The Fix (Amos Decker 3)

Berkshire jerked forward as the round slammed into the back of her head at an upward angle. It blew out her medulla, pierced her brainpan, banged like a pinball off her skull, and exited through her nose, leaving a wound three times the size of the entry due to the bullet’s built-up wall of kinetic energy. She fell forward onto the pavem

ent, her face mostly obliterated, the concrete tatted with her blood.

His pistol out, Decker ran forward as others on the street screamed and ran away. Dabney was still wielding his weapon.

His heart pounding, Decker aimed his Glock at Dabney and shouted, “FBI, put your gun down. Now!”

Dabney turned to him. He did not put down his gun.

Decker could hear the running footsteps behind him. The guard from the shack was sprinting toward them, his gun also out.

Decker glanced quickly over his shoulder, saw this, and held up his creds with his free hand. “I’m with the FBI. He just shot the woman.”

He let his lanyard go and assumed a two-handed shooting stance, his muzzle aimed at Dabney’s chest. The FBI uniform ran up to stand next to him, his gun pointed at Dabney. “Put the gun down, now!” the guard shouted. “Last chance, or we will shoot.”

It was two guns versus one. The response should have been obvious. Lie down and you won’t fall down.

Dabney looked first at the guard and then at Decker.

And smiled.

“Don’t!” shouted Decker.

Walter Dabney pressed the gun’s muzzle to the bottom of his chin and pulled the trigger for a second and final time.

CHAPTER

2

DARKNESS. IT AWAITED us all, individually, in our final moments. Amos Decker was thinking that as he sat in the chair and studied the body.

Anne Berkshire lay on a metal table in the FBI’s morgue. All her clothes had been removed and placed in evidence bags to be later analyzed. Her naked body was under a sheet; her destroyed face was covered as well, although the fabric was stained with her blood and destroyed tissue.

A postmortem was legally required even though there was no doubt whatsoever as to what had caused the woman’s death.

Walter Dabney, by an extraordinary twist, was not dead. Not yet, anyway. The doctors at the hospital to which he’d been rushed held no hope that he would recover, or even regain consciousness. The bullet had tunneled right through his brain; it was a miracle he had not died instantly.

Alex Jamison and Ross Bogart, two of Decker’s colleagues on a joint task force composed of civilians and FBI agents, were with Dabney at the hospital right now. If he regained consciousness they would want to capture anything he might utter that would explain why he had murdered Anne Berkshire on a public street and then attempted to take his own life. Dabney’s recovering to the point of being questioned was simply not going to happen, the doctors had told them.

So for now, Decker simply sat in the darkness and stared at the covered body.

Although the room was not actually dark for him.

For Decker it was an ethereally bright blue. A near-fatal hit he’d received on the football field had commingled his sensory pathways, a condition known as synesthesia. For him, death was represented by the color blue. He had seen it on the street when Dabney had killed Berkshire.

And he was seeing it now.

Decker had given statements to the D.C. police and the FBI, as had the security guard who had joined him at the scene. There hadn’t been much to say. Dabney had pulled a gun and shot Berkshire and then himself. That was crystal clear. What wasn’t clear was why he had done it.

The overhead lights came on and a woman in a white lab coat walked in. The medical examiner introduced herself as Lynne Wainwright. She was in her forties, with the compressed, slightly haunted features of a person who had seen every sort of violence one human could wreak on another. Decker rose, showed her his ID, and said he was with an FBI task force. And also that he had witnessed the murder.

Decker glanced over as Todd Milligan, the fourth member of the joint task force, entered the room. A fifth member, Lisa Davenport, a psychologist by training, had not returned to the group, opting instead to go back to private practice in Chicago.

Milligan was in his midthirties, six feet tall, with close-cropped hair and a physique that appeared chiseled out of granite. He and Decker had initially butted heads, but now the two men got along as well as Decker could with anyone.

Decker had trouble relating to people. That had not always been the case, because he was not the same person he had once been.

In addition to the synesthesia, Decker also had hyperthymesia, or perfect recall, after suffering a brain trauma on the same vicious hit in his very short career in the NFL. It had altered his personality, changing him from gregarious and fun-loving to aloof and lacking the ability to recognize social cues—a skill most people took for granted. People first meeting him would assume he was somewhere on the autism spectrum.

And they might not be far off in that assumption.

“How you doing, Decker?” said Milligan. He was dressed, like always, in a dark suit with a spotless crisp white shirt and striped tie. Next to him, the shabbily attired Decker looked borderline homeless.

“Better than she is,” said Decker, indicating Berkshire’s body. “What do we know about her so far?”

Milligan took out a small electronic notebook from his inside coat pocket and scrolled down the screen. While he was doing that Decker watched as Wainwright removed the sheet from Berkshire’s body and prepared the instruments necessary to perform the autopsy.

“Anne Meredith Berkshire, fifty-nine, unmarried, substitute schoolteacher at a Catholic school in Fairfax County. She lives, or rather lived, in Reston. No relatives have come forward, but we’re still checking.”

“Why was she down at the Hoover Building?”

“We don’t know. We don’t know if she was even going there. And she wasn’t scheduled to teach at the school today.”

“Walter Dabney?”

“Sixty-one, married, with four grown daughters. Has a successful government contracting business. Does work with the Bureau and other agencies. Before that he worked at NSA for ten years. Lives in McLean in a big house. He’s done very well for himself.”

“Did very well for himself,” corrected Decker. “His wife and kids?”

“We spoke with his wife. She’s hysterical. The kids are spread all over the place. One lives in France. They’re all coming here.”

“Any of them have any idea why he would do this?”

“We haven’t spoken to them all, but nothing pops so far. They’re apparently still in shock.”

Decker next asked the most obvious question. “Any connection between Berkshire and Dabney?”

“We’re just starting out, but nothing as yet. You think he was just looking to shoot someone before he killed himself and she was the closest?”

“She was definitely the closest,” said Decker. “But if you’re going to kill yourself why take an innocent person along? What would be the point?”

“Maybe the guy went nuts. We might find something in his background to explain his going off the deep end.”

“He had a briefcase and an ID. It seems he was heading to the Hoover Building. Was he going to a meeting?”

“Yes. We confirmed that he was meeting to go over a project his firm was handling for the Bureau. All routine.”

“So he goes off the ‘deep end’ but he could still put on a suit and come downtown for a routine meeting?”

Milligan nodded. “I see the inconsistency. But it’s still possible.”

“Anything’s possible, until it’s not,” Decker replied.

Decker walked over to stand next to Wainwright. “Murder weapon was a Beretta nine mil. Contact wound at the base of the neck with an upward trajectory. She died on impact.”

Wainwright was readying a Stryker saw that she would use to cut open Berkshire’s skull. She said, “Definitely jibes with the external injuries.”

“If Dabney dies will you be doing the post?”

She nodded. “The Bureau is taking the lead on this since Dabney was a contractor for them and it happened on their doorstep. So I’m your girl.”

Decker turned away from her and said to Milligan, “Has the FBI assigned a team to the case yet?”

Milligan nodded.

“Who’s the team? Do you know them?”