Decker had woken up in the hospital after the hit and looked over at his vitals monitor with all the numbers skipping across it. He had seen his heart rate, 95 — the same number on his football jersey — represented as violet for the nine and brown for the 5. Before his injury he didn’t even know what the color violet was. And the numbers had swelled huge in his head, tall and massive. He could see every detail of them. They were like living things.