He glanced at her again.
“I was here before you.” She pointed down the street. “My car’s right over there. I saw you drive in. And I’m not alone.”
Another figure appeared at the driver’s-side window and tapped on the glass.
An annoyed Decker unlocked the doors once more and Mars climbed into the backseat.
“So you were spying on me?” Decker said angrily.
“How could we be, when we got here first?” said Mars. “I just wanted to see your old home, Decker. It’s nice.”
Decker gazed out the window. “It was nice,” he said quietly. “The first and probably only home I’ll ever have.”
“Don’t be too sure about that,” said Mars. “Life throws you curveballs, you and I both know that.”
Decker glanced in the mirror at him. “And your point?”
“Never say never. You just don’t know. My future was death row. You think I ever thought I’d be here, today?”
“You were an unusual case, Melvin.”
Jamison snorted. “And you’re not?”
Decker fell silent and shifted his gaze to the house again.
It was late, but there was a light on in the upstairs on the left. That had been Molly’s bedroom. He supposed it might be the Hendersons’ little girl’s room now. He didn’t know why her light was on at this hour; maybe she was sick and her mother was tending to her.
He closed his eyes when powerful images and lights started to bombard him, like before. Their deaths spilling over him, threatening to bury him. He began to shake.
“Decker, you okay?” said a voice.
He felt something grip his arm and his shoulder. He opened his eyes to see Jamison’s hand on his arm, and Mars clenching his shoulder. Jamison was looking at him anxiously. Mars the same.
He blinked rapidly, and, thankfully, the images vanished.
“I’ve been having... some issues.”
“What kind?” asked Jamison.
He drew a long breath. “The memories of finding my family dead have started to just empty out of my head, over and over, the colors, the images, the...” He rubbed his temples. “I don’t know when it will happen, and I can’t seem to make it stop.”
“But it has stopped now, right?” asked Mars while Jamison looked on with a horrified expression.
Decker glanced at her but then quickly looked away after seeing her tortured features. “For now.”
“When has it happened?” asked Jamison quietly.
“Once when I was in my room.” He glanced at Mars. “When you fell asleep in my room. I barely made it to the toilet. Then I went outside in the rain. I thought... I thought I was really losing it. Then, other times.” He thumped the side of his head painfully.
“Had it happened to you before you came back to town this time?” asked Jamison.
“I know what you’re going to say, Alex. I know I can’t live in the past.”
“Knowing is one thing. Doing something about it is another.”
Decker didn’t respond.
“What makes you come back here, Amos?” asked Mars. “I mean, Burlington, I get. But why come back to the house where it happened?”
In his mind’s eye, Decker saw himself climbing, bone-tired, out of his car after an exhausting shift at work. It was nearly midnight. He was supposed to have been home hours before. But he had decided a case he was working on might get a breakthrough if he put some more time into it. He had called Cassie and told her. She hadn’t been happy about it, because they were supposed to go to dinner with her brother, who was in town staying with them. But she told him she understood. She told him she knew his casework was very important to him.
My damn casework.
And then she told him that they would just go out to dinner the next night. Her brother was staying over, so they’d have another opportunity.
Another opportunity that never came to be.
Those were the last words that Decker had ever spoken to his wife. He had gone into the house with the intention of slipping into bed without waking her, and then taking her, Molly, and his brother-in-law out to breakfast the next morning. As a surprise, to make up for that night.
And then he had walked into his home and entered a nightmare.
His life had never been the same. Not in any conceivable way.
And the bottom line was clear to him.
I was not there when my family really needed me. I failed them. I failed myself. And I don’t know if I can live with that.
“Decker?” prompted Mars.
“I guess I keep coming back here,” began Decker. “To imagine how it could have been... different.”
The light in the upstairs bedroom winked out. For some reason that made Decker withdraw even further into whatever hole he had mentally dug for himself.
His head was throbbing. It was like his brain was melting.
Something tapped on the window.
“Who the hell else did you bring?” snapped Decker.
He glanced at Jamison, who sat rigid in her seat. He eyed Mars in the mirror. He was sitting exactly the same way as Jamison.
Decker slowly turned to his left.
And saw the figure there.
And the gun pointed at his head.
He looked to his right and saw a figure and a gun at the passenger window.
Two others were at the two rear doors.
The driver’s-side door was wrenched open and something struck him so hard on the back of the head that it drove his face into the steering wheel.
And that was the last thing he remembered.
Chapter 79
When Decker came to, he had a vision of something that felt familiar. When he opened his eyes fully and looked around, he understood why.
He was in the Richardses’ old home, sitting on the floor.
In the kitchen, where Don Richards and David Katz had died. He felt the zip ties around his wrists and ankles.
He looked next to him and saw Jamison and Mars similarly bound. They were staring across at the doorway where a man was standing.
Bill Peyton, or more correctly, Yuri Egorshin, did not seem like a happy man.
There were three other men in the room. They all looked tough, hardened, chips of iron with guns in their hands. Decker didn’t recognize any of them from the American Grill. To him, they all looked like muscle. Russian muscle, which was pretty damn intimidating.
Egorshin pulled up a chair and sat down opposite the three bound people.
“You have royally messed up my work, Decker,” he said quietly. “I hope you realize that.”
“Well, it’s sort of my job.”
“If the optics weren’t so bad and other... conditions not so adverse to me, I could probably beat your bullshit search at the Grill. You found all that stuff without a warrant. None of it would be admissible.”
“Yeah, but the whole Russian spy thing? I’m not sure the Fourth Amendment really applies to protect people like you.”
“And there we have the limits of the democracy you Americans tout so fiercely.”
Decker glanced out the window into the darkness. “I’m surprised that you would bring us here.”
“What? You mean witnesses? Are you concerned the DeAngelos might have seen us?” Egorshin stopped and his lips set in a firm line. “You don’t have to worry about them. Whatever they might have seen, they will be able to tell no one about.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” said Decker grimly, his features turning angry.
“Do you know what Mr. DeAngelo told me right before I put a bullet in his head?”
Decker said nothing.
“He told me that all he wanted to do was retire down south. I saved him the expense. And I needed... privacy, to deal with you and your friends.”
Decker felt sick to his stomach about the fate of the DeAngelos. He said, “You’ve wasted a lot of time hanging around here. You could be gone from the country. Now it’s too late. It’s death penalty time for you.”