Long Shadows

Chapter 1

“Who the hell is this?” barked Amos Decker.

He had been awoken from a sleep far deeper than he usually achieved. The insomnia had been getting worse, and it was adding nothing positive to his already unpredictable temperament. He hadn’t looked at the phone number on the screen before answering it. In his line of work, calls came at all times of the day or night and not always from those on his contact list.

“Amos, it’s Mary Lancaster.” Her voice was low, tenuous. “Do you remember me?”

Amos Decker sat up stiffly in his bed and rubbed his unshaven face. He saw on his phone screen that it was nearly three in the morning.

“Since I pretty much can’t forget anything, it’s not likely I’d forget you, is it, Mary?” He patted himself on both cheeks, working to remove the fuzziness from his mind. Then his thoughts settled on the timing of the call, which was in itself a warning.

In a tense voice he added, “Mary, is something wrong? Why are you even up now?”

Mary Lancaster was Decker’s former partner in the Burlington Police Department in Ohio. A while back she’d been diagnosed with early onset dementia. The disease had spiraled continually downward, as her brain deteriorated and dragged the rest of her along with it.

“I’m fine. Couldn’t sleep.”

To Decker, she didn’t sound fine at all. But he hadn’t spoken to her in a while, and this might just be how she was now.

“I have trouble with that too.”

“I just wanted to hear your voice. It just seemed so important to me right now. I’ve been working up the courage to call you.”

“You don’t ever have to worry about calling me, even in the middle of the night.”

“It’s so difficult to understand time, Amos, night and then day. But then, everything is very difficult for me to understand right now. And... it’s so very frightening because... every day there seems to... be less and less of me... th-there.”

He sighed as the tragic sincerity of her words hit him especially hard. “I know, Mary. I understand why you feel that way.”

“Yes. I believed that you would.”

Her tone had firmed up a bit. Decker hoped it was a positive sign.

He leaned against the creaky headboard, as though using the wood to fortify his own spine in dealing with this unexpected development. Decker surveyed the dark confines of his small bedroom. He had lived here for years, but it looked like he was just moving in, or else was simply passing through.

He was a consultant with the FBI. Long before that he had suffered a near-fatal brain injury while playing professional football. His altered brain held two new attributes which, up to that point, he hadn’t even known about and had no reason to: hyperthymesia, or perfect recall; and synesthesia, which caused him to pair certain things with unlikely colors. In his case it was dead bodies linked with a shade of electric blue. After his football career ended he had become a policeman and then a detective in his hometown; thus, seeing dead bodies was not all that unusual.

He and Lancaster had successfully partnered on many cases. Having a perfect memory was a godsend for a detective, but a thousand-pound ball-and-chain for a human being. Time did not heal any of his past miseries. If anything, they were more intensified.

He lived in an apartment in Washington, DC, in a building owned by a friend of his, Melvin Mars. Decker had first met Mars while the man was on death row in Texas. He had proved Mars’s innocence, and Mars had received a substantial financial windfall for his wrongful incarceration. He’d used some of it to buy the apartment building. Mars had recently married and moved to California.

Decker’s longtime FBI partner, Alex Jamison, had been transferred to New York and found what looked to be love with a Wall Street investment banker. His old boss at the FBI, Ross Bogart, had retired and was learning to play golf — badly, he had heard — in Arizona.

That meant Decker was now alone, which he knew he would be one day. The phone call from his old partner was thus welcome, even at this hour.

“How are you, Mary? I mean, really, how are you?”

“So-so,” she said. “Every day is a... challenge.”

“But you sound good.”

“You mean I can put sentences together. The... me-medications help me with that, sometimes. This is one of those times. I’m... not usually like this. I’m usually... not good.”

He decided to reroute the conversation. “How are Earl and Sandy? Sleeping, I suppose.” That was Mary’s husband and their daughter.

“They went to visit Earl’s mother in Cleveland. She’s not doing well. Probably won’t be long for this world. She’s old, and gaga like me, actually.”

“You don’t sound gaga to me, Mary.”

“Yes, well...”

“Wait, if they’re in Cleveland, who’s staying with you?” The last time he had visited her, there had been an aide helping out.

“I’m okay right now, Amos. It’s all right for me to be here.”

“I don’t know, Mary. I don’t have a good feeling about this.”

“You don’t have to worry about me.”

She sounded almost like the old Mary. Almost.

But there was something else going on here that he didn’t like.