Long Shadows

Chapter 23

Their hotel had a sad four-seater bar and Decker was sitting in one of them cradling a half-empty bottle of Bud. He eyed the TV screen, where a hockey game was on. To him, it was a little incongruous watching heavily clothed men skating on ice with palm trees gently swaying just outside the hotel, and a temperature of seventy degrees at eleven p.m.

He took out his phone, placed it on the bar, and looked at the caller log. Mary Lancaster had phoned him at 2:58 in the morning. She would have roughly seven minutes left to live.

The image of the woman putting the gun in her mouth once more came to his brutalized mind. And he had just stood there without saying one damn thing to stop her.

When he had woken up in the hospital after the blindside hit on the football field that had ended his athletic career as well as the person he had once been, Decker had no idea what had happened to him. As the doctors explained about his dying twice before being resuscitated, it was as though they were speaking to him about someone else.

Traumatic brain injury, they had said. The extent of the damage was unknown as yet, they had told him. They had simply done their best to keep him alive. It would not be until weeks later that he would learn what had truly happened to him that day.

Then came the extended stay at the Cognitive Institute in Chicago, where he had met folks who had also suffered injuries to their brains. And for all of them that trauma had led to startling new mental superpowers.

Superpowers. Yeah, I can forget nothing, most of the time. I see death as electric blue and other shit sometimes as orange or pink or green. Big, bad numbers used to come to eat me. I’m as socially awkward as a fourteen-year-old boy with a face full of zits at his first dance. I get tongue-tied on things I used to do easily, like being funny instead of annoying, having a filter, being sympathetic, though I have gotten a bit better with that. I have the same body but not the same person inside of that body. It cost me my family, though, and because of that I can never forgive... me.

He closed his eyes, and his broad shoulders slumped as he felt the full weight of all that he was pondering.

“You want some company?”

He looked up to see White standing there. She’d changed into jeans, a dark red blouse, and black ballerina flats that made her look very short.

“Free country.”

She slid onto the seat next to him and glanced at his phone. The screen had gone dark.

“Waiting for a call?”

He pocketed the phone. “No.”

She waved to the bartender and ordered a G and T with Bombay Sapphire as the critical ingredient. “We covered a lot of ground today. Crisscrossed the state twice, in fact.”

“But didn’t find out much,” he amended.

“Early days yet. Got to start somewhere. And there are always lots of questions and muddling shit at the beginning.”

“And at the end, depending on how things turn out.”

Her drink came and she took a sip. “I looked you up, Decker. You have never failed to solve any case the Bureau put you on.”

“My very first case as a rookie detective back in Ohio, I put the wrong man in prison. A bunch of years later he told me so. He challenged me to prove I was wrong and he was right.”

“And did you?”

“Yes. But it was too late to help him. Someone killed him the same day he made his challenge. I found his body.”

“And how did that make you feel?”

He finished his beer and waved for another. He turned to her. “How do you think it made me feel? It made me feel like shit. I carved years off a man’s life because I fucked up. I went into a case with preconceived notions and I never deviated from them.”

“Did you learn from that?”

“Yeah, I did, but too late for him.”

She raised her glass. “Congratulations, you’re not perfect.”

“Is that what you think this is about?”

“What this is about is us trying to do our job to the best of our ability. When I was a rookie, I messed up chain of custody once. Then I wasted time on following dopey leads. Got torched on the witness stand twice by slick defense lawyers because I didn’t prepare hard enough. This is not TV, Decker. We make mistakes. We’re human. We don’t always get it right. We don’t always solve the case in one hour including commercials.”

“Maybe you don’t” was all he said to that. But there was so little energy behind it that White did not seem to take offense.

She said, “So, we got Lancer and Kelly missing. Draymont and Cummins dead. Ex with an alibi.”

“Provided by his son and maybe some business associates on video. We need to confirm he really was on those Zooms. If all that hangs together, he couldn’t have personally done the murders. But he could have hired someone, as I said before.”

“The Slovakian cash in the mouth?”

“Either real and literal or an intentional distraction.” Or maybe both, he suddenly thought.

“Motive for the ex?”

“We need to talk to Cummins’s lawyer, Duncan Trotter. Might depend on where her money goes.”

“Her neighbor thought it was going to Tyler, not Barry Davidson.”

“Still could be a motive, since Barry might manage that money and burn through some of it until Tyler comes of age.”

“He looks to be doing pretty well all on his own.”

“Looks can be deceiving. And even if Tyler gets it all, there could be personal reasons for the killing that we don’t know about yet. They were divorced and it didn’t sound like it was all that amicable.”

“True.”

“And I’ve got a hunch Gamma is going to stonewall us on our queries.”

“I gotta feeling Gamma is gonna stonewall us on a lot of things.”

Decker nodded but said nothing. He stared at his fresh beer like it was a clue.

“Hopefully, we’ll find something on the judge’s computers or phone that will help us.”

“Yeah,” Decker said unenthusiastically.

She stared at him. “Alex described you as relentless. You get going on a case and nothing, not God himself, is going to stop you.”

He did a sideways glance at her. “And?”

“And, don’t take this wrong, but you don’t seem to be that guy right now.”

He took a long swig of beer. “Maybe right now I’m not.”

“Is it Lancaster’s suicide?”

He rose, dropped cash for his drinks, and walked off.