The Last Mile

Chapter 49

Decker was walking in a gray drizzle along the same route that he and Mars had earlier taken. His thoughts had turned to another facet of the case. One way to find Roy Mars was to figure out his connection to Charles Montgomery. If Mars had paid off Regina, then he had to have some connection to the Montgomerys. He hadn’t picked them out of the blue. There had to be a reason. And that answer might lie in the man’s past.

Charles Montgomery had not told them all of the crimes of which he’d been accused. This was understandable since the list was lengthy. But Decker had done some digging.

Montgomery had come back stateside and left the Army in March 1967. In January 1968 he had been arrested in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for driving while intoxicated and for possession of marijuana. Bail had been posted and he’d skipped town. A month later he’d been stopped in Cain, Mississippi, for illegal possession of a stolen gun and drunk and disorderly. Again he’d posted bail, and again he’d skipped town. The crimes had not been serious enough to warrant much of a follow-up, and he apparently had never returned to either state until shooting the Alabama state trooper. And back then there was no central database for cops across state lines. But the crimes were relatively minor and the police no doubt had more pressing matters to claim their time than chasing a petty criminal.

In his mind Decker listed the offenses in chronological order:

DUI and pot possession in Alabama.

A stolen gun and drunk and disorderly in Mississippi.

Bail posted each time.

And he’d skipped town each time.

There was no reason to think it important, but as the drizzle hit him, Decker couldn’t think it unimportant, he just didn’t know why.

He went back to his room and sat in his chair and stared out the window at the gathering gloom. It was barely five in the evening and it looked and felt like midnight. His energy just seemed sapped. If this weather kept up they might all well drown without even stepping into the water.

But Decker’s desire to find the truth trumped the weather. His brain hit the reset button and the key question popped up again.

Why did Roy Mars pick Charles Montgomery?

Montgomery’s explanation of seeing Melvin’s name and putting two and two together obviously had been a lie. The process had actually worked in the reverse. Montgomery hadn’t found Mars. Roy Mars had selected Charles Montgomery.

The only possible reason was that the two men had known each other before. And perhaps Montgomery owed Mars for some reason. And that reason, coupled with the inducement of the money to be left to Regina Montgomery and their son, was enough for the condemned Montgomery to lie about killing Roy and Lucinda Mars.

But how and where had they previously met?

Both men were about the same age. Roy Mars was not the man’s real name, so he could have been in the military with Montgomery over in ’Nam. They had no fingerprints from Mars to search for in the military database.

Yet had they been in the military together? Maybe Mars had saved Montgomery’s life over there? That seemed plausible.

But if not in Vietnam, where?

Had Mars been a petty criminal too? If he were connected to the cartel then Montgomery might have been in South America at some point. Or in Mexico. Or in some way had been connected with the drug trade. He had told them of his pain problem and his quest to steal money and drugs in order to deal with his headaches.

Had Montgomery known Lucinda?

Was that the angle to come at this by?

Decker rubbed his eyes and then closed them.

Even for his exceptional mind this was a staggering conundrum. He could not find traction anywhere. Every time he thought he had something figured out, another question of even greater complexity took its place, like a vanquished cancer cell being replaced by an even more malignant and entrenched one.

But something in the back of Decker’s brain told him that if he could find the connection between the two men, many other questions might be answered.

He opened his eyes and looked out the window. Somewhere out there Lisa Davenport was being held against her will and perhaps tortured.

Or she might already be dead.

Decker had concluded that his first assumption had been wrong. They had not taken Davenport to later exchange for Mars.

And he wasn’t even convinced they had taken her for information purposes.

But if not either of those two reasons, why? What else was there?

What was a possible third reason?

He closed his eyes again. The answer simply wasn’t coming.

He ate dinner in his room while the others gathered together in the small restaurant off the motel lobby. An apple and a bottle of water. Only two months before he would have laughed at such a meal. It would not even have constituted a snack. Now it filled him up. He wanted nothing else.

He notched his belt a hole tighter. At this rate he would have to cut another hole in the belt or get a new one. He was losing weight rapidly. Not in a good way. His inability to solve any significant part of this case was pretty much eating him from the inside out.

He finished the water, tossed the bottle and the apple core, undressed, and got into bed. But though his eyes closed, his mind did not turn off. If anything it hit another gear and raced even faster.

Every conceivable explanation was run through his brain and came out the other end with an imagined “rejected” stamped on it. Some conclusions seemed promising right up until the moment they ran into a fact that could not be explained away and were discarded into his mental rubbish pile.

Again and again he seemed to be close, but something always came around to screw it up. It was like having one move left on a Rubik’s Cube and being unable to seal the deal. The truth was, he was no closer to working this out than he had been on the very first day.

And he had this oddly creeping feeling that he was running out of time, though he could think of no plausible reason why that would be the case.

He opened and closed his eyes, and his brain, perhaps taking a cue that it was overworked and not anywhere near success, also shut down.

Decker slept.

And he awoke for only one reason.

A knife blade was pressed against his throat.