How wrong they had been.

He had been a good, but far from great, college player. And then the funnel narrowed even more. He had gone undrafted on pro draft day because there were hundreds of prospects far better than he was. He had taken that as a personal attack. Decker had worked his way onto the Cleveland Browns by busting his ass on the practice field, sacrificing his body in idiotic ways that had come back to haunt him in his forties, and being the last to leave the film room. For all that effort his career had lasted one regular-season play and had left him with a brain permanently changed.

Something good had come out of it, at least. He had met Cassie while he was rehabbing his “other” injuries. Because, as it turned out, the hit had not only addled his brain. Both cleats had stuck in the turf as Dwayne LeCroix leveled him. The result was a broken right femur, a blown-out ACL on his left knee, and a torn MCL on his right. Pretty much the whole package, the surgeon had told him. Well, in for a dime, in for a dollar.

Cassie had been a newly minted physical therapist attending him. He had worked his butt off to get back right. His leg and knees eventually healed. His brain was what it was. But she had been with him every step of the way, encouraging when necessary and bullying her patient when encouragement failed to motivate.

During that time he and Cassie had fallen as deeply in love as he imagined anyone could. After his stint at the institute outside Chicago where they studied people who had extraordinary mental abilities, he and Cassie had gotten engaged and then married and moved back to his hometown. He had previously given a lot of thought to what he would do in the future, and had come back here with the express purpose of enrolling in the police academy. The classwork was a cakewalk with his new and improved and utterly infallible memory. His physical skills, though somewhat diminished by his injuries, were still far superior to almost all in his academy class. He had sailed through the process, was sworn in, and got his badge and gun. Nine years later he was promoted to detective. For nearly ten years he had investigated major crimes against the good citizens of Burlington—although most of the crimes had also been committed by the not so good citizens of Burlington, with the occasional outsider thrown into the mix.

They had wanted a large family but had struggled to conceive a child. They spent money they didn’t have on specialists, and at long last Cassie had become pregnant. And they had Molly. She would be their only child. The pregnancy had nearly killed Cassie, and a complication had required surgery that had rendered her incapable of conceiving again.

They had named her after Decker’s mother. His parents had both perished in a car crash while Decker was in college, so Molly didn’t have paternal grandparents. But she had carried her grandma’s name. Carried it all the way to her premature death at the hands of, perhaps, Sebastian Leopold.

He stared up at the brick fortress that Mansfield had become. Crazy-angled police tape was everywhere, like a spider’s yellow web looking venomous and terrifying. There were cop cars and forensic trucks, and black trucks with no windows standing ready for the body bags. For Decker was certain the corpses were still in the school. Except for those injured and needing medical attention, you didn’t subtract anything from a crime scene until it was thoroughly gone over, photographed, measured, and adequately poked, prodded, and analyzed. It wouldn’t matter to the dead how long they lay on the floor in pools of their own blood, their lives ripped away by some psycho with unfettered firepower. Forever was forever, after all.

If Decker had still been on the force he would be in there right now. From where he was standing, he had already seen Mary Lancaster come and go twice. She looked haggard and repulsed and depressed. She glanced his way once but it didn’t seem to register. He knew she had other things on her mind. She probably had forgotten that a man named Sebastian Leopold was sitting in a holding cell. That he had confessed to murdering three people, two of whom had meant everything to Decker. Lancaster had a pile of fresh bodies to work on right now. And with it a criminal out there walking free to possibly kill again, as opposed to one sitting placidly in a holding cell.

The school story had of course hit the national pipeline. The town was the number one headline on every media platform. The names of the dead had still not been released. Decker had been checking on his phone. “Pending notification of next of kin” was the standard catchphrase. He had heard from a friend on the force that Pete Rourke’s grandson was okay. But a son of a beat cop had not been so lucky. And a police dispatcher’s husband, Andy Jackson, an English teacher at Mansfield, was in the hospital in critical condition with multiple gunshot wounds.

Decker began to walk, choosing his path with care as he made his way in a long loop around the grounds of the high school and outside the investigative barriers. Miller had said the shooter had escaped. The entire city of Burlington was up in arms about this development. Wasn’t it enough that they had lost their loved ones? But to have the killer walking free right now, perhaps ready to murder again? It made the already horrible completely unbearable.

Yet how had the man escaped? It was personally and professionally offensive to Decker that any criminal should just walk away from an Armageddon of his own creation.

And then there was the complex reason. Decker could do nothing more with Leopold. He could either sit powerless and run through endless and ultimately pointless speculation. Or he could think about Mansfield and who had done it. And where that person was now. He chose the latter.

He kept walking, toward the football field, where he’d enjoyed some of his greatest glories. Football season was over halfway done, and the grass was beaten down. The home game scheduled for this Friday would not be played. They might not play another game this year. Maybe not another game here ever.

He went up into the stands and took a seat near the fifty-yard line. It was a labor getting his obese body up the steps, and he told himself once again that he needed to lose the weight, get back in some semblance of shape. At this rate, at forty-two, he might not make it to fifty-two. Hell, he might not make it to forty-three.

As he stared down at the field he ran back in his mind pretty much every play he had been involved in as a high school player. They must have been in his brain somewhere, but he had been incapable of digging through the gray matter to reach them. Now it was effortless. The DVR just went back to the date of his choosing and the game film ran.

It was both exciting and a bit disturbing to see himself as a young man running over and through other young men. He could throw the ball a mile and with accuracy. In college he had quickly learned that his arm wasn’t strong enough to make all the throws required of a college QB. He had switched to defense full-time, and discovered that the guys on that side of the ball were bigger, stronger, and faster than he was. It was a rude awakening for a guy used to effortless success. He could have given up, but he had chosen to simply work harder than his more gifted teammates.

In the end it had been for naught. His playing days long over, his law enforcement career also in the toilet, he sat on the hard aluminum bleacher with the row of ridges that guaranteed your butt would be rubbed raw after only one half of a football game. And in doing so decided that he could not look any farther ahead in his life than the next morning. But he had the rest of the day to think about things. And what he was thinking about were ways for a killer to escape from this place.