DECKER WAS RUNNING. Only not in real life.
In a dream.
He wore the uniform of the Cleveland Browns. His twenty-two-year-old self was sprinting down the field on opening day of a new NFL season. He had made the team as a rookie walk-on due to his special teams ability, which largely meant running with abandon and throwing your body at other similarly sized young men with a recklessness bordering on insanity.
Then out of nowhere had come the hit. The blindside plastering that had lifted him off his feet, knocked his helmet from his head, and tossed him down three feet away, unconscious and, though no one knew it at the time, dying.
And when he awoke in the hospital the Amos Decker who had once inhabited his body was no more.
He had been replaced with pretty much a complete stranger. As different from the original Amos Decker—emotionally and mentally—as it was possible to be.
With this last fragment of the dream ricocheting through his brain like a fired round, Decker opened his eyes and sat up, breathing hard, sweat bubbling on his face though the room was cool.
He stared across the darkness of his room. Outside he could hear car traffic, and a few moments later the throaty roar of a plane doing its climb out after lifting off from National Airport. Some rain drizzled at his window.
Still, he stared across the room, his thoughts remaining on that football field. On the person he used to be. As precisely perfect as his memory was now, he couldn’t wrap it around the young man from twenty years ago.
I can remember who I was, just not with any real accuracy. How ironic is that?
He turned and looked at the doll resting on his nightstand. The one like Molly used to have. Only this one had probably been used for espionage.
He lay back down and in his mind started parceling things.
He had many strings in hand, but none that seemed paramount or more capable of leading to an answer than its neighbor. He could sense that all they were doing was running in circles, never proactive, never ahead of the curve.
He was a detective and a good one. He had solved lots of cases over the years, but few as inscrutable as this one. He had told Brown that maybe they were looking at this the wrong way round, even if she hadn’t understood exactly what that meant.
Maybe I don’t either.
Everything seemed to come back to Walter Dabney. That was partly by default. They had been able to thoroughly dig into his past, whereas they had had far less to go on when it came to Berkshire.
By far his biggest asset was his memory, so he turned to it once more.
His eyes closed and the frames flipped past.
There was something that someone had said. He wasn’t sure it was even related. For some reason it seemed an outlier comment, but perhaps with a secondary meaning that would shed light on something.
The frames slowed and his brow furrowed.
It was almost like the reels of a slot machine clacking away and then slowing as the cycle neared its end, showing you to be either a loser or a winner, if the images all lined up perfectly.
Come on. Line up for me. Make me a winner. I could use it.
Surprisingly, the image of Melvin Mars came into his head. They had been talking about something at Harper Brown’s house right before they had been attacked.
The clacking sound diminished; the frames continued to slow.
Mars had said something about Brown. It had sounded perfectly innocuous when he had said it. It had flowed very naturally from the conversation they had been having. It wasn’t related to the case at all.
One…two…three.
The clacking slowed down more. The whirring images too, so that Decker could start to see a firm image taking shape.
Mars had been telling Decker how impressed he’d been with Brown. How well traveled she was, but how she put on no airs even with all the wealth she possessed. Mars had said he had admired that. He liked hanging with her.
She was fun and cool and she made him feel good.
But, no, it was not that. It was something else.
It was like he was holding a piece of flypaper, and bits of confetti, representing the facts of the case, were swirling in the air. If he could just get them to drop down and stick to the flypaper, things might start making sense.
More clacking and more spinning images.
Five…six…seven…eight.
Jackpot.
The single word burst into his head, jumping out in the same way the highlighted ones in the Harry Potter book had leapt from the page.
He sat up so fast he became a little dizzy.
Athlete.