Authors: David Baldacci
“Doubt that would protect you from a nuclear bomb blast. Even if it’s all concrete with reinforced doors.”
He stared at her. “Well, what exactly
would
protect you from a nuke?”
“Good point.”
“I came in here the first night I was here looking around. Those are my shoeprints over there.” He pointed to the far wall. “I walked around, and then, like I said before, I looked in the storage rooms in the back.”
Decker knelt down and studied the floor. “Mary, hit this section with your light. I must have missed it earlier.”
Lancaster did so, revealing a long mark that disturbed the light dust, along with the impressions of shoeprints.
“What do you think that is?”
“Point your light about six inches to the left.”
She did. There was nothing.
“Try six inches to the right.”
She did and they saw an identical mark.
“What is that?” asked Lancaster.
“Marks from Debbie Watson’s feet.”
“Her feet?”
“Or her heels, rather, as she was being dragged out of here. The shoeprints are the shooter’s.”
“Out of here? What was she doing
in
here?”
“Meeting her beau. Her Jesus.”
“You aren’t serious?”
“Debbie was the first vic the ME did a postmortem on. Did you read the autopsy report?”
“Of course I did.”
“COD?”
“Why are you wasting time, Amos? Her cause of death was a shotgun blast to the face, as you very well know.”
“That was obvious. But did you note what the coroner found in her mouth?”
“You mean aside from shotgun pellets?” Lancaster said sarcastically.
“He found the residue of some breath mints.”
“Breath mints? I don’t remember reading that.”
“It was near the end of the report. I always read to the end.”
“But breath mints?”
“
Residue
of breath mints. There was a pack of them in her locker. Two were missing. That’s why she went to her locker. To get the mints. To freshen up her breath before meeting her beau. And her killer. And that would explain the time gap. He comes out of the freezer at seven-twenty-eight. He goes down the passage. But he has to wait for Debbie to get out of class. They probably had a prearranged time. She fakes being ill, gets her permission slip, goes to her locker, gets her mints, and then enters the shop class.”
“But you said the door was locked?”
“Jesus would have unlocked it from the inside for her.”
“Right.” She eyed him suspiciously. “Exactly how long have you thought all this?”
“Not that long.” Decker closed his eyes and touched the back of his head about halfway down. “And the autopsy revealed that there was a subacute subdural hematoma on the back of her head, right about here. Left side of the occipital bone was cracked, and that’s a tough bone to damage like that. That might have killed her if the shotgun hadn’t, just from internal bleeding and resulting pressure on the brain. The ME speculated the injury occurred when she fell backward to the floor after being shot.” He opened his eyes and looked at his partner. “Left side.”
“Meaning the blow came from the left side and behind? A left-handed person? Like you said the guy who wrote the musical score was, left-handed.”
“The probabilities lie there, yes.”
“So he meets her in here and knocks her out, but why?”
“He needed her out of the way. And he needed to kill her first, before anyone else. He couldn’t risk the possibility that she would survive. She could identify him. So he arranges to meet with her, uses the passageway to get across the school unseen. I would imagine this is not the first time they’ve done this. They might have had sex in shop class during or after school on other occasions. I wonder how often Debbie got permission to go to the nurse’s office?”
“Have sex? Are you serious?”
“Their own private space in the middle of the school? What could be cooler for a teenager in love with her
mature
man who doesn’t even go here? And the killer would have wanted to know the passage by heart when he was planning this whole thing. He could bring stuff in and store it here. It was perfect.”
“So how do you see it playing out from there?”
“He meets in the shop class with her, she thinks to make out, hence the breath mints. He knocks her out, gets his gear, slips out of the room, walks around the corner to the camera, and gets his picture taken.” He glanced at Lancaster. “You saw the shoeprints in the passage?”
“You
know
I did.”
“I estimate they’re a size nine or maybe nine and a half, but no larger.”
Lancaster looked confused. “That’s not very big for a large guy,” she said slowly. “Earl’s six feet and he wears an eleven.”
“I’m six-five and wear a fourteen shoe, which is not unusual for a man my size. A guy six-two weighing in at two-hundred-plus pounds with a size nine shoe? Not likely. And I couldn’t get past the gap in the door with the AC units in the way. I had to push them out farther. And the lack of marks on the floor showed I was the only one who had. You got through easily enough, but you’re short and skinny. The guy in the video had a lot smaller waist than I do, but his shoulders and chest were just as broad as mine. So how did he manage to get through that gap without moving the AC units?”
“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.”
W
HILE 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.
He walked around the place and found nothing and no one.
He pulled his phone and called the Watsons’ house. George answered. Decker wondered if Beth was already gone for good.
“Hello, who is this?” Watson wasn’t slurring his words. Maybe he’d slept it off.
“Mr. Watson, Detective Decker again.”
“What do you want?” he asked, clearly annoyed.
“Just a quick question. Had Debbie been spending a lot of time after hours at school, or maybe in the morning before classes started?”
“How the hell did you know that? How the hell do you know so much about my family?”
“Just a guess. But I am a detective. It’s what I do. And your wife mentioned that she was home a lot more than Debbie. So I assumed she was doing something after school. So what exactly was she doing?”
“She belonged to some clubs. They had meetings. Sometimes they ran late. She wouldn’t get home until well past dark. Why, is that important?”
“It might be. Thanks.”
Decker clicked off. He knew Debbie Watson was not going to club meetings. She was hooking up with “Jesus” in their private space.
He next called Lancaster and told her what he’d found.
He put his phone away, sat down on an oil drum, and waited with his eyes closed. He figured he would not have to wait long. He had left the door in the wall open.
He heard the footsteps coming. One would have made him open his eyes. This was about a dozen. So he kept his eyes closed. A killer came alone, not with an army.
He opened his eyes and saw Special Agent Bogart standing there.
“Another educated guess?” asked the man.
“Another educated guess,” replied Decker.
Behind Bogart was a group of FBI agents and members of the Burlington Police Department. Lancaster stepped forward.
“I called Mac, he’s on his way,” she reported, and Decker nodded slowly.
“How did you figure this?” Bogart asked Decker.
Decker gave him the two-minute drill on his deductions.
“If you had briefed us on your meeting with Beth Watson, we might have been able to help you on this,” Bogart pointed out. “We might have gotten here sooner.”
“We might have,” agreed Decker.
Bogart ordered a search of the place and the perimeter and then pulled up an old wooden bench and sat down next to Decker while Lancaster hovered nearby.
“So the shooter befriended Debbie Watson, found out about this link with the school, and used it to get away?” said Bogart.
“He used it to both get in
and
get away. With the passage he could come and go as he pleased. He seduced her. He’s a grown man. She’s an impressionable teenager with not the best of home lives. They must’ve had a bunch of trysts here that no one else knew about. She must have felt really special. Right up until he discharged a shotgun in her face.”
“We’ll contact the Army and get all we can on the base.”
“Yeah. Good luck with that.”
“I’m surprised no one knew about this passage,” said Bogart. “Other than the Watsons.”
“Well, if it was originally built in 1946 or close to it, most of those folks would be dead. I doubt they would have told the kids about it, so only the school officials would have known. Maybe it was never used. Maybe they never even had a practice drill. I don’t know. Even if they did, the students from back then would be fairly elderly now. Maybe they forgot about it.”
“But you said Simon Watson had
added
to the passageway?”
“He came to McDonald in the late sixties, and sometime after that the passage from the base was put in. But when the base was closed everybody left. Lots of people who worked here in uniform were probably transferred to other places.”
Lancaster interjected, “And even if there were folks left here who knew about the passage, I doubt they’d think about a killer using it to move around the school. They’d assume it was sealed up after all this time. The public probably believes he shot up the place and made a run for it and got away.”
Bogart nodded. “But he could have gotten into the school more easily from this way, meaning the Army base end. But he apparently was in the cafeteria and traversed the school that way. Why?”
“I don’t know,” said Decker. “We thought it might be to allow him time to cut through the wall sealing off the door behind the sign in the cafeteria. But now since I believe he’s been in and out of here a lot, he could have done that any time. And he probably wouldn’t have waited until the night before the planned attack, in case something went wrong.” He paused. “So, bottom line, I don’t know.”
“I thought you had all the answers.”
“Then you thought wrong.”
Bogart considered him thoughtfully. “You really don’t forget anything, do you?” Decker didn’t look at him. Bogart drew closer and said in a low voice that only Decker could hear, “What makes you tick, Decker? What do you have up in your head that allows you to do what you do?”
Decker didn’t acknowledge that he had heard the comment.
“You always tune out like this when someone is trying to have a conversation?” Bogart asked.
“My social skills aren’t the best,” said Decker. “I told you that already.”
“But you can walk and chew gum at the same time. So if you have some special mental ability, it hasn’t affected your capacity to function out in the world.”
Now Decker looked at him. “Why do you say that?”
Bogart said, “My older brother has a form of autism. Brilliant in his field. Positively clueless in interacting with another human being. He can’t carry on a conversation beyond a few mumbled words. And he’s actually considered high-functioning because he can work at a job.”
“What’s his field?”
“Physics. Subatomic particles more specifically. He can expound all day about quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons. But he forgets to eat and has no idea how to book a plane ticket or pay the electric bill.”
Decker nodded. “I get that.”
“You seem to do okay, though.”
“It’s all degrees, Special Agent Bogart.”
“You been this way since birth?”
“Later,” Decker said tersely. “Which might be why I can walk and chew gum at the same time,” he added in a tight voice before looking away.
Bogart nodded. “You don’t want to talk about this, do you?”
“Would you?”
Bogart rubbed his hands along his thighs. “We need to get this guy. And we have one thing that we haven’t really broached yet.”
Decker looked at him. “His
thing
with me.”
Bogart nodded. “He’s sent you two messages. One coded, one not. That was a risk for him. He had to go back to the house where he committed the murders of your family to write one of the messages. Someone could have seen him. And he went to Debbie’s house. Again, with the risk of being seen. Now, anyone who kills is a risk-taker, by definition. But like you said, it’s a matter of degrees. A killer like this may not want to be caught. So he will minimize his risk. But that was outweighed by his desire to communicate with you. That’s important. Because it makes me believe that he feels he has a connection with you somehow that is very strong, very deep.”
Decker fixed his gaze on the other man. “You were at Quantico? BAU?”
“Behavioral Analysis Unit, yes. I was what the movie and TV folks would call a profiler. And I was pretty good at it.”
“There are no profilers in the FBI.”
“You’re right. Technically, we’re referred to as analysts. And sometimes we’re right and sometimes we’re wrong. Some say psychological profiling lacks empirical validation, and they may be right. But I don’t really care. All I care about is catching the bad guys before they can hurt someone else, and I’ll use whatever tools I have at my disposal to do so.” He peered more closely at Decker. “And I’m considering you to be one of those tools.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
“Meaning that I’d like you to work more closely with us. Together we may be able to make headway.”
Decker looked over at Lancaster, who had clearly heard this last exchange.
Decker rose. “I’ve already got a partner. But we break anything we’ll let you know.”
He walked off. Lancaster waited for a moment, flicked Bogart a tight smile, and scurried after Decker.
Special Agent Bogart remained sitting, staring after them both.