“I don’t know. Do you?”
“I’ve got some ideas.”
Lancaster looked around nervously and chewed her gum so ferociously that her teeth were clacking together. “We need to get a forensics team in here. I hope to God we haven’t already tainted evidence. The Bureau will rip us a new one, after Mac finishes with us.” She looked around and then something seemed to strike her.
“Wait a minute. If the guy knocked Debbie out and then dragged her out of here, how did he shoot her standing up out in the hall? The ballistics was clear on that. She was upright. Blood spatters don’t lie. And there was only a minute gap between his picture being captured on the video and him killing Debbie.”
“There was a hole in the back of her jacket right where it would sit behind her neck,” Decker said. “He probably hooked the jacket on her locker door. It could keep her upright for a short time. He slips around the corner, gets his image captured on the video, comes back around the corner, and shoots her. The blast would have knocked her down. That’s when the jacket tore, when it was jerked off the locker door when she fell.”
Decker shone his light around the room and picked up more shoeprints, including a set leading back into the storage room and then back down to the passageway. There were also footprints in the shop class, belonging to Debbie Watson. She had worn clunky boots. They had been on her body. In the prints on the floor Decker could see a picture of activity forming. The two sets of footprints had gotten very close together. Probably when they had been kissing. She had been anticipating sex with the man she called Jesus, and instead she’d been thrown right into an early grave.
Decker leaned against the wall and rewound his DVR until he stopped at the point he wanted. “Did you notice something else down in the passageway, Mary?”
“Something else? Like what?”
He opened his eyes. “There were two sets of shoeprints going up the stairs to the storage room off the shop class.”
“Right.”
“And there was a set coming back down the stairs.”
“Right, again. So?”
“And while there were scuffed prints all over the place showing that he had used this passage before, there were no clear sets of shoeprints going back down the passage to the cafeteria to match the two sets coming from the front of the school to the back.”
Lancaster’s eyes widened. “Damn, that’s right. So how did our guy escape from the school?”
“Now, that’s a really good question.”
Chapter 29
While Lancaster hurried off to alert her colleagues to this new development, Decker slipped back down into the passageway and reached the bottom of the stairs.
So if the shooter hadn’t gone back down this passage and escaped via the cafeteria or gone out the front or rear doors, where someone surely would have seen him, then where did he go? The school had been searched, including the unused upper floors, and nothing had been discovered. The police hadn’t known about this passageway, of course, and thus it had not been searched. But the guy was not down here now. He had walked down the stairs from the shop class storage area and gone... where?
Decker hit the area all around the bottom of the stairs with his flashlight.
There were two blank walls on either side of the stairs. There was no dust here and thus the shoeprints had ended at the bottom of the stairs.
He looked at this spot again. But why was there no dust here when it was everywhere else? Had someone cleaned it away? If so, why? He could think of at least one reason.
It was something someone had said to him.
It had been a very recent statement.
Beth Watson.
She was packing up to leave her husband. Her husband’s grandfather had told her about the passageway. But she also said something else that Simon had told her.
He didn’t build it originally. He just added to it.
Decker stepped closer to the wall on the right and hit the surface from all angles with his light.
Nothing.
He did the same on the left.
Something.
A slight seam where the wall met the stairs. He dug his fingers into this gap and pulled. And the wall opened on hinges, smoothly and without noise, just like the fake wall back in the cafeteria. It had been recently used.
Decker was peering down a long, dark hall.
The air in here was stale and musty as well. But not overly so, which meant fresh air was getting in somehow, somewhere. He moved down the passage, his light hitting the dirty concrete floor. There were the shoeprints, again size nine or so. He took pictures of them with his cell phone camera.
He stopped when he saw the door. Leaning next to this door and against the wall were sections of plywood with bent nails protruding from them. Like back in the cafeteria. They had been used to seal off this end of the passage, but someone had unsealed it.
The shooter.
He pulled his gun, touched the wood of the door, and eased it open. He shone his light ahead. He could hear water dripping, the scurry of what he assumed were rats, and the beating of his own heart.
Decker was a brave man, because you did not go into his line of work without being braver than average. But he was also scared, because you did not go into his line of work, or at least survive very long in it, without a commonsensical understanding of your own mortality.
He moved ahead. The floor sloped upward after a hundred feet. Then he reached a set of steps. He took them up, trying to keep as quiet as possible. There was another door at the top. It was locked. He tried his lock pick. It didn’t work.
He tried his shoulder with over three hundred and fifty pounds of bulk behind it.
That did work.
He came out into semidarkness and looked around. The room he was in was large, with windows set up high. There was the smell of grease and oil, and as he looked around he saw the skeletons of vehicles scattered here and there.
They were old abandoned Army vehicles. Because he was now standing in one of the buildings of the long-closed McDonald Army Base.
A passage connecting a school with an Army base?
But the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Lots of kids who went to Mansfield back then had parents who worked at the base. In the event of an emergency, what better place for the kids than either in the “bombproof” shelter underneath the school or at the base with their parents? Or maybe the underground shelter was designed to hold both base personnel and the school kids. Whatever the truth, it was also a fact that it had long since been forgotten about. And it was probably never even used.
But he corrected himself. It had been used recently, so it was not forgotten.
The shooter had exited this way; of that he was now certain. The base was a large place to search, and it had been abandoned for years. No witnesses to see anything. Everything was in disrepair and only a chain-link fence overgrown with vines and bushes and trees around the perimeter. Easy to make one’s escape completely unseen.
As Decker shone his light around he could see discarded beer cans and liquor bottles, empty condom packs, and cigarette butts littering the floor. The place was a forensic nightmare. There were probably hundreds of DNA samples down there, most of them from bored teens looking for sex, booze, nicotine — his light hit on a discarded syringe and a rubber hose to pop blood vessels — or something stronger.
But he doubted any of them knew that there was a passage connecting the base to the school. Even if they had explored the place, they would have encountered a locked door. If they had managed to get through that, they would run into a blank wall. End of exploring. And this would be a summer hangout place. Now that it was nearing winter, the unheated space was freezing. Their shooter would not have needed to worry about running into teenagers screwing and boozing here while he planned his massacre.