Memory Man (Amos Decker 1)

“I asked. More than once. But she didn’t bite.” She paused. “Well, she did slip and say that I wouldn’t understand him. He was so…mature.”

“Meaning older. Not in high school?” said Decker.

“That’s what I took it to mean, yes. I mean, she was a senior. She sure as hell wasn’t talking about any of her classmates. And she didn’t bother with the juniors. And Debbie was a real looker. All developed and everything. Lots of boys had their eyes on her. I tried to give her advice, but girls don’t listen. I didn’t listen when my mom tried to tell me. I always went for the bad boys.”

Her husband looked at the detectives almost apologetically. “And then she married me.”

“Had to marry you, George. We had Debbie on the way. My mother almost had a heart attack anyway. By far the best thing to come out of our marriage was Debbie. And now I don’t even have her. Which means I’ve got nothing.”

Lancaster looked away at this and George Watson bit down on his lip and decided to focus on an old water ring mark on the coffee table.

Decker studied the pair of them. In the wake of such tragedy all other societal rules within a marriage tended to give way. What was never spoken about was now easily and readily revealed. It was as though the dam holding it all back had failed. Debbie might have been the dam. And now her death represented the breach.

“Why the sketch of the cammie gear?” asked Lancaster. She looked at George. “Do you hunt? Do you have camouflage gear here?”

He shook his head forcefully. “I couldn’t shoot an animal. I don’t even own a gun.”

Decker said, “I guess your condition would make it difficult to hold a weapon properly.”

George looked down at his malformed arm. “I was born with it.” He paused. “It’s made lots of things difficult,” he added resignedly.

“So the cammie gear might be a reference to this guy Jesus?” said Decker.

“It might be,” said George cautiously.

“It had to be,” snapped Beth. “She had a heart next to it.” She glanced at Lancaster with a knowing, exasperated look. “Guys don’t get it, do they? Never set foot in a damn Hallmark store.”

Decker said, “I saw the laptop on the kitchen counter. Did Debbie use that?”

“No, she had her own. It’s in her room.”

“Can we take a look at her room now?”

They were led down the hall by Beth. Before she turned away she took a last drag on her smoke and said, “However this comes out, there is no way my baby would have had anything to do with something like this, drawing of this asshole or not. No way. Do you hear me? Both of you?”

“Loud and clear,” said Decker. But he thought if Debbie were involved she had already paid the ultimate price anyway. The state couldn’t exactly kill her again.

Beth casually flicked the cigarette down the hall, where it sparked and then died out on the faded runner. Then she walked off.

They opened the door and went into Debbie’s room. Decker stood in the middle of the tiny space and looked around.

Lancaster said, “We’ll have the tech guys go through her online stuff. Photos on her phone, her laptop over there, the cloud, whatever. Instagram. Twitter. Facebook. Tumblr. Wherever else the kids do their electronic preening. Keeps changing. But our guys will know where to look.”

Decker didn’t answer her. He just kept looking around, taking the room in, fitting things in little niches in his memory and then pulling them back out if something didn’t seem right as weighed against something else.

“I just see a typical teenage girl’s room. But what do you see?” asked Lancaster finally.

He didn’t look at her but said, “Same things you’re seeing. Give me a minute.”

Decker walked around the small space, looked under piles of papers, in the young woman’s closet, knelt down to see under her bed, scrutinized the wall art that hung everywhere, including a whole section of People magazine covers. She also had chalkboard squares affixed to one wall. On them was a musical score and short snatches of poetry and personal messages to herself:

Deb, Wake up each day with something to prove.

“Pretty busy room,” noted Lancaster, who had perched on the edge of the girl’s desk. “We’ll have forensics come and bag it all.”

She looked at Decker, obviously waiting for him to react to this, but instead he walked out of the room.

“Decker!”

“I’ll be back,” he called over his shoulder.

She watched him go and then muttered, “Of all the partners I could have had, I got Rain Man, only giant size.”

She pulled a stick of gum out of her bag, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth. Over the next several minutes she strolled the room and then came to the mirror on the back of the closet door. She appraised her appearance and ended it with the resigned sigh of a person who knows their best days physically are well in the past. She automatically reached for her smokes but then decided against it. Debbie’s room could be part of a criminal investigation. Her ash and smoke could only taint that investigation.

She whirled around when Decker came back into the room.

“Where’d you go?” she asked.

“Had some questions for the parents, and I wanted to take a look around the rest of the house.”

“And?”

He walked over to the musical score written on the chalkboard wall and pointed to it.

“Debbie didn’t do this.”

Lancaster gazed at the symbols. “How do you know that?”

“She doesn’t play an instrument. I checked her school record earlier. She’s never been in the band. I asked her mother. She’s never played an instrument and there are none in the house. Second, there are no sheets of music in this room. Even if you didn’t play an instrument and just composed music, I think you’d have some sheet music or more likely blank score sheets in your room. Third, that’s not Debbie’s handwriting.”

Lancaster drew closer to the wall and studied the marks there and then compared them with the other writing on the wall.

“But how can you really tell?” she asked. “I mean, musical scores aren’t like other writing. They’re symbols, not letters.”

“Because Debbie is right-handed. Who ever wrote this was left-handed. Even though it’s not letters you can still tell by the sweeps, flourishes, and general flow of the marks.” He picked up some chalk and wrote on a different section of the board some of the musical symbols. “I’m right-handed and you can see the difference.”

He pointed to some smudges on the board. “And that’s where the person’s left sleeve smeared some of the score. For a righty it would be in the opposite place. Like mine.” He pointed to where his sleeve had brushed against some of the chalk marks. “And Leopold is right-handed.”

“How do you know that?”

“He signed a paper I gave him when I saw him in his prison cell.”

“Okay, but maybe a friend of hers who is a musician did it.”

But Decker was already shaking his head. “No.”

“Why not? I could see a buddy of hers writing out a tune or something on here. Maybe inspirational, to match some of Debbie’s writing.”

“Because those notes make no sense at all. You couldn’t play it with any instrument of which I’m aware. From a music composition perspective, it’s gibberish.”

“How do you know? Did you play music?”

Decker nodded. “In high school, guitar and drums. I know my way around scores. And not just the ones on the football field.”

Lancaster glanced back at the symbols. “So what is it, then?”

“I think it’s a code,” said Decker. “And if I’m right about that, it means Jesus was in this house.”