Long Shadows

Chapter 92

D​ecker finally put his head on his pillow at two in the morning, and yet his mind would not shut off. It was racing like it had never done before; images flashed across the spectrum of his brain at a frightening pace. Yet he could see every single image with great clarity, though what was being presented held little rhyme or reason. But still, it was unnerving.

New lesions, new anomalies. Maybe this is what my future looks like.

But I’m not going to let it control me.

He focused, pushing the stream of consciousness away, and willed himself to concentrate on the case. Four murders had been solved, but there was one outstanding.

Julia Cummins’s killer was still out there. And he couldn’t leave here with that unresolved. And why did I never consider the possibility that it might be Tyler? Because he was a football player working his ass off? Because he... reminded me... of me?

They would have to follow up on Langley, but Decker’s gut was telling him the man was not Cummins’s murderer. Langley believed he had a new sugar momma in hand. Why risk that? But had Perlman’s men killed the woman and lied about it to Perlman? If so, they might never reveal the truth.

But things about Tyler’s potential complicity were now clicking into place and taking Decker to conclusions that he didn’t want to draw. The mother always demanding perfection. The mother with all the rules. The mother always hovering over her only child. Then throwing out Tyler’s father, and maybe Tyler as well, and going off on her own midlife crisis, while complaining about her husband doing the very same thing. What might that have done to her son?

Decker knew that Tyler could have slipped out of the condo while Davidson was on his Zooms. He could have run to his mother’s home; he had done it the night they’d found Davidson there. If he had found his mother there with a dead man? Dressed as she was? What would have happened? A kitchen knife snatched, a chase ensuing, a slaughter to follow? Then he could have run back, gotten back into bed, and no one the wiser.

Shit.

He turned over on his side and stared at the wall. His old bedroom had been painted a similar gray color. It was soothing and Cassie had liked soothing things, particularly after stressful days at the hospital. He recalled the time when Molly, unnerved by the night terrors she sometimes suffered with, would climb into bed with them. Decker could never really understand what was troubling his daughter, but Cassie would hold her, and speak soothing words into her little girl’s ear. Eventually, Molly would calm and fall asleep between them, her fingers usually curled around her father’s huge hand.

What I would give to have that right now. To feel those fingers around mine?

He had wanted to help Tyler through this, to get him closure on his mother’s death. It was evident now, to Decker, that Tyler was a younger him, maybe the son he never had, basking in the glory of his youthful football prowess. But Tyler was also mired in the expectations and uncertainties that came with constantly being thrown against greater and greater competition until the day came when he would realize he was no longer the fastest or strongest, or most athletic. That, in the spectrum of elites, he was mediocre at best. Decker had first tasted that bitter rinse at Ohio State. And then he had been completely humbled when entering the NFL. Those expectations had come close to breaking Decker. The question was: Had they broken Tyler?

Guys like Drew James, Tyler’s teammate, would never experience that dilemma. They would be stopped well short of that lofty—

Decker sat up in bed as the memory plates reordered themselves and fell into place so perfectly that it seemed he had nothing to do with the process. It was like his mind was on autopilot.

James had said that Tyler hadn’t run with them since the morning his mother died. But Cummins didn’t die in the morning, she died at night. So if James really meant that Tyler had not run with them beginning with the morning his mother’s body was found... several hours after Tyler would normally run with the other players? But James had also said something else that was far more critical.

And suddenly Decker knew two things: His superpower had not failed him, regardless of what the Cognitive Institute had said.

And he had just solved Julia Cummins’s murder.

And it wasn’t as simple as one killer for the dead woman.