Decker scowled. “This has to be your priority, Mary. If the guy really didn’t do it, we screwed his life up, sent him to prison where it looks like he was raped, and then let somebody murder him.”
“We didn’t let anyone murder him,” she retorted.
“We might as well have,” Decker shot back.
“Problem?”
They both looked over at Jamison standing in the doorway.
Lancaster finally drew her gaze from Decker. “Just two former partners having a discussion.” She turned back to Decker. “I’m sorry, Amos. I will work this case as much as I can with you. But my plate is pretty damn full.”
“What about your saying it was good working together, like old times?”
“We don’t live in old times. We live in the present.” She paused and added, “At least I do, because I don’t have a choice.”
Decker gazed at her stonily.
Jamison said, “Decker, have you heard back from Bogart?”
“He still hasn’t called you?”
“No. But he’s good with us staying here and working on the case?”
“No, he’s not. So you better pack up and head back to D.C.”
“When did you hear that?”
Decker didn’t answer.
“Decker?”
“A while back.”
“And you didn’t think to mention it?”
“I’m mentioning it now. I’ll see you back in D.C. at some point.”
“But you mean you’re staying? Decker, you can’t.”
“Watch me.”
He stalked out.
Jamison looked down at Lancaster, who sat in the chair still slowly chewing her gum.
“What the hell is going on with him?” Jamison said. “If he disobeys orders he’s going to blow up his career at the Bureau.”
Lancaster stood. “Amos Decker has always had priorities. But his ‘career’ has never been one of them.”
“I know, he just wants to find the truth. He always says that.”
Lancaster glanced toward the door. “I actually think he just wants to find some peace. And all of this” — she paused and looked around the room — “all this is just how he survives with more guilt on his shoulders than any person has a right to bear. And what happened to Meryl Hawkins just added a shitload more, because he obviously blames himself for what happened. It’s just how he’s wired. God, I wish I’d never told Hawkins where Decker was.” She touched Jamison on the shoulder. “It was good to see you, Alex.”
Lancaster followed Decker out, leaving Jamison alone.
Chapter 13
Decker sat on a red park bench in the town of his birth.
Burlington, Ohio, warts and all.
It had been crushed when most of the factories closed up decades before. Then it had made a comeback of sorts. Then the recession had come and knocked it down again.
Now it was slowly coming back.
He wondered when the next knockdown would come. It always seemed to.
Jamison had sent him a half dozen texts after she’d left town, and he’d ignored them all. Part of him felt bad about this. None of this was about Jamison. This was all about Amos Decker, he knew.
You’re never going to get over it, are you?
Lancaster’s words had ripped into him like that round into Hawkins’s brain.
You never are going to get over their deaths, are you, Amos? How can you? It was your fault.
He had sat on this bench before, just as now, when fall was speedily giving over to winter in the Ohio Valley. Back then he’d been making a feeble living as a private investigator. He’d been sitting here awaiting a man and a woman who were headed toward a cocktail lounge that was no longer in business. He had been paid by the woman’s wealthy father to convince the con artist creep who had won her heart to leave town. He had been successful. It wasn’t that hard, since the man thought himself far smarter and slicker than he actually was. He never counted on running into Amos Decker, who finished him off in a few easy moves of chess play.
While waiting for the couple he had observed those moving around him, making deductions and grafting them onto his memory. He used to refer to his memory as his personal, wired-in DVR. Now he had updated the term to fit modern times.
I have a personal cloud in my head where all my data is kept safe and secure until I want to pull it out.
Two young men walked past arguing about something. Decker noted the clenched hand of the one on the left, in which years ago there would have been five-dollar bags of crack. Now he suspected the dude had some opioid pills that he was trying to sell. The dude on the right was arguing price, no doubt. In his hand was a fistful of Jacksons, in his back pocket a snort bottle of Narcan. In the event of overdose, which was pretty much inevitable, users were bringing their “back to life” medication with them so that a passerby could stick it up their nose and give it a squirt. Thus they would live another day to die once more.
Such was life in the twenty-first century.
He floated this image up to his personal cloud and went in search of others.
He found it in a woman pulling into a parking space on the street in front of what used to be a service station and was now a CrossFit facility. She climbed out dressed in tight workout clothes and slung a bag over her shoulder, her face glued to her smart-phone screen and with ear buds in. He looked over her car. The parking permit on her front bumper identified where she lived, for any potential bad guy to see and follow.
He wanted to tell her to find another way to do the parking thing, and not to be so oblivious about her surroundings while she eagerly examined her critically important social media happenings. But he figured she’d just call the cops on him for harassing her.
This scene was dutifully uploaded to his cloud for no apparent reason other than it always went there.
Last shot. An elderly couple walked by, hand in hand. He looked a bit younger than she, perhaps in his early eighties. Her hand was trembling, and she had a tremor along one side of her face. The other side drooped. Either Bell’s palsy or she’d previously suffered a stroke. The man had hearing aids in both ears and what looked to be a melanoma growing on his nose. And yet they shuffled slowly along together. Growing old, nearing the end, and still in love. That was the way it was supposed to work.
Decker tried but failed to not upload that to his cloud. But he did try to stick it in a particularly remote part of his memory.
So, with Jamison gone, he was alone again. In some ways, he preferred it. He had been on his own after his family had been taken from him. And he had survived.
Maybe it was for the best. Maybe he was destined for a solitary existence. It just felt more comfortable.
He shifted his sole focus to the problem at hand.
Meryl Hawkins. Decker had approximately one million questions and not nearly that many answers. In fact, he had none at all. But he was not parked on this bench merely for his health, or for the sake of nostalgia.
He had spoken to one widow, Susan Richards. Now he was awaiting another.
Rachel Katz walked down the pavement a few minutes later. She and David Katz had never had any children. She lived alone in a condo downtown. It was a luxury loft in an old factory building. Decker had learned that she still worked as a CPA and had her own practice. And she still owned the American Grill. Her office was a five-minute walk from her loft.
Several years younger than her late husband, she was now forty-four. A striking-looking woman when Decker had first met her all those years ago, she had aged exceptionally well. Her blonde hair was still long and skimmed her shoulders. She was tall and fit, with a swagger to her walk. She moved like she owned the world — or at least Burlington, Ohio.