Decker looked at Billy. “You?”

Billy grinned. “I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout this place. Just drawing a paycheck, man. Beer money on the weekends. Looking to have a good time with the ladies. Need cash for all that.”

He went back to his mopping.

“I’m sorry we can’t help you,” said the woman.

“Part of the job,” said Decker. “Thanks.”

He turned and left.

His phone buzzed. He looked at it.

Lancaster.

He put it away without answering.

It rang again.

He looked at it again.

Lancaster.

He sighed, hit the answer button.

“Yeah?”

“Amos?”

Decker immediately went rigid. Lancaster sounded nearly hysterical. And she wasn’t the type ever to do so.

“Mary, what is it? Not another shooting?” Decker had been worried about this from the start. Things about the attack at Mansfield had made him believe that the guy was—

“No,” she said breathlessly. “But, but there’s some-something—”

“Where are you?” he interrupted.

“At Mansfield.”

“So it has to do with Mansfield? You found some—”

“Amos!” she shrieked. “Just let me finish.”

Decker fell silent, waited. It was as though he could hear her heart beating from across the digital ether.

“We ran ballistics on the pistol used at Mansfield.”

“And what did—”

Interrupting, she said, “And we found a match.”

His grip tightened around the phone. “A match? To what?”

“To the gun that killed your wife.”

Chapter

20

A .45 ROUND.

Semi-jacketed. Hollow-point.

An SJH, in ballistics shorthand.

It was a brutally efficient piece of ordnance. Not exactly a dum-dum, named after Dum-Dum, India, where a British army officer had invented a bullet that mushroomed out on impact and acted as a miniature wrecking ball inside the body.

Innovation wasn’t always good for you.

The .45 SJH had blown right through the front of Cassie Decker’s skull and ended up lodged deep in her brain. It had been dug out of her during the autopsy and the slug preserved as evidence in her murder investigation. It had retained enough of its shape and lands and grooves to one day be matched to the weapon that had fired it. Well, they didn’t have the weapon, but they had something else.

Now they knew that the very same pistol that had fired the bullet ending Cassie Decker’s life had also terminated the lives of half the victims at Mansfield. The other half had endured the blunt force of the shotgun. The medical examiner had removed the matched round from Kramer, the gym teacher and, per normal protocol, run it through the department’s database. The hit had been immediate.

Because of the magnitude of the finding, the FBI had run its own tests on the slug and came back with the same conclusion.

Same gun. Ballistics didn’t lie. The grooves and lands on the bullets’ respective hides had matched like a fingerprint. And that wasn’t all. They had recovered the single bullet casing from the Deckers’ bedroom. They had compared it with several of the casings found at the school. The pinprick on the bottom of the casing where the firing pin strikes was nearly as good as a fingerprint. And it too had matched on all salient points.

The murders of Decker’s family and the massacre at Mansfield were now inextricably connected.

*  *  *

Decker huddled in his coat as he stood outside the darkened façade of the school, enduring the driving rain pinging off his hair and burly shoulders. The case had mushroomed from Mansfield High to his home on a quiet street with symbolically an ocean’s distance in between. He had never given any thought to a connection between the two crimes. Now that fact dominated him.

There was a chance that there were different killers. Since the shooting at his house, the gun could have been lost by, taken from, or sold by the original killer. The same gun was often used in different crimes by different perps. But Decker believed it was the same shooter in both instances. And if that was the case, it let Leopold out. So Leopold was lying. Yet it was possible he had been told facts of the Decker case by the real killer. And if that were so, then Leopold was the best hope he had to find the person who had murdered his family. And all these others.

Despite the recent writing on the bedroom wall, the case was cold on the Decker family end. Conversely, it was red hot on the Mansfield High School end. So the Mansfield end was where he would focus—that and on Sebastian Leopold. If Leopold knew who the Decker killer was, then he knew who was behind the Mansfield crimes too.

He flashed his credentials at the perimeter security and walked through the front entrance. Yesterday had been disjointed and confusing for him in all respects. He didn’t know if he belonged in the middle of all this. He felt cut off from everyone and everything going on around him. But with the possible connection to the murders of his family, Decker knew that he did belong. He would be on this case for as long as it took. They would have to dynamite him out of here.

He didn’t head to the command center in the library. He went to the cafeteria and stared at the freezer. Then he looked at the ceiling tiles.

Cammie fiber, possible gun oil. Maybe all bullshit. Maybe.

He looked at the exit door. False lead too, or so he now believed.

He left the cafeteria, walked down the hall fronting the library, turned right onto the main corridor that bisected the first floor, and counted his steps off as he made his way to the rear of the school.

At each intersection with another hall he studied the lay of the land, first left, then right. Classrooms on both sides. The last corridor was where Debbie Watson had died. And where, to the left, so had Kramer the gym teacher over his breakfast sandwich and coffee. The rear entrance with the camera faced him. The angle of the camera still intrigued him. That had been deliberate. And deliberate action always had a deliberate motivation.

Then he looked at the classroom to the right of where Debbie had perished. ROOM 141 was stenciled on the glass.

He tried the door but it was locked. He pulled a pick set from his pocket and unlocked it. He stepped inside and turned on the light. He was surprised to see that it was set up as a shop class. They had had shop class back when Decker attended here. But he had thought it now a thing of the past. He looked around at the work places, table and miter saws, planers, drills, buckets of tools, vises clamped to wood, shelves on the walls holding metal tubing, nuts, bolts, wood, more power tools, extension cords, work lights, pretty much anything someone would need to build something. There were three doors at the back of this room. He opened two of them. Storage. He saw stacks of what looked to be old school projects: jumbles of half-finished furniture, metal twisted into various shapes, wire cages, part of a roof section, sawhorses, plywood sheets, stacks of wood, lots of dust, and lots of nothing.

The last door would not open. He took out his lock-pick set again and used it to open the door. He peered in. There was an old boiler in the far corner, now connected to nothing. Some window air-conditioning units were stacked on the floor against one wall up to about ten feet.

Again, a lot of nothing. He closed the door, walked back through the shop class, snapped off the light, and shut the door behind him. Down the hall from the shop class was Classroom 144, the one Debbie Watson had been coming from when she had been shot.

Decker looked over at the open locker on the wall. That was Debbie’s. She had been at her locker when she’d been murdered. Probably getting something to take with her to the nurse’s office. That might explain the detour here. Or it might not. Teenagers were unpredictable. They could be sick as dogs and stop at their locker to look for some gum. Or examine her face for zits in the mirror that hung on the inside of Debbie’s locker. He noted the tube of pimple cream standing up on her locker shelf next to a small opened pack of breath mints.